This Simple "ABC" System Will Fix Your Trading, Anyone Can Apply It! - Jake Trades

A trader with seven years of market experience, trading exclusively price action strategies. If a trader is struggling out there, if you have a functional strategy and from a psychological perspective, you're able to keep your trading day to either A, you make money, B, you simply followed your plan, or C, you didn't go on tilt over the course of a thousand days, you are going to be successful.

Jake Richie is one of the few traders who has ascended the ranks of futures trading, profones to be actually live trading a book capital. And in this episode, we explore the exact strategy that allowed them to have these consistent profitable payouts.

I believe that trading is a game of runs, meaning that you're going to have winning stretches and losing stretches. In order to build success as a trader, and this is not a concept I knew, but I wish I did, where when you take a small probability and then you add a condition to it, your small probability just became almost invisibly tiny.

The vast majority of successful traders take a while. If you take that sentence and say, "I want to be one of the 5% of day traders who succeed in under 3 years," it's like looking in the eye at something incredibly difficult and then saying, "Hey, I want to do it even harder."

So, key levels, how are you defining it in your way? Cuz key levels could be trend line, support, resistance, it could be supply zone, higher low, previous week. There's many lines people can have on screens. What are the lines that mean something to you?

If you had asked me this question two years ago, it'd be a lot different of an answer because the thing that stood out to me was, 2 years in, you're 50K down. What happened there?

So, I uh, I spoke about it a little bit on that conversation with Riz, but um, two years in, 50K down, and I want to make it clear, I was really essentially like burning money, and I was staring at charts. I was trying to, but I was making no real progress in terms of actually figuring out what I was going to do.

So, one of the most pivotal moments is I uh, had a conversation with my dad and he offered this perspective to me that was supportive, not financially, but in the sense of mentally supportive, that if you're going to do this and if this is something that I'm really going to pursue, you have to make a change, right? And it, it cannot be the continuous burning of money that it has been so far, right? And so that conversation with him really changed a lot for me and it opened my eyes into terms of how I needed to approach it from education, how I needed to approach it from a day-to-day basis of treating my money with more care and not just burning the paychecks from this new job that I was getting.

Um, so I had that conversation with him and it was really very helpful where it took me to a point, it's like, okay, now I feel like I'm kind of starting from zero. I have a fresh start and now rather than looking at the 50K and thinking, I got to make it back. I got to make it back. I'm screwed if I don't make it back. That was, for the record, that was like my entire life savings plus the paycheck every paycheck I had gotten at a new job, right? And it's hard-earned money. It's not just like some money you had. It was working a job actively. I studied agriculture. So my hard-earned money was me working in cornfields in Memphis for 10 hours a day doing real physical manual labor.

Um, I did not want to lose that money. It was something that I had really worked hard to get, but I wasn't treating it like that, right? I wasn't treating it like it was money that it was really I had worked really hard to get. I was treating it like money that I knew that I could make more of, which in theory wasn't wrong because I had this job. I was graduated with a degree in agriculture. I got a degree in the agriculture industry. I had a some sort of income, right? It wasn't a great job. Wasn't a ton of money, but in my eyes, the way that I was looking at it is I kept kind of losing, losing, losing, and I kept thinking, uh, well, when I make it back, I'll just make back more. I'll just make back more.

So, so what? Cuz you're a smart guy. You're working hard for your money. It's not money you can afford to lose. And it's over a long period of time. So, how, what kind of mindsets did you have to just keep chipping away and keep losing without you thinking, "Let me give up"? Because this is also before the prof era. So there was not this hope of like, okay, so 500 buy-in or 300 buy-in, I can turn it into 20K in one payout. There wasn't that same level of hope. So it was a slow bleed. Let's say a very slow bleed. Talk to me about the mindsets or the behaviors you had, cuz I'm sure a lot of people do something similar.

Yeah. I, like I mentioned before, it was, it really was like I was addicted to it. It was an addiction on some level, right? It felt more like a, a sports betting addiction than it did a trading addiction because while I was trying to learn and I was on the charts and I was doing that, I didn't know what I was studying, right? And so at the time I was using these different oscillators and like different MACD crosses and all these different things that like I was on the charts and studying, but there was nothing actionable happening, right?

Or, or the pre-work of, you had no edge.

Yes. No, no edge, no plan. Know, I woke up 10 minutes before. I was living in California at the time where the market opens at 6:30 in the morning, which is brutal, and I was waking up at 6:20 in the morning and roll out of bed, rolling out of bed and making a Keurig in my little college hut and trying to trade. And then you do that long enough, right? And I also think that for me, I was in, I, I thought about this the other day, which I haven't thought about it before, but I heard, I like sports references. I heard for any team to win a championship, they have to not only be good, but have luck, right? Can't just be good because every team is good. You have to have some sort of luck on your side, some sort of that. I had not thought of this at all before yesterday. But in order to be a successful trader, I also think it takes you being good and working hard and a little bit, or a lot of bit, of luck, right? And for me, the luck that I had in the first few years of that trading career was the timing of where I was at in life, right? No kids, no no responsibilities in terms of having to immediately make a bunch of money to pay off credit card bills. My, I went to a state school, California. It was extremely cheap. It was paid off by the time I was graduated. Like I was in a position where the luck of what helped me succeed were that those two years I was in a spot where like I could take some risks. I could, I didn't have people depending on me. I had a job that I had signed an offer for a year in advance in the agriculture industry that I knew I was going to be getting a 60K a year salary, which looking back is very small and I did not provide me with a lot of what I was looking for, but I knew I was in a, the luck that I had was that I was in a position where I could spend a couple of years and not necessarily feel like the world was crashing down and burning down on my shoulders, right? Which I think that not a lot of traders have that opportunity to go through a learning phase. I imagine there's a lot of traders out there who are watching this right now who are trying to trade whilst having credit card debt that they need to pay like next month, right? That wasn't me. And eventually it was over the course of two years. Let me, let me tell you, I built up some strong credit card debt by putting all my rent on my credit card. I started to put all my paychecks towards my trading accounts. Like I built it up, but in the beginning, through those two years, I was not in this like terrible financial position where I needed money right away.

Okay, right. And that I think is what holds a lot of people back is that they can't go through the learning phase properly. They're in some way, shape, or form, they need a lot of money right away and that it's not usually a good recipe. I guess it's the psychology side, you're chasing the outcome and it's, it's more difficult. Do you think this period of two years of just hardship, let's say, uh, where you're slowly bleeding out, do you think that acted as a a catapult where it was kind of taking you back to learn these lessons to then catapult you to to where you are now? Uh, or do you think looking back, you could have done it in a a lot easier way and saved yourself the headache?

I, this is an excellent question. Um, part of the reason I'm really excited to be here. You ask incredibly detailed questions and I love it. But I was thinking about this earlier today and I surely could have gone about it in a different way. Meaning, I didn't need like year, year one I did. I think what most traders do. You know, I was chasing the money. I was just throwing all that. I, I barely knew what I was looking at. Put no real time into education. It was more like asking my friend like, "What stock should I buy today?" Trying to follow signals. Like all those mistakes. I don't think I needed to change how year one was, right? Year two, I was still kind of mostly doing that stuff and instead, I should have been taking the courses that I bought and didn't watch more seriously. I should have been finding a specific mentor. I didn't need to spend that time doing it, right? But for me, a catapult came from year like three slash four, is really more like end of two through end of three, right? Is where, again, sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. But my work had moved me from the East Coast to the West Coast, which I was very excited to be back in California, but they moved me to a part of California, sure, I'm sure you're not familiar with, called Fresno, California. And exactly, it's a little pocket in the desert in the middle of California where the only thing there is agriculture. And I moved there for with a plan to live there for one year while COVID was happening. And I knew nobody, nobody. It's also very hot to the where you don't want to go outside. So, all that to say, I had a year where I really didn't do anything but study charts. So, my first two years I kind of was just throwing stuff at a wall, hoping something would stick. That next year was like this laser-focused, locked-in. And I will never underestimate how much that contributed to my journey because I legitimately spent probably 10 to 12 hours a day on the charts. I was working a remote job where they just, quite frankly, had kind of forgotten. It was co, I don't think they knew how to deal with a lot of the developmental reps that we were. And I had work and every now and then I'd have to drive a couple hours and do some agriculture stuff. Mostly it was meetings and mostly I told them I was studying for my pest control advisor's exam and I was there studying charts for as much as possible while having a paycheck coming in. And that's a, a very lucky spot to be in. And that time frame to me, I would really look at as the catapult to where that pushed me.

It's interesting because you had an incubation period where you had no distractions. You had no other thing to do. Your expenses were probably low because you're not socializing and you had stable income. So it's a nice recipe to then catapult off. You mentioned earlier luck. Now, luck can seem like, "Well, come find me. I'm waiting for my luck." But but you also ended up in a situation or you had the opportunity to create your luck. Is there, is there other instances in your life, specifically with trading, that you fostered an environment that enabled luck to happen?

100%. I think that almost every day is a situation where, I mean, right? Because at least the way I trade, I, and I'm sure we'll get more into this, I aim for larger moves. I like big moves. I don't like scalps. Not that there's anything against it. Um, but that's just not what I like. It's not what I like to do. I aim for large moves. Now, the thing with aiming for large moves is you don't really know if they're going to come that day or not. Sure, you can hope for it and you can expect it and you can say, "Hey, this chart has been building. I've been thinking about it." But at the end of the day, it's better to be lucky in the than good in the sense that you have to be if you're positioned well that day and the move happens to occur that day, right? Again, you've done your analysis, you've been anticipating it, but there's going to be, for every one day where there's a large move, there's going to be two or three times where you strike out and you have to be like, "Ah, oh well, that, that's not the end of the world." And a lot of that doesn't necessarily come down to right or wrong decision-making. It does come down to luck in a sense, right?

