How To Start Day Trading As A Beginner In 2026 [Full Tutorial]

Most beginning traders don't fail because they're not smart enough. They fail because they're trying to do too much at once. That was me for years. And the fix isn't what most people think. Because instead of adding more, what finally made me profitable was simplifying. Let me explain what I mean.

I started with a tiny account risking about $50 per trade. But today, you can actually get started with as little as $4, which I'll show you how to do. Now, I risk around $1,500 per trade, and I've had months where I've made almost $10,000 trading in just 60 minutes each morning. This video is the full road map I wish I had when I started and a complete beginners trading course, start to finish, completely free. And I'll show you how to get set up, how to read the market, how to find profit, and how to grow your account. So by the end you'll have a simple system you can actually practice and execute. Watch this video from start to finish. Build a foundation. Then come watch me trade live every morning for free with over 4,000 other people to learn even more. Now let's get started.

So we're going to go over the four major steps to get you started on this process. What you actually want to be trading. How to get started trading with just $4 of risk, what your trading plan will actually be, and then how to actually scale your account to making consistent money. Because again, when you first start out trading, it's not about making money initially. It's about practicing your strategy and learning and then you can get to a point where I am where you are risking a lot of money but making even more.

So, what are you actually going to trade? Because there are so many things and assets in the market that you can trade successfully. You can trade stocks, you can trade options, you can trade forex, you can trade crypto, and we're actually not going to trade any of those. We're actually going to trade futures. And if you don't know what these are, they are just another trading asset like crypto, forex, stocks, or options for starting with a small account, beginning traders. And as well, they allow you to scale over time. You can basically trade 24/7 with them if you want. You know, again, I only trade 60 minutes a day, but you can trade these more if you want. There's no small account restrictions. That's the problem with trading stocks is a lot of times you have run into something called the pattern day trading rule where you need over $25,000 in your account to consistently place a lot of day trades.

Now, like I was talking earlier, it's super scalefriendly. Just to pull up a quick chart here, you can be risking under $20 on some of these trades, but then you can also increase your risk way more. So, you can start small, but then you can also do the exact same thing. And you can see these charts look the exact same, but here I'm risking $1,500 instead of that $20. And so, it allows you to execute the exact same system on the exact same chart, but just scaling and changing your size, which makes that process of scaling extremely fluid.

Now, what futures markets are is they are extremely liquid markets, which makes them really powerful for actually trading. You're not trading something like a penny stock or an option spread that can be really illquid where you can have fill issues. You can lose money based on fees or spreads. These are the most liquid markets in the world. And so, you don't have to deal with any of that. You're trading things like the NASDAQ, the S&P 500, oil, gold, these huge markets you hear about all the time, but instead of trading the actual index, you're trading a derivative of them just called futures. And all futures are is they're essentially a contract agreement to buy one of these commodities at a future price. And so that kind of sounds complicated, but to show you the reality of what this looks like, here's a trade I recently took where I'm trading the S&P 500 on a one minute chart. And you can see it looks like and it produces candles just like any other market. And you can actually bet the market's going to go down or you can bet that it's going to go up. And so here's an example where I'm making money as it goes down. And so that's the beauty of trading futures is you can get really big leverage like options, but if you've ever looked at options, they are extremely complex and there's so much that is so frustrating about them. And futures are so much simpler. They're just as simple as stocks. You basically enter here, bet the market's going to go down, and you make money as it goes down. There's nothing complicated or added about this and you essentially trade exactly what you see on the chart versus options have so many other variables and so I find it extremely more powerful to do that and again there's the scaling that comes into play and so you can see here I'm at large size and so this allows you to make a a crazy amount of money in just a few minutes here. Each one of these candles is one minute and so over, you know, 15, 30 minutes here, I am, you know, up just over $5,000 and it eventually closes out here. But that's the beauty of it is you're able to easily manage to trade on the chart, get out when you want to, and it doesn't have a lot of complexities as other markets. And again, I'll show you how you can get started with a really small amount of money here in a second.

And so let's go on to step two now where we can talk about scaling your account. How you can start with a really small amount of money with $4 and then the process of scaling and the steps you're going to take. So there's three main options you can take to get access to trading and practicing it and then starting to make money. Now the first one is demo trading. You can get started with this for as little as zero to $4. And this is what I always highly recommend people doing because when you're first starting out, especially something new like futures or any other market asset or strategy, you're going to make mistakes. And I have countless people that have emailed me saying they started out risking a lot of money, tens of thousands, and they've lost it all because they're just making beginner mistakes. And so, you have to get started with demo trading first and then when you become confident, scale. And we'll talk a little bit about that process in a second.

Now, a huge option that you'll see is prop firms. And in my eyes, these are a trap. They will generally cost you at least $50 to $100 per month or more. The concept of them is really awesome, but in the execution, they work against you. And so the concept of how they work is you pay a fee to get access to a funded account where they essentially say, "Hey, here is $50,000 and you can trade with this money and it the profits you make with that money, you will keep a small percentage." And so they will allow you to do this for a monthly fee generally. Like here's a great example of a prop firm that will give you a $50,000 account, $150,000 account for a monthly fee. And so the risk-reward of, hey, I can just risk $200 a month, but I get access to this $5,000 account and I even if I make $5,000 or $1,000, that is insanely good. But the execution of how this works, even if they'll often give you a coupon code to make this 80% off, that just gets you in the door. There are so many other fees associated with this that you are spending a lot of money consistently at the end of the day to actually not trade with real money. You are demo trading anyway because they have it to where you are trying to pass these challenges. You have to pass multiple levels of challenges before you actually unlock a real money account and can get real payouts. And there is literally statistics that under 5% of people over time pass these challenges. And so really what you're doing is you're just paying a couple hundred a month to demo trade because they're dangling a piece of cheese in front of you like a mouse. And so I highly recommend staying away from these because it's just going to cost you a lot of money when you can just be paying $0 to $4 a month to do the exact same thing.