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I see what you mean because in the markets, you have controllables, which is why did I enter? How much risk do I enter upon? How do I protect my capital with a break-even? And the uncontrollables is the outcome, if if it goes up or down. So it's, it's, you're just hoping you get a strong tide and it goes towards your direction, which it's an uncontrollable, therefore must be an element of luck. I want to hear about the behavior changes specifically, or what, what actions you took from the year two mark onwards where things started to change.

Yeah. So, I, one of the biggest things for me and, um, this can probably still apply to traders even nowadays with the the prop firm craze, but, um, I was using uh, Robin Hood as my broker when I first started and that's where I lost the 50 grand and it was just money burned. And the biggest struggle for me mentally was anytime I would even have like a, a decent day, you know, you can check, you can scroll over and and click the little all-time button and you can just see, all right, where you at all time? So, I'd have a good day, I'd make like $1,000 and then I'd look at the all-time and I'd be like, it's a, it's a blip. Well, I'd be like, did that suck, right? And and that really also stemmed from the conversation with my dad where he was like, "Hey, like if you're going to do this, you got you got to start making some progress." And part of, I think where that led me was is that I can't focus anymore. So I switched brokers. I started trading, trading on TDM Trade. I started trading on different brokers. I started to change the path a little bit. And all of the sudden that combined with actual effort into studying the courses I bought, I started to watch. I, I bought the first few, I bought one, I, I asked for one for my birthday. Uh, couple hundred bucks. I didn't watch a single video. I didn't watch. No, I, I got it and the first video didn't have to do with charts and I was like, "I just want to know about the charts, dude." And I, and I never even skipped forward because I had to watch all those to get like it was bad. So I started after year two, I started watching those courses. I started paying attention to more. I started seeing successful traders and I would figure out ways to ask them. I would figure out ways, one thing I was really, really good at was figuring out ways to not annoy the successful traders that I saw in Discords or anywhere. They, they, they would have a good trade and I would figure out how to ask them questions about it without annoying them, which is very hard to do, but somehow phrase things and start to learn and really start to to piece together this information in an actionable way. But the backbone of it all was that I was no longer fighting down from my minus 50K on Robin Hood. That was, if I, if I know myself and if I had continuously tried to chip away at that drawdown with $1,000 day or $200 day, eventually it would have gotten to a point where I would have been like, "You know what, I got to take a big swing to try and erase that."

Right? It's also the interesting feedback loop where a win usually is, okay, I'm up for the week or I'm doing well. I followed my plan. So you're, you are getting positive reinforcement. You're getting dopamine and and you're rewarding yourself for following the plan. But then if you're always comparing to this huge number, this mountain you have to climb, you automatically wipe out any goodwill you had in your head because like, well, it's, it's all insignificant right now. It means nothing, right? And I think it could really apply to prop firm traders because no matter the firm you're trading with, let's just say that you've stuck with one from the beginning, FTMO, whatever. If you're trading forex or if you're trading futures, you know, um, Apex, one of the big guys, right? If you're trading with a firm and you've racked up a bill of five grand, 10 grand, whatever it is in challenge fees trying to get a payout, right? At least knowing myself, I don't know about all of you, but I imagine if this is the way my brain thinks, maybe it's the way your brain thinks, my brain would be, okay, my first payout, it's got to cover all those expenses. It's not my money yet. It's not my money yet. It's got to cover all those expenses. And then all of a sudden, so let's say you put yourself in a hole where you rather than your first couple challenges with a firm, you're down 500, 600, 700 bucks. Sure. If you're fighting down from seven, eight or 10, you're going to want a big payout because you're going to want to try and make all that back. And I know that because you're also going to want to pay off that credit card that you put those on. Like, it's, there is some value in my opinion if that's been happening to you. One, maybe that firm isn't conducive to what the trading that you have. Maybe it's something that you're doing, but maybe another option is move to a different firm and just try and say, "Hey, this is actually my first try with with this." There's plenty of reputable ones out there. There's, okay, this is my first try with them. Guess what? I don't need to make 10K to cover all my bills. I'd love to start a goal with just get a payout. And I'm not even going to track how much I spend. I'm just going to focus and I'm going to try and get a payout whether it takes me two weeks, a month, whatever the case may be. And then all of a sudden you're not fighting this hurdle. Yes. Of of all time green. And guess what? It's tax write-offs. Eventually you, if you stick with trading, eventually over time you will get green on all of it. But if you're so focused on one firm or one thing and making back whatever your initial thing is, then you're going to be like me staring at that Robin Hood and staring at and every time you make a thousand bucks, it's great, but it's just one of 50 that you lost and you can never, it, you put, you don't put yourself in a position to succeed.

It's super interesting because when you first mentioned this, I was like, "Okay, but that's not the good stuff." Like, "How did you actually do it?" But now that I'm thinking about it, it's when you change your environment. I'm linking it to, let's say, some some things that I see about breakups or if someone has addiction problems, they'll be like, "Just change your environment. Relocate." Because if you're trying to recover when you're walking down the same streets, you had those memories, you're just always going to get triggered and then be in your head again. Or if you're struggling with addiction, but you're hanging out with the same friends and going to the same places. How are you going to change your state? But just changing your platform, then you, you don't have those habits of, okay, I know how this dashboard works, I can quickly buy another account like this, and all these little subconscious patterns, you're rewiring it now. It's like new environments. I'm not going to stare at the elephant in the room, which is this 50K number, and just start again, do it properly. It's actually powerful. It's powerful. I really, I do believe that. And I also, I believe that other sports analogy, much like uh, sports, trading is a, it's a game of runs, right? And so meaning that you're going to have, and this is a topic I could talk about for hours at a time, but you're going to have winning stretches and losing stretches. And I think that people always dramatically underestimate the length of their losing stretches. But in order to build success as a trader, and this is not a concept I knew during those two years and where I, but I wish I did. Um, where you essentially want to string together the longest run that you can. And it doesn't have to be, I'm not talking about a huge winning streak. I'm not talking about that. But you want to string together a run of like four, five, six, seven, eight months of really good trading, right? And good trading does not always mean that you make money. I think that there's this really fascinating perspective, and I'm sorry, this is a small tangent, but I promise it's worth it. Uh, is I heard this perspective the other day of having something aligned as A goals, B goals, and C goals. And for me in trading, if I was going through this period of my life again and I was trying to figure out, okay, I've been got my ass kicked, pardon my French, for two years, and then I struggled with a year where I finally made some ground, but I was still blow take, having blow-up days or giving back all my profits some days or still struggling it. Understanding that you just need to string together as long of a stretch of consistency in trading as you can. That's the ultimate objective, right? And in order to do that, it doesn't have to be winning every day. This concept of A goals, B goals, and C goals would dramatically change my life. An A type of day, let's say you finish your trading day and at the end of it, when you're doing your journaling and you're marking up how you did, you said this was an A day for me. This is, I was on great across the board. For me, that would look like I took a trade and it hit my target, right? Like it went to my target and I made xxx money. I don't care how much, but it hit my target. You judge it on the outcome of what happened or I followed the plan. Even if it's a loss, it's an A day. I, for me, an A day would be making my trade works. My, it makes money, all that. And I love that you said that because a B day would for me qualify as just following the plan, right? Interesting. Whether it works, whether you make money, whether you lost, whether you get stopped out by a tick and then it goes and hits your target, doesn't matter. If you followed your plan, that's a B day. That's a day where, hey, was it perfect? No, not necessarily. Did you do anything wrong? Not necessarily. You could have just taken a loss, but it wasn't the dream ideal outcome, right? Which is a winner. I mean, that's just what an A outcome would be for me. A C day would qualify as not blowing up, right? Following your risk limits. So, if you are somebody that risk is risks 1% a day, if you stayed within that 1% and you lost, even if it's, that's the max you're willing to lose, but you stayed within it and you didn't go on tilt and you didn't blow up, that's a C day, right? If you can have almost or all trading days as A, B, or C, in theory, you'll succeed, right? Like if you just exclude everything else, if you have a functional strategy, right? And from a psychological perspective, you're able to keep your trading day to either A, you make money, B, you simply followed your plan, or C, you didn't go on tilt over the course of a thousand days, you are going to be successful. You are, as long as your strategy is functional, as long as that, you are going to be successful. The things that hurt traders are the days where they go below a C grade, right? Which would mean that, hey, maybe you're one day away from a payout and you really want to get big so you blow it up, right? That would be an F, let's say, or whatever the case may be. You're, you're tilt that day, you overtrade, you have a daily loss limit, but you change it, that would be an F, right? Those would be the things I think that if a trader is struggling out there right now, identifying in the year two mark, year three mark, identifying A goals, B goals, and C goals makes it a whole hell of a lot easier to keep a streak alive, right?

So, it's interesting because A, B, and C, I can see how they connect, but it feels like it's a lot easier said than done because people were like, "I am doing these things, but I have the fourth day, let's call the D day, doomsday, which is I follow the plan, and then I end up not following the plan. And I end up, you, not having the C day, I end up going on tilt. And even though they know they should have an A or B, they should follow the plan, for some reason, they can't. Or the issue that you had in your first two years, you don't have a plan to follow in the first place. So, how can we address the third or sorry, the fourth one, a D-day scenario?

Absolutely. And I think for me, it's, it's significantly easier now than it was a few years ago. I'm not going to lie. With the rise of prop firms and really the rise of futures trading, there's platform-enabled risk controls out there on virtually every trading brokerage that you're going to be trading with. I would say that TradeStation is an exception, but for those of people trading futures, right? Or, um, if you are using Trade of 8 or if you're using Project X Top Step's platform, almost all of these brokerages now allow you to enable a max daily loss where if you hit that number, you physically cannot, and like the platform won't let you enter more trades, right? A lot of traders see this as like a negative. They're like, "I don't like it. It holds me back." So I hit the daily loss and then my trade works immediately afterwards. I'm like, "Well, then you planned your risk poorly." That's what that means, right? Like for me, if you're trying to prevent, if you'd asked me this question two years ago, it'd be a lot different of an answer because I traded a lot. I still trade options all the time, but my, a lot of my energy has shifted to futures, um, for no other reason than I think I'm really good at them. Um, and I love these platform risk controls because when you are trading futures, it's not up to me. I don't let it. I don't let Jake in the moment who just took a loss, who maybe is seeing the loss he took start to reverse, do that. I don't let Jake make that decision. I let past Jake who made a decision during the pre-market or the night before or whenever, whatever he decided on how much I'm willing to risk that day. He probably had a little bit of a better thought process behind it. He seemed to be in a stable mindset. He seemed to be doing something smart. And so I leave it up to them, to a former Jake, and my platform, and I, the platform will shut me out. A lot of my losing days, I would actually, I don't know the math, but I would guess that the number is pretty high. A lot of my losing days are daily loss limit days, and I lose like two or three times a week, and I hit my daily loss limit and I'm like, "Oh well, that happened yesterday. I, I trade, I hit my daily loss limit." Like, it's part of it, right? And I think that's really the hard part because most traders struggle with that, right? Um, I, I saw the some profit founders that I know, they said the number one reason people blow accounts is because of the daily loss. I was like, "Wait, so people don't just go down to the minus 10, they just mess it up in one day?" I was like, "If you can now put systems in place to prevent that, you're beating the odds just because of that, most likely." You know, I thought I was the only person on earth that did this. Current me, previous me, future me. But I do it all the, I'll talk to myself like I, he is going to be past me at some point. So in the future, I want to thank me today. So what can I do to make my future self grateful? So I literally split myself up. It sounds kind of crazy.

No, no, but I know, I know exactly the headspace of last night me wasn't in the midst of a trade and probably better, better adapted to make a decision. So let me stick to what he decided, not what I'm feeling right now. And guess what? Future you is going to be either upset with yourself for change. Let's say you, for me, let's say you hit a loss limit and you want to change it. You go out of your way. There's a few ways that you, you can in certain things, which kind of negates the point. But let's, um, in like, for example, in my, my funded futures live account, I have a risk manager that, that works with me on that. And there have been times where I have a daily loss limit, I'll hit it and I'll reach out to him, I'll say, "Hey, I think that I found another trade that's worth the risk, you know, let's open this back up." And I've done the math. So I know that my typical loss limit, I keep it small enough. I allow for that to happen every now and then. Like, I've done the math behind it, right? But that's kind of the, the danger zone, a little bit, of of where you're playing. But it's interesting because you're talking about past self, future self. The way I try to think about it there is past Jake set these amount of risk for me that I was comfortable taking. Future Jake is either going to be really happy that I followed that risk or really pissed at me right now for not doing it, right? And so like you said, it's somehow connecting to think like, okay, how am I, was I feeling before and how am I going to feel after if I do make this decision, if I do make this mistake, right? So platform-enabled risk controls in my opinion are are lifesavers. And if the daily loss limit is causing people to fail, that's because they're risking too much, right? And it's, it's if you're creating a daily like, if I'm in a lab designing a perfect strategy or a perfect trader, right? And I'm looking down and doing that and I'm thinking about how much their daily loss limit would be, it's probably going to be like 1% of the available drawdown, maybe half a percent, depending on how big of the capital is, how that you want to get. If you want to get a little bit more aggressive, you can go two to 5%, right? Like it all depends on on where you're at. But at the end of the day, it should be a pretty small number, right? Like that, the will, the money that you're willing to risk in an individual given day versus your available overall drawdown should be pretty small. Yes. Right. And when it's not is when you have the D-days. And that's what's puts people in a position where they struggle and they fail. I see so many traders out there where they'll have a daily loss limit and you look at their available drawdown and it's like $2,000 and their daily loss limit's $500. And I'm like, "You're telling me that four losing days and you're done?" Like, I had four losing days last month in a row. Like, and I've been doing this for eight years. Like I, like four losing days over the course of, I also love statistics, but over the course of 10,000 trading days, four losing days in a row is not an aberration. That's normal. That's the fall. That's not crazy. Like it is. So people just don't prepare for those types of situations, right? And so I believe that platform-enabled risk controls and smaller, tighter ones massively put people in position to succeed.

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There was a book, I forgot which one, but it was talking about exactly this of, and it was giving the analogy of a casino saying a casino doesn't care if a gambler comes in and he's betting his life savings and it plays out and he makes half a million dollars in a day. They don't care. Even though in that moment they might be like, "That's a big number." They know over time, over thousands and thousands of gamblers and and years and years in a casino, how many people are going to walk in and have big days and blow-up days. They all cancel out and and they have a predefined edge. They, the house always wins because they've rigged, they rigged each game to be in their favor. As you mentioned, you're into statistics or probability. I think every trader knows if I follow, if I have a plan and I follow the plan equals good outcome. Mh. But the problem is people struggle to see that through because they get shortsighted vision on performance of this week and it ends up taking them in different directions. Or I didn't follow my plan the last two trades, but they ended up winning trades, so I'm going to keep not following my plan because it seems to be working, a confirmation bias. How can you, or how did it help you to think in terms of statistics, large numbers, and longevity as opposed to easily ending up hyper-focused on individual moments?

I think that for me, I've always been, I'm again, lucky, I think, to have been always naturally drawn to statistics. I never did great in any other math subjects in my life. Uh, but I, and I honestly don't think I did great in my stats class, but I was really fascinated by it. Right? Like all of these things were really, really fascinating to me. And it becomes significantly easier when you start thinking of things in these large numbers. Like, I, I don't know the age of your average audience viewer, but you know, let's just take a guess and say that it's under 40, right? Most probably. Yeah. And my guess would be maybe even under 30, but let's say under 40, right? Just for whatever. Uh, under 40. The average lifespan of an individual adult nowadays is up to like 70, right? Something in that realm, maybe even higher. If your average viewer is 40 and the average lifespan is 70, that's 30 more years of trading that that individual is hoping to do, right? If they're successful at it, they maybe don't, maybe 25 years. You want to retire, have five years where you don't trade, whatever, probably will still trade a few of those days. But understand that that's a long period of time, right? Anybody out there who's watching this right now, you, anybody, you have multiple years of trading left, especially if this is what you're hoping to do and be successful at it. And I think that's what people don't necessarily think of is that if you're trying to do this for the long term, right? Think of 1,000 trading days. That's just four years. That's four years, right? And if you're under 30 or under 40, you're presumably going to be doing that for another 20. Like that's just four. And so if you start to look at it as like, okay, on the grand scheme of things of these really, really, really larger numbers, if I stick out this over volume, right? Over this period of time, it makes it a little bit easier to deal with the fact like, okay, yeah, I'm not thinking so much as week to week or month to month or whatever. And it, it, it's, I, I think that there's this other misconception out there that, um, once you figure out trading, you like figure it out and you don't really deal with losing weeks or losing months or like, and I just laugh. I'm like, "What?" Like that's just not the way the statistics work. Like no matter how your trading goes over the long run, it's going to move in waves. You're going to have draw down periods. The last two years I've been red in January. I don't know what it is about January. I think that maybe coming into a new year, I'm just a little hesitant. I'm a little on my, just trying to make sure that I'm pressing the right buttons. I don't want to start off the year deep red. Like, but this year, for example, I started off January, uh, with a $20,000 losing month, right? Like, and truthfully, it all came from the last like three days. Other than that, it was essentially break even. But if you look at the grand scheme of things, that's one month of my trading career that I'm hoping to be like 500 months, right? Like that's not that crazy. And then I've followed it up by being significantly more green than that every other month so far this year. Right? So like, it, that in and of itself is not a bad thing. It is a normal, expected thing and it's not something that you should just like take my word for it when I say it's normal. Understand that math and statistics will tell you that, right? It will tell you that over the course of a thousand trading days, you will have a few bad ones in a row. The same way you're going to have a few good ones in a row. It's amazing to me. No one questions the math when you have like a two-week winning streak. No one questions the math of that. You know, everyone just starts to talk about their ego where it becomes like, "Oh, I've done so well over the last two weeks." And like, I'm like, "You definitely have. Stats have been on your side as well. Things have worked out in your favor. There's been some some luck to this, right? It's not just about like, you should question the math when you're having those winning streaks as well."

It's interesting because people think I'm on a hot run, so let me keep trading. Let me trade even more. Let me even size up my risk. But what they don't realize is if you were to take, if you're just to backtest your edge on a two-year sample size, how often do you have a five winning streak? How often do you have a six winning streak? How often do you have a 10 winning streak? And you realize these are very rare pockets. Maybe a 10-winning streak is just once in that 2-year period. And maybe the 11th win is didn't happen in the last two years. You got to realize the more wins you have, the less likely another win comes. Even though each moment is like, "I got a 50% win rate, so it's a 50-50." Sure. But when you connect the dots, yeah, them happening in succession gets less and less. Same for losing period, it's very unlikely you'll have 10, 12, 13 loses, loss losses in a row and continue to lose. Eventually, it will will bounce back if you have a predefined edge. By the way, on this January thing, I, I spoke to someone just the other day who was a, he was a fund, he was hired to teach and coach fund traders. So he was above teams. And he said it was a recurring pattern that a lot of traders would struggle in January. So I said, "Oh, what, what including yourself?" I asked him why. And he said that, um, it's likely because a lot of retail money comes in, new year, new me, let me try this trading thing. Plus a lot of professional traders, they're waiting for the bonus to land, so they're a bit hands-off. So you just have a little bit different price action as a result of this. Could be that, because it's a common thing, a lot of people struggle in January. Uh, I want to jump into technicals. So you are a futures and options trader. Looks like you've had your hands both, but in terms of strategy, how do you view the market? If you can kind of give me a quick walkthrough of what an A+ setup is for you.