Now, if you really want to do this, I'm not going to fully knock on it. If you start demo trading first and then you prove that you can be consistently profitable demo trading over a couple months, then you can switch to prop firms and try it out. But again, keep in mind and be aware that the way they're set up is not to allow you to win. They actually want you to lose money because it's in their business model and best interest too. And so instead of doing prop firms, I would recommend starting your own brokerage account with futures. You can do this for as little as $300 to $1,000, maybe even less, but that's a really good starting amount. And what this does is it allows you to increase this slowly from zero money risk of demo trading to a small amount like we saw $20 of risk. People don't realize initially and what you'll learn over time is trading is very, very mental. Risking money is hard. If I go back to this example I was showing, you have to be able to handle seeing this amount of money move. This candlestick right here is like a $1,000 swing. And I didn't start being able to handle that originally, right? I've slowly built up to this over time starting at that small amount of risk. But that's where the mental side of trading comes in. And so even if you pass with a prop firm, you will be all of a sudden having to deal with these huge money swings with these prop firms when you haven't done the training essentially to build up to this. I have so many trades where I was risking $50, $100, $300, $500, $1,000, and now I'm risking $1,500, and I'm close to sizing up to 2,000 or $2,500. It's a slow building process to get there. And so, that's another reason why people fail with prop firms is because you go from risking nothing to a crazy amount. Even if you're not risking it, think about it on the flip side. The amount of money that you can make is still in your brain and messes with you. And so that's why it's the most important thing to start this process like this. There are no shortcuts in trading. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to get your money in some way.

Now, let's go on to step three of building your trading plan and your robust system. So, there's a few key things about creating a successful trading plan. The first thing is you have to choose your time frame to actually trade. And so for me, what I do is I'm day trading and so I'm trading on a one minute chart a lot of the time, but I also use a 15-minute chart to look at the big picture because what you'll realize over time is the small little patterns are not as important as understanding the big picture. The big picture always is the most important thing.

Now, what you want to do is you want to figure out how long you're going to trade each day. There's a lot of different reasonings you'll go through in your head of why I want to trade longer versus shorter. Originally, a lot of the time in the beginning, I thought, hey, I should trade 6 hours a day because that means I will capture more trades and so I'll make more money. And that's not really how trading works. Instead, I've realized the sweet spot is somewhere between one or two hours. Because what you'll realize over time is trading is a decision game. You are making hundreds of decisions every hour, even if it's to do nothing. And what this does is it's very taxing mentally over time. And so over time, you'll get more and more tired and you'll make worse and worse decisions. And so what you want to do is I've realized is well I would rather instead of trading this whole time and by the end of my trading session I'll just be making crappy decisions. I'll probably put a loss on. It's better to just trade in this beginning amount of time where I am at my peak performance and I'm going to make the best decisions possible consistently. Trading is a consistency game. You have to show up every single day and make the right decision. That is really hard to do. And so figuring out how long you're going to trade every day is extremely crucial for that. And as well risk-reward is really important when it comes to trading. I used to start out scalping to where I was risking $100 to make 50. That is a negative risk-reward ratio, making it really hard to consistently make money because every time you lose, you wipe out two trades. And so, it's really important to understand how win rate and risk-reward works and kind of where is that sweet spot. And this is kind of different for everyone. A lot of people like a 1:1 risk-reward ratio because it's very easy to hit your profit target. It happens quickly. I found the sweet spot for me is 1:3 risk-reward ratio. Now, of course, this kind of depends on the exact strategy you end up using, but for me, this allows me to be profitable with only a 30% win rate. And so, mentally, that takes the stress off of every single trade to be right. You are going to lose trades in trading. And so I find it way easier to be risking $100 to make $300 because it takes multiple losses to wipe out one win. And when you have a win, it puts a lot more money in your account. And so mentally, it sets you up in the right way. That's the biggest thing I'm trying to do here for you is set you up with the correct foundation to approach trading properly. There are so many ways to trade and approach trading, but if you don't set up some of these foundational things the right way, you are going to get lost and waste a ton of time trying to figure it out.

Now, the last big thing is your strategy and entry checklist that you make. Every time you jump into a trade, you want to have a plan of what you're doing, why you're jumping in, where you're going to get out, if it's a loss or a win, and how you're going to consistently repeat that every single day. Because if you don't have something like that, you're going to show up to the market, be watching it, and reacting to the price movement and trying to take a long, trying to buy, trying to sell, and capture as much of every move as possible. So, this is a huge problem for me and other new traders is you see all these moves and you think, "Oh my god, I can make money off of this move. I can make money off of this move, this move over here." You know, oh, I I I don't want to miss out on this move. And what that ends up doing is you just end up losing money because you're being reactionary to the market versus having a plan, looking for a specific thing every single day, and executing on that plan when the market comes to you. That is the biggest light bulb moment I had in my trading is not trying to make money from the market every single day. Instead, having a strategy that I know that makes money when it shows up and waiting for that strategy to show up and the market to fit that checklist that I created. And so that's literally all I do every day is I have an entry checklist that I look for the five key things and if it shows up, I take a trade. And if it doesn't, I just move on with my day. For me, in my strategy, I would probably take one to three trades a week. And the reason why is because really good setups don't show up that often, but I am patiently waiting for them. And when they happen, with the beauty of trading and scaling and size, well, you can make a crazy amount of money from them. And so, you don't need them to show up very often. I think that's another huge trap that I fell into and a lot of beginning traders fall into is because they're day trading, they want to be taking five to 10 trades a day. They want it to be really exciting, fast-paced, crazy amount of money. And that's actually not how a lot of really good traders trade. And at the end of the day, trading is boring. And it should be boring because that's how good trading works. And that's how you're going to be able to mentally handle trading long-term.