Yeah, absolutely. So, I, a chart is a chart, right? Whether I'm trading options, whether I'm trading futures, stocks, forex, crypto, it doesn't matter. Chart's a chart, right? Charting has been around since I was talking about this beforehand. Uh, charting has been around since I want to say either the 17th or 18th century, which would mean that Japanese candlesticks. Yes, they've been around, um, so they've been around for a while, right? So, charting itself is is an art that has been around for a while. And in the current world, I think that there's been a lot of different interpretations of how they do what they do, why they do what they do. And I think all of those are right. Right. And I think that there's, in some level, it's just a different manner of of shaping it or framing it. For me, I learned and became successful. I don't know when ICT had started his doing mentorships.

And doing all the but that that style certainly blew up the past like three years. I would say by that point I had already found the system and strategy that I use. And so I always tell people this. I've trade what I believe to be, I don't know this for sure, but an old school price action approach, right?

Okay. One of the authors that was really, really impactful to me. I had a bunch of mentors who I'll speak to, um, as well as an author was Al Brooks, who wrote the book "Reading Price Charts Bar by Bar." And the entire basis of what he was talking about was that the individual candles themselves are telling you everything you need to know. So he never once uses the word liquidity, sweeps, breakers, anything that I've, I've heard from some of the more advanced stuff. So for me, sorry, long-winded way of saying A+ setup, I keep things very, very simple. I like to trade large trending moves, right? And within those large trending moves, I like to buy higher lows and short lower highs, right? I know it sounds simple, but that's what I do. And I, I, I guarantee you that if you were to look at a chart of some of my trades and executions, there would be more things that you could label along the way. Like I've heard the word inversions. I've heard fair value stuff. Like I'm sure that stuff is happening inside of what I'm doing, but it's not what I'm recognizing. It's not what I'm taking.

So for me, in order to find an A+ setup, there are four rules that I need to have for a trade to be aligning and setting up, right? The first rule I have is I need some sort of reference point on that trade. For me, that's a level. I, you, I call it a level. Some people call it support, resistance, overnight high, overnight low, whatever. There's a bunch of different ways to get them. The truth is, again, all of ours are probably meaningful in some way, shape, or form, right? I need some sort of level or the opening print for that day is also a big thing for me. I need some sort of reference point. I need to be trading with the trend. That's my second rule. Whatever the trend is on that time frame, it means I'm longing the higher low or I'm shorting the lower high. I need a trigger, which would mean for me in the candle entry system I use, it would provide me with my entry signal and where my stop loss goes. That all comes from the candle itself. Um, and then the fourth and final rule for me and the most important is that it needs to be aligned with all time frames, right? I can't be looking to take a, sorry, let me rephrase that. All time frames need to be working in conjunction with each other. They don't need to all be the same trend. That's pretty rare. Um, but I can't be looking for like a one-minute higher low or a two-minute higher low when the hourly chart's in a super clear downtrend, right? Like that just makes no sense to me. Right? So my fourth and most important rule is that all of the time frames have to be aligned in some way, shape, or form. Right?

So we can walk through all of these one to four. Starting off with key levels. So key levels, how are you defining it in your way? Because key levels could be trend line, support, resistance, it could be supply zone, right? As you mentioned, higher, low, previous week. There's many lines people can have on screens. What are the lines that mean something to you?

So the lines that mean the most to me, uh, come from the hourly chart. And for me, if I can find the areas where I find reference points that give me the strongest reactions, right? Cuz at the end of the day, any support, everything you listed is technically valid. Like if someone came to me and they were like, Jake, I did X, X, and Y, and part of my thesis was a rejection of this supply zone. I'd be like, that makes sense. I see a supply zone there. Do I use supply zones? No. But does, am I logical enough to kind of assume and see what that is? Yeah. So, at the end of the day, I do mine a very specific way that without a chart would be hard to explain, but I do my levels a very specific way. And I also use different pieces of information like previous day's high could count as a low level. Previous day's low could look as a level. It all depends in the scheme of what I'm looking at on that chart. What is that area doing to act as a reference point? Right? I need it as a reference point because one of the biggest parts of my trading is that nothing that happens on a chart is random. Every single thing that happens is, I mean, there are some times where there's irrational moves like, uh, a Trump tweet will come in and the chart will spike up out of nowhere, right? But even within that spike up, where it's going is not random, right? It's none of this is random, right? Everything is moving with, all these charts are moving with intention, right? Whether it's, I know a lot of people look for like liquidity low being to taken out on a low, like that could be a target area or reference point, right? Anywhere on a chart where you can have a reference point where it is telling you, hey, I think we're going to go from here to there, from point A to point B, right? And so for me, what defines the level, again, comes from a specific system, but I don't want people to get hung up on that too much because I genuinely believe at the bottom of my heart that the reality is most of the levels that people use, whether it's a supply zone, whether it's a Fibonacci fair value gap, previous day high, previous day's low, those are accurate and meaningful. It's how are you using it as a reference point to guide you to the next point, right? That's the real key for me.

So I do agree the key is what happens after. But before that, let's say you open your, your computer and your pre-session. So you know, I'm going to trade the market open. I got one or two hours trading window, and if it's playing out, maybe even longer, but preemptively it's a one-hour window, let's say, and you got three good levels on your screen. One could be a resistance, another could be high of previous day, and another one that you like. Do you wait for each one to interact and then see rejections, or is it usually something that is more likely from previous, or do you have to see how it arrives on the day?

I, if let's say there are three levels on the board, right? I don't know what the market is going to do with those three levels, right? I know that they're reference points. But let's say the first one is a low that I would expect to hold, right? If we pull back into that low and we offer me some sort of candle analysis that would give me a trigger in order to enter that trade, right? Then the thesis on that day becomes a hold of XX level up into maybe one of my upper targets, right? Maybe previous day's high, right? Something like that, right? Let's say the market opens though and it just rips straight up. It never comes back down for that bottom level. It just rips straight up and the very first five-minute candle of the day, it closes over the previous day's high. Right? Okay. Then all of a sudden, the trade that I'm looking to take in there might become a different trade. Now I might be looking rather than longing a lower level with intentions of targeting previous day high, now I'm using that previous day high as my reference point into whatever is above. Right? So it all comes back to, okay, in the moment when this starts to set up, what is this area, this level, this area, this fib, whatever, what is this telling me in terms of where we will go next, right? Like that's important to me.

Yeah, it's more a case of wherever the market is going to open, you know, it's not likely going to reach this one, this one's a bit too far. The session's not going to move there today, maybe tomorrow. So you kind of can narrow it down based on the open. So therefore, is time of day important for you, open specifically?

Yeah, the time of day is important. Um, but not as much as I've heard it is for some others because for me, moves happen at like all different times of day, right? And like one of the more frustrating things as a trader is when the first two hours of the day is extremely choppy and you take multiple stabs and you get stopped out and then just by a hair of that and then the, the last three hours of the day is like a straight up clean trend, right? And it's so funny because you ask people all the time like, why does that happen? Why does that happen? Why does that happen? Why does that happen? And the reality is is that the market is always in one of two states. There's no in between. It's either a trend or a range, right? Like, put a gun to my head, ask me the third state of the market. There is none. It's either trend or range. There's literally nothing else that a market can be doing. It's either trending or ranging. The trend can be up or down, but at the end of the day, it's still a trend. It's still a range. So for me, timing doesn't necessarily impact what I want to happen when because I can't tell you how many days I know there was for sure one or two last week where the market spent essentially multiple hours consolidating and the first hour was extremely frustrating for traders, including myself, and then it was hour four on where it just broke out of that consolidation and trended. And why that happened is because the market was trending before. It then went into a range and then it trended again. It's, it changed its state from trend to range. So I try not to force time on that.

Would you, would you say, pro, just from a probabilistic thing of, I'm sure if you went back far enough, you could find a consolidation to trend happening at or starting at every minute of the day. There's probably some reference point at every point. But those ones that you're saying at the end of the day that just happen to fly, is probably more of an anomaly or less likely compared to, let's say, a market open. So, would you, would you argue there is portions within the day or a portion that is most probable to then just say, eliminate these ones because they're less likely here. It's not a guarantee, but you got a better, you got better odds here.

No, I wouldn't. Not for me, just because when I define a trend, when I define a trend day, right? A trend day. Um, for what I'm looking for is a trend on the daily chart, right? So, basically a big green candle or a big red candle because that means that whatever happened that day inside of that daily candle doesn't really matter at the end of the day, it had reached its objective and closed with a strong trend on that day. Right? I wouldn't say that there's, it, I guess the other thing I would say is it comes down to to framing and looking at it because I know some traders that look at like a 15-second chart or a one-minute and that will go from trend to range a lot more than a five to a 15, right? There's just more candles in a day. So, there's more opportunities to do that. Um, but I found that if you're using 15-minute structure or 15-minute charts that, um, a trend will always present itself in a sense that it, it, it won't be exclusive to a certain time of day is what from what I found, right? And so one thing I actually tell people and I, I really believe this at the bottom of my heart. Um, if you're struggling with the first two hours of market open, stop trading the first two hours of market open. There's still setups post first two hours of market open. I think that sometimes there, that action and that time frame is looked down upon because it's slower, which is fine. It is slower. The moves aren't necessarily as violent. And yes, there are outlier days, but on an average day, right? But one thing that's super straightforward is that the later in the day that you get, the more data you have to work with, right? Like at the open, you're not really sure what the hourly candle is going to look like. That first hourly candle of the day, you can hope that it's strong or weak or following your plan, but later in the day, at that two-hour mark, you already have the first hourly candle to play off. You can use that and kind of make a trade based off the 15-minute chart, based off the hourly chart. Doesn't have to be in the only rush. And I actually encourage people against it. So, long-winded way of saying that, uh, I don't necessarily think that it, I would restrict it to a certain time period.

Yeah, you mentioned you prefer catching big moves or big portions of big moves. I'm interested to explore what that means to you. Is it just a case of you hold for a long time, you swing trade, or is it more a the big moves come after a a consolidation, consolidation to expansion, so you're a breakout trader? What, what is defining for you of big moves and how are you able to find where they're going to happen?

Great question. I, it's a mix of defining big moves as I like this, the move itself to be what I hold from when I purchase to when I sell or when I short to when I cover. I would like that to be a, a, a big area covering a large portion of ground on the chart. So let's say NASDAQ for example. I like trades that go 200 points, right? 250 points, right? Um, there's also an element you have to calculate your R in there, right? Because if you're risking 200 points, doesn't really mean anything. But I like big moves as in like five R, six R, 300 points on the NASDAQ, 200 points. And I like to hold my full position for those moves, right? I like to be holding my entire. And I, what that will result in is a lot of break-even trades where things will go half an hour and then come back and take me out, or they'll go one hour or two hour and then come back and take me out, whatever the case may be. But I like to aim for four, five. Not, I don't, you don't get them every day, but in dream worlds for me, those are the A days where I can catch 250 points on the NASDAQ on a 50-point risk. That's a dream for me. I love risking 50 points to make 250. That's a dream type of risk because I know I'm also, I trust my analysis enough to hold the full position for the 200 points. Um, I have no struggles watching the P&L. I have no struggles, any of that. I can hold my my contracts for those moves.

Let's say emotions aside, just in terms of raw optimization, would you argue that holding a full volume towards a greater level and then catching the big R's stack up better or cutting trades early so when it does reach the one to five, one to four, yes, it's with less volume, but all of those one to two back to break even, you were to take a piece of it, which side of the spectrum are you on or have you, has your data shown one or the other?

No. So, I am a little bit of a unique perspective here just because I manage each trade differently. The way that I manage trades, uh, is all based off of, I, let me rephrase that. I don't, I manage all my trades with the same system and mentality, but each one will often produce a different result, right? A different chart. And so, there's a concept that I use called uh, dynamic R, right? So, when you enter a trade, let's say you enter a one to three, right? That's the objective you're trying to make. You're risking one to try and make three. At the beginning of that trade, with the chart showing you what it's showing you, that one to three is the R to R. As that trade starts to work in your favor, that R to R is shifting, right? Like if you make it halfway to your target, right, you're up 1.5 R's. Now, all of a sudden, if you have your original stop, you are still risking 2.5, right? Because the distance from where you're at profit rise, you don't break even. I, I don't break even. No, sometimes I do, but let's just, I'm just for the, for, for even for purposes of this, uh, understanding, if I don't, well, I won't go automatically break even. I'll go wherever the chart tells me to go. I'll look at a pullback area where we held. I don't want us to lose that pullback. I'll trail under there. Right? Wherever that trail is, sometimes it's break even, sometimes it's my original stop still. Sometimes it's more in profit. But wherever that trail is, it's a certain distance from the current price. Right? My target is also a certain distance from the, uh, current price, which means that I have a new R to R at that moment. Right? If I took the trade originally thinking that I could get a 3:1 out of it, and we're getting close to my target, but all of a sudden, I'm looking at the chart and we've really had no pullbacks, right? It's been straight up. There's nowhere for me to trail my stop under a higher low and continue to trade with the trend because that's what I like to do. I have no spots for that, right? So, I have to keep my stop all the way at that original point, right?

Is the reason you do that is because it could come back and you don't want to get clipped out?

I don't want to get out. I want to keep the, I want to hold for the full move. And the, the reason I'm asking this because I used to do similar. I transitioned away. The reason I did that is because let's say in the scenario where you're, uh, approaching your target, your target is 1 to four. You're at 1 to two right now and you haven't broken even. You're now potentially risking three for going your two plus your initial risk to try and gain one. So you've now entered a negative risk to reward, and the more RR you chase, the more unrealized profit you are willing to give up to gain less and less. Yep. So there is a tip-over point. How do you navigate that?

That is where, so if I was in the trade that you just described, right, where I was aiming for three R, I was up two, but I had no trail spot, which means that there's no, in terms of price action, in terms of price action. So that's why it's different for every time. If I have no trail spot and if I have to keep my original stop, I'm out. I'm, and that's that. I, if, if I asked myself or if I was kind of, one exercise I do when I'm in a trade is I, I pretend that it's me over my shoulder kind of judging, you know, what the trade is. So, it's past you, future you, and two present years. And two presents. Exactly. Um, but he's saying that I'll be like, "Okay, Jake, you're up two R's. Your trail spot is still minus one R." So, like you said, you're really risking three because you're already up two, right? At that point, I'm probably immediately clicking exit on the trade because full, full exit.

Oh, how interesting. Because in my eyes, I, I'm not, I, I've, I used to do a lot of partials and trimming. As the years have gone on, I'm usually in or out. And I'll take the partials sometimes, but like I'm either in or out. And I like moves. And so if I'm up two R's, but I'm risking the three to give back if I were to hit that. Most time for me, that dynamic R is so bad that I'm out. Right? Where it becomes more of a question mark is let's say I'm up two, right? I've been able to trail my stop to, you know, a little bit above break even. Okay. And then, or, or one R above break even. And then the question becomes, well, I have one R left to target, one R left to trail spot. What do I do? Those are the ones that are a little iffy because one, because you know, Jake behind my shoulder here would be like, you, that's a one to one at this point. You don't want to still be in this trade. It's like, yeah, but I do want to hold till target. That's important to me.

I think you have to express it because if you use the logic of always unrealized versus what I'm left to gain, you're never going to do more than one to two. Exactly. Because a one to three in progress leads to at some point an unfavorable dynamic. So there is virtue in like a broken, now it's up to the market and and I know data shows me at times it will reach there. So let it do its thing.

How, how about in terms of you've got a system now and it's interesting that you will clip it if you see no if it could retrace but clip you out. So you let me, let me take a full volume. You don't do a partial because you've just found it's not favorable for you. How do you express that though in the sense of this is a bit subjective. It's based on a bit of price action, likely for a younger version of you, a bit of emotion too. How do you make sure that if you're making decisions on the day and it's not something that is like this is a system, this is a decision on the moment, how do you make sure you're taking sound decisions, not getting clouded by bit of fear, bit of greed, bit of, I'm about to pass this challenge, let me just give it room, or, you know, all these emotions that can come in the way, especially for a younger trader. How do you navigate that?

Confidence and time seeing your system work. That for me is the one thing that is, I feel def and I know it's not necessarily a scientific answer that is the best one, but I have seen my system and trades play out so many times and I have so much confidence in my system, right? That the discretion involved in that process is important, but it's also less than the overall system. The overall system is still taking the trade to target most of the time. Most of the time it's still working out in my favor. Those decision-making processes in the grand scheme of the trade are a little bit smaller than the actual confidence I have in the system and the seeing it work out and play out time and time again, right? Like, and I would challenge that to most traders out there. I do think that most traders out there, whatever the chart play, the trade, the thesis that they're putting on, a lot of the times it works. It's us talking ourselves out of it in the process, right? And so it really is a delicate balance. And I think what I try to do is is measure art versus science, right? Because there's the science of it, which is the R, which is the math. It's just math. It's where's your trail spot? Where's your target? What's the R? How does that, is that favorable for you? Is that not favorable for you? What is the math? That's the science side. The art side is, okay, I've been an artist for eight years. I have a, I can see, you know, I've seen this work. I've seen this fail. No matter what it does, I'm going to be okay mentally, right? I'm not going to let that drive me crazy, draw me on tilt.

It's interesting. A lot of traders want to be like, "No, it has to be just the science, just the maths." But then that's an algo or that's a bot, which has limited, like you'll take one trade a month because it has to be perfectly fit the system. But an experienced artist knows it's missing one of my checkboxes, but it's still worth it. You can add a bit of discretion, intuition, market experience. That's why we do it as humans and not just try and code it and let it do its thing. And I think that I, I personally don't know anybody that's had a success. I've seen about a hundred of them on Instagram or on Twitter. I haven't seen one that is, is results and really work because the theory behind it would be, why would you ever give that away? Sell that to people? Or why would you ever do that? Because it's a scam. Yeah, it's a scam, right? And they work in the short term, really. I think that we're all, all everyone here watching is smart enough to realize that, right? And so if there's something there, well, that's not the intelligent takeaway from that, right? The intelligent takeaway is that because there are no functioning algos, at least that we know about, there are inevitably some out there in the higher up.