And just quickly to walk through this five-step entry checklist on this trade I had is literally every single morning the market opens up at 9:30 Eastern Standard Time. It's actually 7:30 my time, 6:30 a.m. Pacific time, which makes it super easy to do this before a full-time job. Especially on the West Coast, you can literally be done trading by 7, 7:15 and then go on with your day. But how it works is all I look for with my trading is reversal trades. I look for a move up to reverse betting that it's going to go lower or I look for a move down to reverse betting that it's going to go higher. I don't look for a breakout trade or a continuation trade because I've realized that again everything with trading the simpler the better. And so with this trade specifically, there was a big move that the market had in the morning. And so I was looking for that to reverse. And so the market had a really nice trend here. Looking at the swings of the market, it was making higher highs and higher lows. The market actually opened up right here. And then from there, it made a lower low here and a lower high. And what I mean by these the major swings here is an uptrend is, you know, made by higher highs and higher lows. But when it starts making lower highs and lower lows, well, that is the structure of the market telling you that it's going to shift. And I found it way simpler to just not use any indicators and just read essentially the swings of the market like that. Also, I have levels here that are essentially reversal zones of major support and resistance. Once that happened is, you know, I looked for a confirmation of a big bearish candlestick. The market kind of broke the lows of that candlestick and then I bet that the market was going to go lower. And you can see here there's a couple support zones on the way down that I'm looking as targets. I think, okay, maybe the market will bounce up here, but I can see and bet that maybe it'll come down to this major support zone. And so from there, you know, I just manage to trade a little more fluidly. I go to break even at some point. It's really good to go break even eventually to take risk off the table because I don't know, you know, the market could come down here and just bounce and go up, right? And so there's no point in me losing money on the trade once it's got to a point where I think it's shown that it will work out if it does. And then from there, it's just managing with the trend. You can see I have a little downtrend line. And then it starts to get really kind of parabolic here to the downside. And I trail my stop up pretty tightly because you can see here at this point as it spikes down here, I'm up basically $6,000. But it pulls back to where I closed at $5,000. And so each one of these candlesticks ends up being $1,000. I don't want to have my stop all the way up here and give too much back on the trade. But I don't want to get into this too much. That's for another video. But this is the exact same strategy that I used risking $50 per trade. You can enter that exact same trade risking $50 or less.

Now, let's go on to step four of how to start with that small amount of money and scale your account. Now, the rough idea I like to tell people is when you first start demo trading is you want to see one to two months of consistency trading on a demo account. This gives you enough time to practice reading the markets, practice your strategy, practice entering, practice the trading platform you're using before you switch to real money. I know you really want to jump into real money and actually start making money, but don't focus on that right away. That is what so many traders do that ends up losing the money and washing them out of trading because they get too excited and jump too quickly into the real money. What you want to do is focus on the process, practicing your trading plan, practicing the strategy, and consistently daily executing and even your trading routine. Getting used to waking up every day, opening up the charts, analyzing the market, looking for your exact strategy, and then also practicing with calling it for the day. It's hard to be done trading some days when you get close to a trade or it looks like there's going to be a trade soon, but it hasn't shown up in your trade window. Those are all mistakes I've done before. And what I do now is because of all these mistakes.

Now when it comes to real money and trading platforms with futures is there's one thing that futures have that is a little different compared to trading options or trading stocks, forex, or crypto is futures have something called margin. All this is is just think of it like collateral because you're buying a leveraged asset. Why they're so powerful is because they give you a lot of leverage. They allow you to trade these assets where generally to get access to control that asset would be a lot of money, but you're getting that same movement for a fraction of the price. But the beautiful thing about it, going back to the chart, even though you're getting a lot of leverage, you are still able to keep your risk really small based on putting your stop-loss in a good spot. That's what you always want to do with trades is you want to have a good stop-loss. Now with margin and when you get to opening a real brokerage account is some of them have stuff called intraday margin where if we look at here to hopefully not have this be too complicated for you as this is a huge graph of a lot of them but what I trade is the ES futures essentially the S&P 500 futures and what futures have is they have the larger version which is called the E-mini and the micro version which is the one you want to start out with the small account. And these have the margin requirement to be really small. $50 to get control of one contract. Think of a contract like buying a share. You know, in this trade right here to show an example, I have three contracts. That's all that's showing is you're just buying that many to get control to keep your risk at a certain amount. And then when you, you know, trade up to a larger amount, you just need $500. And this is where it's really powerful for a small account is to get control of one contract. Like in this example right here, if you controlled one contract entering in here with your stop-loss here, you're only risking under $20. You're not margin isn't actually the risk on the trade. It's just the collateral that you have to put up. And so this can change based on where you enter of how much you're going to risk on one contract. But that's the beauty of futures.