So I can add here because just, uh, two weeks ago I went to an event here in Manhattan. It was, uh, it was called Battle of the Quants and it was just AI geniuses and quant scientists all in the finance sector. So we had like the head of strategy of quants from Bloomberg, okay, or fund managers, like super in-depth guys, and they're all about tech, all about AI. And, um, even I had a couple guys on the show and they were telling me in the fund space, they do have AIs. And I forgot the number of it, it was like 20% or something X percentage of the market is all algorithmic. So they do exist, they do work, they do carve out profits. However, they need constant human intervention. They need constant oversight. They need constant refinements and constant use of all this tech and resource. So these Instagram ones, they're not it. They're not it. Right. So like I think that the biggest takeaway, especially from what you just added, is that no matter what, you can't get around the human element and the discretion. You just can't. And in my opinion, that's because again, candles, they've been around for so long. All they are is a visual representation of data. They're a visual representation of orders going through and buying and selling. And we are trying to gain insight and have give ourselves an edge based off of what those are. The reality is, candles on a one-minute time frame look the way they do because there's only so many certain things that can happen within that 60 seconds of buying and selling orders, and it's just reflecting that data, right? And so, so it's technically an indicator. I never thought of it, but whatever happened in that one-minute time frame, it's packaged as a candle. Exactly. With open, close, high, low. Exactly. That's exactly what it is. So, because of that, all it is is an aggregation of data. It's a visual representation of an aggregation of data. In order for an algorithm or something to succeed, it's got to essentially either take the discretion out of it, right? Or, or it's essentially like you said, it's on a higher level, um, that most of people watching this, we're not, we're not operating on that particular thing. But I really, I think the biggest takeaway is is that even those people who are operating on the craziest high of levels with algorithms and all that, there's still human element involved. There's still discretion involved. There is no way for trading to be 100% science. And I'd argue that it's more art than science. Like I would argue that the artist side has to be higher just because you need to have the element of control of who you are, your psychology, your, all that. You can have a perfect system or a great system all you want, but if you're relying on a system and you're expecting to make no human error involved, you're not putting yourself in a position to succeed as a trader. It's very simple. You have to find an edge and then you have to have a mind so you can follow that edge. But how do you know if you're performing correctly or not? You have to know your data. And TradeZeller is going to show you everything that you need beyond the surface level win rates and performance and equity curve. It's going to show you detailed reports. It's going to be your backtesting tool, strategy testing tool, playbooks, notes, and it's going to be a full journal. It makes your journaling easier, faster, and more meaningful. Whereas, if you were just documenting on an Excel spreadsheet or taking screenshots on your iPhone, you wouldn't be able to pull out the data that you need. The correlations that the AI within TradeZeller is pulling out for you. There's so much variety and utility within the software that I think it's essential for any trader. So, the link somewhere below is going to take you directly to the TradeZeller website. I'm not getting paid. This is for you. If you want it, if you like it, go ahead and explore it and probably you'll be using it for years to come.

The theme I also noticed with these algos, they're usually, uh, smaller time frames. They're usually scalps. The higher time frame ones, I asked, why not just do like a swing bot or swing algo? Feel like too much stuff can get in the way, like it might be valid today and in three weeks it's invalidated because of a new thing that happened in the world. So they're usually trying to carve out inefficiencies or arbitrage in the market and the moment they try and exploit it, others exploit it and it suddenly disappears. So the market is perfect in that way. If it finds an inefficiency, many try and efficiency disappear one of the other four criteria that you had, which was you've got your key levels and and how you find them. Uh, once you've arrived to one of them in in an appropriate time window for you, usually market open. How do you know this key level is for me to act upon today versus not act upon today?

Really, how do you take trade idea to trade execution? I'd like to see some sort of candle action around there providing me with the insight that I like. So, and the book "Reading Price Charts Bar by Bar" by Al Brooks is just gold standard for me in terms of understanding individual price action. But, um, I, for example, let's say something comes down to a level and I'm looking in, interested in taking a higher low entry off that level, right? I think that the price action that we can see at that level will provide me a higher low into my upper level. Right? From there, it's specific candle structure and candle rules and understanding that will allow me to trigger into that trade and where my stop would be on that trade.

Um, from this book, is it, uh, like the typical Japanese candlestick patterns, the dojis and the engulfings and so forth?

No. So, it's honestly less about individual candles, too, because candle patterns themselves are definitely super valuable, like a doji or a hammer or all those things. But the real biggest takeaway from this book is how candles react to one another, right? So, let's say something is pulling back into a level and I want there or expect there to be a higher low there, right? What gives me the trigger, so to speak, that there is a higher low there and I'd like to take that higher low would be a break over the previous candle's high. Now, okay, that can look like a thousand different ways, right? You could have a hammer candle that closes green and the next one breaks above its high. Yes, you could have a big red bar and then just a green one that fully engulfs it and breaks above its high. So, it could be presented to it you in a million different ways, right? But at the end of the day, based on the principles that Al Brooks talks about in that book, theoretically by breaking over the previous bar's high, that should be the trigger that I need. That should offer me in that specific instance where I'm looking for a higher low, right? Something is in an uptrend, pulls back to a level, and then breaks above that previous candle's high.

What time frame are you doing this on?

It's applicable to all of them. I, that's why I think that it's incredibly powerful on a 15-minute chart for people who are struggling the first hour of the day because you can still find these types of entries on a 15-minute chart. Are you going to have a significantly wider stop-loss on a 15-minute chart? Yes. Yeah. Your target's probably going to be a little bit wider, too, though, because you're using a 15-minute chart, right? So, uh, for me, I, the two-minute and the five-minute are where most of the time I will take my triggers off of, okay? But I hesitate to even say that because I am a time frame freak. I am watching at all times. If I'm, say, I'm trading the NASDAQ that day, I am watching the five-minute, the two-minute, the 15-minute, the hourly, the daily, and then a few of those. I'm watching that same time frame with extended hours on, and with extended hours off. So, I'm watching, you know, I've got a 15-minute chart on my screen. It will have extended hours on, and I'll have a different 15-minute chart on my screen that has extended hours off because I think those will present two different stories for me, right? So, while I might be taking the trigger of breaks above previous bar's high on a five-minute, I'm always aware of what's happening on every single time frame and I'm likely taking that five-minute with the hopes that a 15 is going to trigger soon. Right.

Do you, do you believe that you have to enter and exit on the same time frame? Like your entry was based on M15 signal, so therefore your exit should be on M15 movement or can you enter on an M2 and then use your M15 target?

I think you can mix and match. And I think that the dream world, it is if I can enter on an M2. I bought an exit on daily. Yeah. I mean, that's the dream, right? The truth is, the best trades are going to come from something like that, right? I just think that, but let's say I enter off the M, the M1 or the M2. For me, the lowest I usually go is the, is the two-minute. Let's say I enter off the two-minute. Right. Again, I'm taking a trigger off the two-minute, but I'm not doing that like blinded to the 15. And so like, like while it might not be a trigger for me technically speaking off the one hour or the 15, if my plan is to hold for a large move, I'm definitely fully aware of how the 15 and hourly are looking and how I want them to look. Right? So I'll take an entry off the five or the two. I, my best trades, I enter off the two or five. I manage off the 15. 15's so stress-free. It's just, it's just there's like 26 of them in a day. Um, it's, it's the M15 is home for you. Just golden child, man.

How do you, uh, navigate risk in the sense of is it a fixed stop loss size or is it M1 or M2 entry but using the M15 high to protect yourself?

Uh, whatever, whatever time frame I'm trading and I use for that trigger, I, all of my stops are one candle. So whatever size that candle is will determine what my stop is. So, if the candle, if I'm taking a two-minute entry, I'm probably going to find a, a NASDAQ, uh, entry on the two-minute around 30, 40 points is where they tend to hover. On more volatile days, it gets bigger and you just have to adjust to your contract size. Um, but the two-minute, you always, that's that's the, that's the allure of the two-minute, right? Of the five-minute. The allure, that's what draws people to it in the first place is the fact that you can get tighter risk entries most of the time, right? I mean, I, I'm not trying to beat a dead horse, but if you're a trader that is, this is a, a, a middle ground that I've always found really, really funny is that I believe that your risk should stay the same. I mean, you, across time frames, right? So, whether you're entering on the 15-minute, whether you're entering on the two-minute, just however big the stop loss is, adjust your contract size so that the risk is generally the same, right? Sometimes the best setups of you've ever seen, you put a little bit more on. Mediocre setup, you put less. Not arguing that, right? But I think that a part that people have really sort of struggled with is they look at, okay, there's a 15-minute chart and I'm looking at a 15-minute signal bar here where it's determining my stop loss. And on the NASDAQ, that's like 80 points. And in their head, they're like, I don't want to take 80 points of risk. So they go down to a two-minute time frame or one-minute time frame and they try and find an entry that's so small and so tight that it has 15 points of risk or 20 points of risk so that they can use more contracts. And I think prop firms have been a very negative on this side because prop firms allow you to use way too many contracts, but they'll use, they want to find entries with small contracts. And I ask after the fact, that trade will end up, of course, the smaller the one-minute chart setup fails, which is not its fault. It's a one-minute chart. There's a million of them on a day. Of course, they're going to have again, that statistical probability of them failing is just higher than a 15-minute because there's more of them, right? So, I look back and I ask people and I'm like, "Well, why didn't you use the 15-minute entry, right?" Like, that looks pretty clean there. Like, that looks like there was a good signal bar. All that, well, the risk was too big. I'm like, it's not the risk was too big. It's that you have an ego involved where you're not willing to use less size so that the risk is still what you want it to be. Yes. Right. The risk is, you can manipulate that. You can manipulate the, the number of points that you have risked per trade. You can manipulate the dollar value by changing the contract sizes, right? And so that's one of my biggest gripes with people is they're like, "The 15 minutes too much risk for me." I'm like, "Then you're, you're trading too much size." I'm like, "No, it's not." I'm like, "Then size less." Like a 15-minute chart, guess what? Size down until you're using one micro, right? Like one micro, you're going to, you're going to put yourself in a position where it's so small of risk that you're going to be like, I'm not risking enough, right? Like, it's not the time frame, it's how much you're risking, right? So, um, I will use, again, I, you'll see the habit, my answers tend to be very long tangents.