Now, you want to make sure that you go with a broker that has these small intraday amounts because if you look here, some of them for here, you can see the normal S&P 500 ES E-Minis, they require $14,000. And in intraday, they will generally be half that at $7,000 versus the exact same thing on some other platforms that are smaller, it's $500. And then the micro one would be $50. And the micro one on this one would be still $700 just because it's a tenth of the size of the larger version. And so that's where the beauty of being able to trade with a small account. You just need to find the right brokerage to do that. And don't worry too much about fees because they're pretty competitive across all brokerages being roughly the same. The biggest thing I always say about fees is don't overtrade. That's where fees eat you alive. If you are trading infrequently, going for larger swings, kind of like my strategy, fees do not matter. That trade where I made $5,000, I was at this fee rate. I think technically I was even at a better fee rate, but essentially I, you know, at the worst case, it cost me $9 to make that trade where I made $5,000. That's nothing, right? And so don't worry too much about that if you are trading a robust strategy that doesn't overtrade like 20 trades a day.

Now where you can get started with all this is the platform I've been showing you and the platform I've used for over 5 years at this point is called Ninja Trader. It's a futures trading focused platform and it's the perfect place to start practicing learning your strategy, trading futures, and growing your knowledge from there. I'll leave a link in the description below for this as well. It's the platform that allows me to manage these trades very easily. You can enter in essentially on the chart, move your stop losses around by just clicking this and dragging it. And again, it's like I said, it's futures focused. It's really, really powerful for trading. This is where the $4 comes in of how you can get started for just zero to $4 is Ninja Trader actually will give you live data for free for 14 days. All you need is an email to sign up, but after that, all you have to do is pay $4 to get access to data. Other trading platforms out there will cost $10 to $25 to get that same access just to demo trade and that would be a monthly cost and so I highly recommend checking into Ninja Trader out to get started.

Now another really good resource I've got for you is a 90-day trader roadmap. I've gone through and created essentially a full step-by-step process of what you should be doing in the first 90 days trading to work towards becoming profitable, scaling your account, starting trading, and everything in between.

Support and resistance is one of the most powerful tools in trading, and once you actually understand how to use it, trading becomes a lot simpler. But the problem is most traders don't really understand it. They draw random lines all over the place, not knowing which one will hold or break. And I know that because that was me years ago. And I want to pass on to you the five concepts that really make or break a support and resistance level. If you can use these concepts every time to draw your support and resistance levels, you are going to find levels that hold a lot more often, which will in turn make you a lot more profitable of a trader. So, let's jump into section one and talk about the basics of support and resistance.

Think of support as the floor. It is where the market is more likely to bounce off of and continue higher. So, with that, you want to generally be buying off of a support level. And on the flip side is resistance. Think of it as the ceiling. The market is unlikely to go higher from there. And so it's a good spot for the market to likely push lower and reverse down from. The whole idea with these is support levels are where buyers are more likely to push the market higher and sellers are more likely to push the market lower off of a resistance level. And so what this does is it gives you a simple rulebook of okay, if the market is near a support level, I should only be looking to buy. And if it's near a resistance level, I should only be looking to sell. It helps guide you in the correct direction to place a trade.

And so there's a few major reasons why support and resistance levels happen. You can also think of them like supply and demand. Big institutions are what drive a lot of these levels. Now, with a trader like you and me, it's very easy for us to get in and out of the market at a blink of an eye because the amount of money we are trading is basically nothing compared to what will move the market. But these big hedge funds and banks that are trading billions of dollars, if they try and buy their whole position that they want to buy of, let's say like $2 billion of a stock or a market index, it will cause a massive move in the market to happen and they will get a terrible price. And so what they want to do is over time they say, "Hey, we want to buy at this level of 68.50. And so every time the market comes down to that level, they have a limit order that will buy and get filled. But the problem is because they're trying to buy so many shares at that level, it doesn't necessarily fill in one go. And so it takes multiple touches for their order to get filled. And every time it touches, well, it causes the market to reverse at that level because of their big buying pressure that they put on the market. And so that's how we as smaller traders can use these levels to realize that, okay, previously the market has bounced at these levels and so big institutions are most likely buying there. And so when it comes to that level again, you can assume that it's probably going to continue to bounce off that level. Now, later in the video, I'll show you the five key concepts that I use to confirm whether a support and resistance level is actually worth trading off of that can really save you a lot of money in the long run.

Now another big reason why support and resistance levels happen are psychological levels. Now, what that means is it's just a big round number basically. And so, how you see those is just looking to the right side of your chart. And so, a normal psychological level could be 6880, but a bigger one would be 6,900. And then an even bigger one, if I zoom out just to pull it in, would be 7,000. And so, these are just big numbers that are very easy for people to place orders at because mentally you think, "Oh, wow. The market here is going to hit 7,000. That is a big number to either break to a new all-time crazy number or I think that you know it's going to hit that level and people are going to get crazy and it's more likely to reverse off of that." So those levels can also cause a lot of movement.

Now support and resistance levels will always eventually get broken. And this is because well either at one point the big institutions their orders they get filled and used up and the market is able to move through that level or just the supply and the demand of the market has reached an equilibrium where enough people that are wanting to sell this level do not want to do it anymore. And there's a quite a few reasons why that can happen. And we'll get into a couple reasons in a minute of why or how to know if a level is going to hold or break. But first, I want to talk to you about how to tell if a level is strong or not. Now, the most basic thing is does it have at least two touches. You do not want to be just betting that there is a resistance level here after the market has only made one clean swing up into that level because you don't know how the market has been reacting to that level. The market has so many ups and downs in it. The best way to use support and resistance is to see when okay it has multiple touches in that area because the third time that it comes to that area you can then be confident that it's going to move lower. Another one is how clean are the reversals off of these zones? How fast does the market move lower? And then also is what is the range that it's essentially reversing off of? Is it always reversing lower in the exact same price or is it kind of trending up and then reversing? That's another big thing is reversal levels don't necessarily have to be a straight line. You can have trending reversal support and resistance right here. This is a great example of you have a clean touch here and a clean touch here to make this trend line. And then the third time is the market clearly tapped this area and reversed off of it. And you can have that on the flip side too where you can have a trending support level that the market bounces off of. These are more just trend lines but they use the same exact concept. It's more of just is it a horizontal support level or a trending support level.

Now what makes a weak level? A weak level is where you just draw it off of one swing. Often times, if there is a strong trend in place, I am not going to be looking for a new high like this to hold. If the market here pops up here and I think, okay, well, it's going to come up here and sell off because this is a resistance level. That's really unlikely because the market trend here has been so strong. And so that makes it more likely to be a weak level. And as well, it has only one touch. You want multiple touches to confirm your levels. And as well, right here, this confirms that it's a weak level when this price just breaks right through it. At that point, I would pretty much just disregard this as a level going forwards. And I just wouldn't really pay attention to it. I would just delete it from my chart and move on.

Now what you can see here though is what happens on some levels is it's called essentially a break and retest. This is where a resistance level weak or strong turns into a support level. You can see the market broke above here came and retested this high essentially and bounced off of it and pushed higher. And so that is what I call a break and retest. A lot of people use these for continuation trades. Either to the long side or to the short side where the market there's a level, the market comes down to it, bounces, and then breaks and comes down, pulls back, and then continues lower. It's a very clean stairstep pattern that the market likes to follow when it's in a very clean trend. Some people's whole strategy is created over those.

Another one is a failed breakout. And so how that essentially works is this isn't necessarily a strong level, but right here, the market came up here, made a high, and then it attempted to break out of it again right here. And instead, what happened, and a lot of beginning traders will think, oh, well, it breaks out, and so that means that it's probably going to break out, pull back, and continue higher. Well, that's not necessarily true. Just because it breaks the previous high does not mean that it's going to go super bullish and continue higher. A lot of what happens is a failed breakout where it breaks this zone and reverses back lower. You can see this exact same thing happened again over here where the market barely broke out of a new high right here. Probably got a lot of people long thinking that this had a huge bullish move over these two candlesticks. Chopped here for a little bit and then continued higher. A lot of people probably thought, "Okay, this is a good breakout trade. I'm going to get long. There's huge momentum to the upside. I'm going to stay with the trend thinking that it's going to continue." And it does a failed breakout instead and reverses lower. This is a huge trap that a lot of beginning traders get sucked into. And now that you kind of know that that can happen, you can avoid those spots and kind of understand why and how to spot the potential of that happening.

And so, how do you tell if this is going to break and continue higher or reverse off of this zone? Well, let me walk you through a quick checklist to do that. And to show you that this isn't hindsight, we'll walk through this later, but this is a trade I took where I made over $5,000 taking a short off of this area, betting that this was going to turn into a failed breakout. And so the big picture thing though is generally when in doubt, look at what the chart has been doing previously. And previously is that it did a fail breakout at this level. And so likely this level could do a fail breakout as well. And we have this trending resistance level that this comes up to making it again likely that it's going to reverse. And another thing is the big picture trend here is in a sideways range making it again more likely that we're not going to just start a massive trend out of nowhere. We're more likely to stay in a sideways range. Comparing this to something like this where we have this level which is a weak level compared to this level over here. This is a strong level. There's multiple touches here. A resistance zone you could make here that we'll talk about in a minute. And so good reasons for that to reverse versus here. There is a one-line resistance level, a previous high here. And the market is in a big trend here. And so this right here is looks more like a pullback. And so you have momentum into this level. And so it's more likely to continue that momentum because it had previously strong momentum. And big picture, this could just be a pullback. And so that's how I look for reversal trades off of these levels. And we'll talk more about how I enter those in a minute. But it's all about the big picture when it comes down to trading. Don't get sucked into the smaller time frames. I use big picture time frames to confirm 90% of my trades. If the big picture doesn't align, there's no trade. I lost a lot of money and time getting sucked into the one minute chart and the micro patterns of what was going on when the big picture just says, "No, this is not a good spot to take a trade on."

And so, I want to quickly run you through the five steps that I go through to confirm whether every support and resistance level is worth trading off of. This is something I use for every single trade. And so the first one is higher time frames. This right here is a 15-minute chart. That is a small time frame chart big picture-wise if you're thinking about daily charts, but I take my trades off of a one minute chart. And so it's 15 times larger basically than the chart I trade off of. And so there's a huge difference there. You know, if I look at the current market price here where we're trading right now, it's very easy to see, okay, we're in this range. We had a big kind of strong trend up to this level, healthy trend here. I am more likely to think that this is not going to reverse off this zone again. It's more likely to break and continue higher. And then if I go into a one minute chart here, it's a lot easier to think, hey, we're just in a strong uptrend here. It's harder to see the big picture of what's going on compared to if I just have that 15-minute chart up. I can see a lot more multiple days and weeks of what's happening. And that's super important for your trading. And so, no matter what time frame you're trading, always look and get your levels off of a bigger picture time frame. And so, that is step one for identifying clean levels.