How, how would you, uh, navigate because you mentioned you're more with futures now and futures prop firms are on the rise. A lot of people are migrating towards them because there's you can leverage small capital to a. But you can, um, it's not your money, you have a reset button. There's plenty of benefits, but just coming from the Forex world, the futures ones have a lot more rules and a lot more challenges to actually end up with a payouts, which is why I find certain individuals that have had huge payouts, million dollar plus that I've had on the show. I find it super impressive to do on futures because it's way harder than the Forex, not because of the market, because of the rules that are placed. How are you navigating the futures profits and how would you advise others too?

For sure. So my journey with, I, I was trading futures long before I decided to try the prop firm world. Prop firm world to me came up more as leverage, right? Like I wanted to just use the leverage that they were offering me. As someone who was a profitable trader, you saw some of the stuff that they were offering and you're like, you tell me I can trade five accounts at once and all of that cost me, you know, $100 of real risk or whatever the math is. It's like, okay, sure. Right? So I originally started using them simply because I thought that I could exploit the model and and use my profitability to make money. So what happens in that bath is with futures prop firms, pretty quickly, if you're a successful trader, they'll move you to a live environment. Um, and once you're a live trader with a prop firm, there's no restrictions, which is super nice. It's essentially just a personal account, right? So, um, I'm now at the point where all the prop firms I trade with, I've been moved live. So, they're all basically, I call them my little tax havens. Um, because they're all basically personal accounts that the way prop firms work, you're not taxed until you withdraw. Um, I mean, it's just 1099 income. You're just not taxed until you withdraw it. So, um, I now have a bunch of little personal accounts basically with other properties, but, but it's taxed as income, not as capital gains or. Exactly. So, there, it's worth, it's not, there is, yeah. Do a whole, there is a downside. Yeah. There's, there's a whole lot of downsides, upsides. You're, it's taxed as income. So, that's obviously not as beneficial because futures capital gains have some percentages splits that are advantageous for futures traders. But if I, on my futures personal accounts this year, the money that I've made so far, I owe taxes on it like right away. Like theoretically at the end of the year, as soon as you like, or as soon as I've made that trade, I owe taxes on that, right? Especially if you're paying quarterly, if you make that trade, you pay taxes on it. On a prop firm live account, only live, right? Um, well, I guess technically sim too, but they move you live at some point on a live account because it's not my account. I'm trading it for them. The money I make in there, I don't get taxed on until I withdraw it. Right? So now all of my prop firm live accounts, I'm just continuing to build the balances in them and I'll take the tax hit strategically, right? When it's a year where, hey, maybe I had a slow trading year that year and I can afford a bigger tax hit on this, right? Or, hey dude, your tax bill this year is looking crazy. The last thing you want to do is pull out any multiple six figures from these live accounts. Just leave them in, right? And just take the hit the next year, right? So, I will use the prop firm live accounts as these little tax havens.

Um, how does it feel when, um, when you're constantly pulling out money from an account, you're keeping that initial balance. So, it's numbers you're used to. And when you reset, is that mentality of, okay, I can't mess up because I haven't got a buffer. So, you're going to trade sensibly. The moment you have, you know, 50k, 100k profit buffer there, you haven't paid yourself. You, you could see a bigger number. So you might even end up risking more and, uh, you can allow yourself to trade a bit more recklessly because you're like, I can afford these because I got a buffer. How do you navigate that with your tax advantages, which is why you're doing it, but nonetheless, larger numbers in an account can lead to different behaviors. Is that something you had to face?

Definitely. And so for my personal accounts, I would throw them day one. Like I, if, if I, so if it's a personal account, not the prop firm lives, but my personal, like my personal trade of eight, for example, broker that I use. I don't like to keep that thing above $5,000. I, that gives me five NQ micros to start. I mean, if you make money that day, you can scale more. I don't need more than five or 10 grand in there. You can do work with five or 10 NQ contracts. Like, and the margin requirements are low. So anything above that at the end of the day, I just withdraw, right? And for the same reasons you mentioned, I don't want to be

Tempted to trade larger size. I don't want to be this. I don't even leave myself much of a buffer because I don't care if I've withdrawn five grand 20 times. It's and then I'll just guess what if I lose. If I have a bad day, I lose five grand. That's okay with me. That's a C day. That's within my acceptable tolerance. That's totally fine. I can put the five grand back in, right? If I leave 50 in there and I lose it all, that's going to hurt me a lot more. So I always withdraw. Draw the prop firm accounts. It's a little bit different, right? Cuz I've been leaving it in there for the tax purposes like you mentioned. The reason I'm able to keep that safe is the platform risk controls. I literally can't, for lack of better terminology, I can't f it up if I wanted to. There are platform risk controls in place where on one of my like my Topstep Live account, for example, that one's been sitting over 200k for six months or so now. That loss limit on a day was for the longest time 1.5% of the account value, right? And so no matter what, if I keep growing the account, the loss limit stays at 1.5% or less of the account value. It's just you'd need a lot of losing days in a row in order for that to be gone, right? And so I completely agree with you that leaving money in there can lead to more reckless trading, more size that you don't want to be trading with, all that. But if you have the platform risk controls, you can you can you can you can control it a lot. Right?

Now the hard part is at the end of the day, let's say that I hit my max daily loss limit in one of these accounts, right? The hard part is at the end of the day not going and changing it to a bigger number, right? Like cuz that ultimately like my my funded live account if I have a day where I take three or four losing days in a row, the biggest temptation is to ask to give me more contracts or in order to give me more risk so that I can try and make that back, right? So that unfortunately you can't teach someone. It just has to you father time is the best teacher in that you have to experience it enough times before you stop making those mistakes, right? And so now I know on my live accounts, there's a certain amount that I'm willing to risk each day. Every now and then, if I need to double that number, it's not the end of the world. If I risked 6K that day and I see a great trade setting up and I need to add another 6K of risk, you're okay with that. That's all right. That's not the end of the world. What I need to avoid is the days where I send a message to that risk team and I say, "Hey, turn the daily loss limit off." You know, which I've never done, but I've I have once messaged them and I've been like, "Hey, I keep getting stopped out because this daily loss limit. Move it to like 20 grand so I don't get stopped out and I can just trade normally." Uh and guess what? I lost the 20 grand. I hit the I hit that limit, right? And so it's like and then future Jake looked back on me and was like, "Why did you change that limit? What were we thinking?" Right? Um, so that's what I mean when I say no one can teach you that. The only person who can teach that is father time doing it enough times over again where you realize, okay, hey, I hit my limit. I shouldn't change it. Right? This is not a smart decision. Right? Or you should set it so that your broker won't let you or your risk manager won't let you. Right? And it it it ultimately where you literally don't have the capability to do that.

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What about longevity with profits? A lot of people are in the mindset of we don't know how long they're going to be around for regulation. They might go bust like many in the CFD space have. They use it as a quick payout, funnel it to life without the restrictions. Why is that not your preferred route?

Yeah. So, here's one of the here's one of the the traps that that draws you into. Um, and let's say that you get a big prop firm payout, right? And you pull out 10 grand and you are then taxed on that 10 grand as income, right? But you take that 10 grand, you put it in a personal trading account, let's say you lose it, right? If you lose that money, you still pay the tax on what you paid out. Yeah. On the income. So, it's a double whammy uh of of extra bad. So, in my eyes, while I understand the argument for withdraw uh prop firm profits and put them in personal account, I'd argue like withdraw prop firm profits and put them in a long-term investing account. Like put them in like treat them as money that like buy this the S&P 500 with them. Like don't day trade with it because then you could potentially lose it and still owe taxes on the other ones, right? So that's I'm always trying to think of tax stuff a little bit. A little uh but you got to move to Tobias. I know. Bro, this is what happens when I'm from California. I'm trying to I'm trying to skirt everything.