Step two is using the extremes in the market. A great example is this range that we're the market kind of is currently in right now and breaking out of is I'm looking mainly at the extreme levels right here. You know, where is the big picture reversals off of which is where the institutions are more likely to be trading off of versus if I drew levels off of those extremes. But then you can see well there's a reversal here. You know, you could make two touches here. There's two touches down here from this swing and this swing. You know, it's very easy to start to draw levels all over the place. And what this does is it ends up cluttering your chart and making you way more likely to take trades off of levels that don't matter. You know, what you could do is you could draw off of this spot right here and think, "Oh, well, there's a support level here." You know, maybe we bounced here a little bit too, so I can confirm that off of the kind of these two touches here. And when it comes down here again, well, it just blows right through that because it's a weak level versus strong levels are usually at the extremes. Think about how that works is the extremes in the market are where it's almost so overextended that buyers on the lows are way more likely to step in and sellers on the highs are way more likely to step in versus if you're trying to trade in the middle of the range. If you're in a range, you're way more likely to get faked out or just trade on a level that doesn't work out. And as well, we kind of already went over this, but you want to see multiple touches. I like to at least see two touches to confirm a level for taking a trade off of. And so here, I would try and short this level. And then here you have these two swings. I would try and buy off of this level once it kind of got down to there. That is the easiest way to confirm that.

Now another thing is the fourth step is strong moves off of these levels. Here you have a big move off of this confirming that this is probably a strong zone. And so when it comes up to here again, it does do kind of a a light fail breakout, but that's okay. You know, what you want to see is overall and even here is the market takes a while to sell off of this level and it chops around here for a lot, but it eventually has a strong selloff when it hits there. And then the third time, boom, it just makes a massive selloff, too. And so that can help confirm whether a level is worth paying attention to as well.

Now the fifth thing I would say is a massive game changer for me as a whole and I think a big help to identifying these levels is thinking of them like zones. Don't think of it like a resistance level. Think of it like a resistance zone that the market is more likely to once it's bounced off of this area once it's more likely to just come up to somewhere in this zone and reverse off of because it's so unlikely that the market bounces off of a exact high and an exact price. The market can come up here, bounce off the bottom of the zone, the middle of the zone, or even like it does multiple times here, break out the high of the zone and reverse. And so, this is very subjective and can get a little tricky to do. But generally to draw these, what I like to do is, let's say I'm drawing it off of these two touches, is I like to use the extreme, the most extreme of the swings and then capture essentially where the the meat of where the market came up and reversed and then pull that across and then see in the future where that is. And then so here as well, same thing would be here. These levels are a lot closer. So I again get the lows in the extreme and then kind of get up to the meat a little bit. You don't want to have your zones too big. Again, trying to stick closer to the extremes that where the market has bounced is better because again that's more likely where the market is going to reverse. And here you can see the market does break out of it a little bit but eventually it pulls back into it. And how I continue my my levels is well once this printed and pushed up. This level's not broken here. The market didn't break this and continue.

A trend lower. It broke this by a good amount but eventually pushed back into this area. And so what I would do, I would just move this down here and say, "Yeah, the zone's a little bit bigger now here, but I'm going to capture these two swings here." And then as well just capture the extreme low here. And then I'm going to want to see pull this across and just see when the market comes down to it again what that looks like. And as it came down into here, did a fail breakout, I would jump in on a long saying, hey, we're at this zone. Again, it's very subjective. I don't need it to stay in the zone. I just need it to be looking for a reversal in this area. I started by risking just $50 per trade. And over the next 10 trades, I'll show you that turned into over $21,000 in profit. This was using the same simple strategy executed the exact same way over and over, just slowly scaling up over time.

In this video, I'm going to show you how this progression works. We'll start with one of the bigger trades where I made over $4,000, so you can see what this looks like at scale. Then we're going to rewind all the way back to the beginning, back to the $50 risk trades, so I can walk you through every single one, what I saw, why I entered, how I managed it, and how small controlled risk compounded into something much bigger. So, by the end of this video, you will know exactly how to execute this small account growth strategy yourself. And the best part, you don't need a massive account to do this. I'm trading this using futures on the platform called Ninja Trader. And with micro contracts, you can control risk down to a really small amount. Even practice this on a demo account. This is about starting small, proving you can be consistent, and then sizing up when you are ready.

So, let's jump into a quick overview of this strategy so you can get a basic understanding, and then we'll dive into how you can grow a small account yourself. So, I found it way easier over time to just look for key areas of support and resistance in the market and bet the the market is going to reverse off of them. That's all I trade. I don't trade continuation patterns. This shift completely changed my trading. I was able to instead of being reactionary to the market, I started to wait for the market to come to where I want it, which made my trading way more profitable. So when it gets to a key area that I think the market could reverse, I just have a simplest step checklist I use every time to confirm to get in a trade or not. Rinsing and repeating this every single trade and day.

So the first thing I do every morning is I open my charts and look at a 15-minute chart of the S&P 500 futures and the NASDAQ futures. I look for key swings in the market to draw areas of support and resistance off of those. So when the market opens, I can identify where they are. I have another video that goes way more in depth into drawing these key support and resistance levels. If you want to check that out, you can look for it right here. And then once I've identified those levels, I go into a one minute chart and look for a few key steps when it hits that level to see if it's going to reverse or not. And then I'll take a trade in that reversal direction.

So here's an example of a real trade I took where the market had come down to this support zone. And so what I look for is I go to a one minute chart because I want to see what the trend looks like into that level and then read into the candlestick patterns that happen. And so what I'm looking for here is as I entered this trade is the first biggest thing that I needed to see is this downtrend be broken. I actually had a trend line here. You can see that that market has clearly broken that. And the first thing and the most important thing is that that happens because the classic thing of the trend is your friend still holds of is if this is going to just continue lower, it's going to continue lower no matter how good of a support zone you're looking at. And so I don't want to be paying attention or jumping into a trade if it's just going to continue lower. And so that's the first signal for me that a trend is going to potentially shift is that the bigger picture trend is reversing.

Step two is that you have a big move down into that level. So if we look at here on a 5-minute chart, you can see that the market actually opened up here and then it had three big candlesticks down where it essentially ripped down lower in about 15 minutes. It made a big move very very fast. And so I call this an unhealthy move. And because if that happens and the market makes an unhealthy move down, well, it's likely to reverse that move very quickly, too. And so this is what I call a catalyst for a good trade to potentially happen. And so if that aligns up as well, that's another thing checked off my list of, okay, this is a good potential spot to take a trade.

And so the next big key step in this is looking for a candlestick reversal pattern. And what that is is down here you can see there's a head and shoulders pattern. Essentially what this is showing you is that the market has made a bottoming pattern where it's attempted to go lower. It's bounced and it's continued that trend. And then what this move right here shows you is that it's now reversing making a higher low and it's starting to trend upwards. And so that's what I like to see near this level after a big move down and when that move down was unhealthy.

Now the last thing is what I've discovered after a long time trading is timing in the market. After the market opens on my chart here it opens up at 7:30. So 15 minutes after the US stock market opens or 30 minutes is when it can likely have timings of reversals. And so you can see here on this day, 15 minutes after the market opened, had this flush and it reversed pretty much dead on that timing. And so these don't always happen, but again, they're areas to look out for. And if you combine everything together here, it makes it way more likely for something to happen. That's the whole idea of this checklist is that you're stacking things on top of each other that increase the probability of a potential outcome.

And then the last thing to actually jump into this trade. If I go back to the start of this trade is how this head and shoulders finishes forming. The idea here I want to see is this higher low in the head and shoulders pattern. I enter in on a bullish looking candlestick. If there's strength behind it breaking this swing high here. If it breaks this high with strength I want to get in on that. And so you can see here it breaks that. I put in an order and then it fills me and I jump in on a trade here and then I move my stop loss up below the low of this big candlestick because I think that this big bullish candlestick is a good enough confirmation because as this candlestick finished forming, it's a strong candlestick. And so if the market gives that back up, it's more likely to just continue lower and I just want to be out at the trade. You know, I'm wrong. Trade didn't work out. You know, this isn't a 100% win rate strategy, right? Nothing is. But over time, the idea is that I'm risking, let's say, one risk of, let's say, like $100, and I go for three times my risk a lot of the time. And so that's the key important part of this strategy.

And then to manage it, what I do is I like to let the thing move in my favor a little bit because the market, even if it moves up here, it could have a pullback. And I don't want to go break even too early because it could just be making higher highs and higher lows in an uptrend and I would have closed out early and missed the whole swing. And so I like to see it move up to somewhere up here like 1 one and a halfx. Really depends on the market. And this is something you'll get better over time once you get better at understanding these markets and trades and how they move. But, you know, once it kind of gets up there, you can see there I moved my stop to break even because, well, if it if it gives this whole swing back up, there's that's a huge move and there's no point in letting it come down on me even more and losing actual money on the trade. But now, I don't lose any money, but also, you know, I would rather not let the market come all the way back on me and, you know, lose. I'm up already basically $3,000. And so, there's a definite skill that comes to managing trades very fluidly. And it changes from market to market.

So with this trade here, the market was looking very very healthy. My initial thought was, okay, well this is where the market opened, we might come up here and I drew a little zone here. We might hit this zone and then sell off. And so what I want to see is I want to see the reaction to this zone. I want to give it a little bit of wiggle room. I want to allow it to have a little bit of a pullback because I think maybe there's this uptrend in play. And if it comes back, pulls back, and then continues higher, amazing. You know, that's a healthy move in the market and that's totally understandable of it could happen. And so holding through that little bit of that pullback makes a lot of sense. And so from there though, once it kind of starts to break higher and this pullback is more confirmed, I move my stop up to here below essentially this pullback here because what that does is well, if the market decided if the market decided to double top here and sell off, well, I want to just get out of the trade. You know, sure I I haven't made as much money as I'd like, but it's still some. And I did capture some of the swim.

With these trades, you don't know how far the market's going to move. It could, you know, shoot up here crazy. Sometimes that'll happen or it'll just move a little bit like this and then start to go sideways. And so adjusting for every potential scenario is very important when it comes to trading. And so here the thing just kind of chops around for a little while and then continues on that trend higher. And so what I look for here is it starts to have a very big move up here. And so now we're getting up to more of what I would consider to be a bigger resistance zone and it starts to pull back. And so what I do here is you can see that I move my stop loss up below the low that this forming candlestick made because I think if it pushes up here and pulls back, this is almost an unhealthy move of a candlestick. And so I think it's likely to sell off. And so I it sells off here. It closes me out at about $4,600 and I move on with my day. And so that is a really good win and what I'm trying to consistently do every time.

And if you want a good reference guide for this strategy, I've made a free PDF that you can download via this QR code or in the link in the description that will walk you through every part of this strategy and each step so you don't have to create notes for yourself. Okay, so now let's rewind the clocks and I want to walk you through doing this on smaller trades so you can know exactly how to do this yourself and how it's possible with a small account risking $50 when you first start.

And so what I'm trading here is I'm trading the micro NASDAQ. And so what this does is it's basically a futures market that is onetenth of the normal size. And so what this does is it allows you to trade futures that are normally really big size with a small account and you can get the leverage that that allows. I don't want to go too much into how futures work because it is a whole video in itself, but I'll link above a video that will go in depth into how futures work. I have found them way more powerful than anything else like stocks, options, crypto, forex because they allow you to trade really small accounts and then the way the platforms and brokerages are set up is really favorable for you.