Fair enough. Um, cool. So, I was going to move on to just the topic of advice cuz you've got a six, seven year career. You've done well for yourself despite a bad start. Uh, there's probably some, you know, zoomed out bird's eye view lessons that things you found out along the way, things you wish you knew that you later found out just so we can give some advice to younger, more beginner traders.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that uh and I always try this is the first podcast I've done in a few years and whenever I I try to to offer something new that I that I haven't talked about before, but the number one thing I would say is just the understanding of the timeline that is realistic, right? And here's where I was someone who used to watch a lot of podcasts for trading and I would cherrypick the information that I wanted to hear. And I think that a lot of people do that where you you listen to a podcast and you try to find the stuff that you think you need to hear and you really only listen to that, right? To affirm your already to reaffirm your own beliefs. Right? So for anyone listening out there of all the things I'm going to say, I promise you don't cherrypick away from this one. This is the one that matters. The timeline to being a successful trader is longer than what you think it will take. And I understand that people have told you this before. They've said, "Hey, doctor, it takes four years, right? Lawyer, it takes eight years, whatever. Eight years, four years, whatever. Takes a long time to become a doctor and a lawyer." People have told you that before. I'm not going to try and be that same person to tell you that again. Right? Let's use the same topic that we've talked about a bunch today. Statistics. Right? The thing that most people don't understand is that when you take a small probability, right, and then you add a condition to it that's also a relatively low small probability, right? Your small probability just became almost invisibly tiny, right? So like if we take the number and just say 95% of traders fail, 5% succeed, right? So in order to succeed as a trader, you're putting yourself in a position where you're already 50 out of, you know, a thousand, right? You're a very, very small subsection of these people who are going to succeed. That already is a very it's a statistical aberration if you succeed at it. Right? Now, you've talked to a lot of traders. I don't know if there's a number that you could put on this, but in theory, my guess would be that at least 95% of the ones who are successful take three years or more in order to be consistently profitable or successful. It's also this parabolic thing where they might tip over to profitable on year three or year two, but it wasn't meaningful until year five or seven or it compounds towards the end. I mean, we can also just look at Warren Buffett's career, how he went from a millionaire to a billionaire to multi-billionaire. It was in shorter shorter increments. Like that you have to understand that like the vast majority of of successful traders take a while in order to become successful, right? So if you again ignore the doctor taking four years thing, ignore that, just look at the probabilities and the statistics of it. 5% chance that you become successful. These are arbitrary numbers, but just pretend with me, uh, 5% chance you become successful is trading as a whole, right? That's already really hard. If you're going to put, which I think is the number one thing that people struggle with, is putting an unrealistic timeline of when they're going to be able to achieve the goals that they want. If you take that sentence and say, "I want to be one of the 5% of day traders who succeed." And then you add another condition to it where you say, "I want to be one of the 5% of day traders who succeed in under three years, right?" All of the sudden that 5% chance dwindles into the ground and it's I don't remember the specific math on it, but it's it's like it becomes like 1% or then and if you add it to making it less than two years, then it would be arguably 0.25%. Right? So it's like looking in the eye at something incredibly difficult that is statistically unlikely to happen and then saying, "Hey, I want to do it even harder." And it's like, well, wait, the math just doesn't work there. It's also maybe not even worthwhile. It's just a bit of FOMO and a bit of rush. But you also think like, I don't know about you, but it's probably similar, but I'd say an average month for me now wipes out an entire first year of profits back then. So, it's like what's the point of chasing big wins in your early days? Because if you follow it long enough, you'll make more than that in a single month what you'll make in in a whole year. So these are all small numbers in the grand scheme of things, which hopefully gives a bit of peace of like, you don't need to make it all today. And if you have systems around you of like you had an income coming in, you have you control your expenses, all these you have an environment that is not lifestyle inflation, all of these things are going to just keep you grounded to not chase highs and think long term. And you think long term. And it's the idea too that again, remember think about how old you are. Just think about how you you watching this, how old are you? And I if you are under 50 years old, my assumption is you have another 10 years of trading. That's 2500 trading days. 2500 trading days in that 10-year span. Think of it over that time horizon. Right. And during that time, like you said, I think that's an excellent point. You are going to have months that are going to fully erase your previous year losses, right? Like it's going to take you five, six, seven, eight years to get there, but you will, right? And it's the unreasonable expect I would even argue that for most traders like you said they might flip to consistent around year threeish is where you start to and by consistent I mean break even. Right? And it's year five or six where it's the the Nike check mark effect where you go from this I've talked about the Nike check mark a lot, but you go from this to that the parabolic right? And it's a parabolic move that might come in year five or year six. And guess what? That Nike check mark, you're going to probably have about 10 fake outs where you you you have a good week and you're like, "Oh my gosh, I'm hitting my Nike check mark." And then the next week you lose that entire week's profit and more and you're like, "Okay, turns out that wasn't the Nike check mark. I still need to work on it up here." Right? It might even go the other way where you you are having your actual check mark, but then the losses are just naturally bigger because you're scaling up. So, you might be like, "Imposter syndrome. Was it all fake? Did my strategy stop working? Was this all a lie?" Because I don't know about you, but I've been doing this almost a decade. But I still have my moments where I'm like, "Wait, was this all like a bit of luck?" You snap out of it. But then it does catch me sometimes like, is this all a facade? Have I been just on a on a lucky run? But that's the power of losses, I guess.

No, it really it is. And I I It's so funny because I I uh I recently started seeing a personal trainer and every day I I see him and he always asks me, he goes, "How's the market today?" You know, "How'd you do today?" he always asks, you know, and the last like few days in a row, May has been a particularly choppy month. It's just been kind of neutral. In the last three days in a row, I've just been like, ah. And like that's because I that's my sign of one, I don't really want to talk about it. Two, I really don't have anything to talk about. I either took a planned loss, I had a break-even trade, like it was nothing worth sharing. And he go and he literally tells me he's like, "Man, we need to stop. I need to I need you to change those into hell yes." And I'm like, well, that's not the way it works. Like, you have to understand that like in the gym, that is the way it works. Like, if you come in with a mindset, you can lift more weights and ultimately go, "No, it's the hell yeah mindset." In trading, I have to be cool with the I have to accept those. I have to be like, "Oh, that just happened that day." Well, that's fine. That's normal. It was an A, B, or C day. I didn't blow up. I didn't tilt. I didn't do anything stupid. And over the course of a long period of time, that's going to put me in a position to succeed. It's not the hell yes every day. It's the, "Oh, boring. Oh, well, it's boring. It's trading now at this point is boring." And and and you will all reach that point. Like I I don't know about you, I love weekends now. When I was beginning trading, I used to cannot wait. I was like, "Screw the weekend. Open the market again. I want to trade more." And it's so funny how it's taken a total 360 and now I'm like, can I trade less? Like, can we keep the market open like one day a week? I'll just show up that one day and I'll just, you know, like, and I can't do people, some people will be like, why don't you just do that? You can't predict what days are going to have good movement. You got to show up every day. It's part of the game. You have to show up every day, right? Um, or most days you got to show up. But as every as you go and become older and older as a trader, eventually you reach a point where you're like, "Dude, I can't like I can't wait for a vacation. You're telling me that, you know, Thanksgiving or Christmas and New Year's, I get to take two weeks off." Hell yeah, that sounds great. Right. Um, and you'll look forward to to loving those. I promise over the course of time. Nothing beats time. Truly.

Just to end the episode, I think it's nice to hear from someone who's had a long career. Relatively as you were saying, but you know, a relatively long career and how your early days what pivoted you towards profitability was you didn't have financial anchors. You had a steady income coming in and a and a stable life and that helped you not take erratic decisions. Now when you are taking large losses because you're you're growing your accounts, what was once a small meaningful loss of $50 or $100 now certain losses might be like that used to be a monthly salary or I don't know, but they become meaningful numbers when you do make profit. How are you distributing it to continue to have uh financial strength around just in in general investing or things that you may do?

Yeah, investing, real estate. I My parents do a lot of real estate investing. We're a very close-knit family. Um, and I've been able to get into a few little pieces here and there of deals with them. I have a long-term stock portfolio that uh going to be honest with you, I'm just not a great long-term investor. I seem to buy things at bad times. Um, which you wouldn't really you I mean I'm doing fine, but does that cause you to pull out or No, no. I just I I if the way I'll phrase it is if you look at the market from where it was like Nvidia for example, right? I should have made I'm a I'm a really good day trader. I should have made some money on Nvidia. It went down to $10 a share and then went up to multip whatever there was with the split. I should have made money on that, right? I uh I spent a lot of the year holding Apple, which if you look at the last two or three years, Apple just hasn't gone anywhere. Um, but I long-term invest. I know I'll do well over the long run. I'm just I'm not great at. So here's an interesting stat because I saw because uh Nagi that you've met, he was getting a bit of FOMO in the market right now because it had a V recovery and um it's just that sentence of time in the market beats timing the market. And we came across this thing where it was like the guy who bought at the best time, he was always buying the lows. What was his 10-year portfolio like versus the guy who was just buying highs and after 10 years versus the guy that was kind of dollar cost averaging, he was just buying randomly all the way through. The difference between these three was let's not say negligible, was very small. So it's just time in the market beats all. So even if you're not the best at it, in 10 years you'll beat the guy who did it. And that's what I've started to do. So I've changed now. Now I have an auto buy set and it just buys and I don't even care. And like because I mean even the most recent downward wave I took a larger long-term investment position on Coinbase. I I just thought it had good upside potential. All this market goes through its tariff volatility drawdown. I think I was probably down 40, 50% on the stock, which again for the long term, not really too worrisome. Short term, definitely painful. The plan was to buy more, right? And I didn't follow the plan. I I as as the market dropped so I'm now sitting pretty on that stock, but it's at 260, which is my average price. It went down to like 140 and I like I should have bought it, right? But for me, something I've learned in really more in these last few months than anything. I am just my skill is not in long-term investing picking bottoms and all that. Like you said, at the end of the day, the math cost average, it's just dollar cost average. So, I've now switched. Now whether it's Bitcoin, whether it's stocks, S&P 500 is what I'm mostly doing. It's just auto buys and it's just auto auto buys and auto goes. Um, yeah, but I I like to make sure um that I'm taking profits. I'm redistributing them into long-term investment accounts, into some real estate stuff, um, and some crypto. And if I can just continue to funnel money into those long term, I should be pretty good, right? Um, as well as a large section called future taxes. I think everybody should put in all of your long-term investment accounts, there should be one section you funnel into called super future taxes, so that when tax season comes, you are ready. Because I I have been not ready before, and that's not fun. That's not fun. Yeah. And the reason I wanted to end the episode on that was because it's something that I've only been doing a few years, but I wish I've been doing it since I started because oh my gosh, it would have made a world of difference. And I'm not trading the stock market, but traders that I've spoken to that like I shorted the market, so I lost money, but then the market went up on my portfolio. So kind of break even. Like it gives you a bit of uh, you know, mental peace, let's say, that you got something coming in despite your performance. Um, yeah, bro, thank you very much for the episode. A lot of amazing stories. I love I love just the way you explain things as well. You you think tangents, I think stories. It was pretty well. Thank you for coming along. Thank you, man.