So going into our checklist, the NASDAQ here sold off overnight. And so here at 7:30, that's when the market opened during this time zone I was trading and it kind of chopped around. Now it it pushed higher, breaking this downtrend, also showing some strength. And so my inclination with that is, okay, well, I see a potential for this to reverse higher because this downtrend is starting to shift and break and it's showing me some strength this morning. There is a bigger picture support level here, too. It's just not on this chart for some reason. And then as well as that timing is right here. If you think about halfway between these is a five. So here is 7:45 minutes after the market open. That reversal timing is also coming into play. And so what happens here is the market makes this double bottom. At that reversal timing, there's been a little bit of a flush down here. It's not crazy big like the last trade we were looking at, but this is a nice confirmation of a double bottom, a new swing high. The market's essentially retesting this level and then I'm looking for a bullish candlestick to essentially reverse this big candlestick. If we get a reversal of this candlestick, that shows you that this big candlestick was essentially a fake out and that is a huge strong signal for when the when the market breaks above this that it's likely to actually reverse higher.

And so the market makes a little bit of a pullback here. I put in a buy stop above this candlestick. I like to use buy stops because I like to enter in on when the market essentially confirms that momentum is happening in the other direction because the market could put in a high here and then it could pull back here and then keep going lower. And so in that sense it would be making a pullback here and continuing the trend lower. That's a confirmation that the trend is continuing to the downside. And so I actually don't want to get in there. And so that's why I wouldn't like getting in on a limit order down here. But if the market comes here, pushes up, and then pulls back, and then breaks that, I think it's very likely that it's going to continue higher. And so I get in with two contracts there. I put my stop down here, and you can see this number is a lot smaller than the first trade because I'm risking here about $50.

And so letting this play out is the market kind of bounces around a little bit and then it moves up further. And so I it tests this high. That's where I like to go to break even because I think well if it's going to come up here it could sell off. You know, thinking about this day here is it's been pretty rangebound this whole day so far. And so in that case, well, I want to be aware of that the market could actually just stay rangebound for the day. And so I want to close out at break even and not lose any money if that's the case. And so that's where coming into watching all these different trades and realizing every trade and every day is slightly different. You're going to learn something different. And so that's where this moving that stop loss was very important in case the market did that. But that being the case, you know, letting it play out, it moved up higher and I wanted to see if it would, you know, move up to this resistance zone. That was my initial target. And trading about $50, I'm up about, you know, 2 3x here. And so just letting this play out, I had a limit order right here at what I thought was a good price to close out of if it spiked up there. Essentially, that would have been three times my risk. If you think about my risk like this, I don't have my drawing tool that I normally use on this screen. And so the market pulled back a little. There's kind of this uptrend I'm looking at. And I'm thinking, well, if it holds this up trend, I actually want to stay in. And so realizing though that it looks like it's going to actually reverse this and close out, I moved all my stops up here and close out of the trade fully for about $250. And that was risking, you know, about I think it was a little bit more than $50 here. You know, maybe it was 60 or 70, but you know, two three times my risk was a really nice swing. And so again, you know, as well, we didn't really go over this is then I'll just be done for the day. I'll be done after that trade. 30 minutes. You know, I'm literally watching the market for 30 minutes in the morning sometimes, which is really, really awesome for having this be, you know, a part-time thing where you can go about your day, do other things with your life. You know, this can essentially be a easy, manageable side hustle.

So, here's another example that I'll quickly go through. So, this is a big important thing about this trade is you can see right here 6:30, which is an hour before the market opens. This would technically be 8:30 Eastern Standard Time is there was a huge spike up here. And so this is because market news came out. And so this is super important to do every morning as well. Just type in Forex Factory calendar in Google and it'll come right up. All this does is it shows you the news that is happening that day. It'll essentially have on here, here's a a green arrow showing you what's the next news. This is news that's already happened before today or the days before. And then this is news that is coming up in the next days. And so every morning I come in and I look at this and I actually put on a filter. If you go up here to the top left button, a filter and I only have US selected because I am only trading US markets and those are what impact it the most. And so what you want to do then is look at okay and and this is set to Eastern Standard Time. So the market opens up at 9:30. Let's say for tomorrow the market's going to open at 9:30. So 9:45 minutes after that market open there's going to be some news. And if you highlight over this little yellow I don't even know what this symbol means. It's maybe like a little factory. I guess that makes sense. Is it says it's low impact expected or an orange one is medium impact and you know a red one is high impact and so those you want to pay attention to. Okay, at 9:45 we're going to have minor news come in most of the time that's not going to do much to the market compared to something that is high impact or medium impact. I would highly recommend always watching those because those are likely to have a big impact. Or if you have multiple news releases at the same time, that is even more likely to have a bigger impact, especially if they are red and orange at the same time. And if you notice is the 9:45 and 10:00 a.m. that is my reversal timings as well, that 15 minutes and 30 minutes after the market opens. So those are huge times in the market to be looking for news to reverse.

Now this one was pre-market. You can have those. And generally what happens with pre-market news is it will have a big spike and then two things will happen. Either it will hold and be really strong and continue higher or it'll start to do this and it will need to essentially fill this move. It'll essentially have to recover this whole move at some point. Now that can take a while. You can see here pre-market it was kind of choppy and then the market opens here sells off pushes higher comes up to this high which is I would consider to be a big resistance zone the market will likely retest this level even if it's going to sell off and so here you can see it starts to I've got this uptrend here super tight uptrend but the idea is look at every one of these green candlesticks is very bullish and so that's broken when the market starts to have a bearish candle candlestick here, another bearish candlestick. It starts to kind of go sideways. It's losing steam when it's near this reversal area. And so that coming into play, you know, is giving me the idea of, okay, we have a big push up here that was unhealthy cuz there was no pullbacks in it. And so that's likely to reverse. It's at a reversal zone. Now, all I'm looking for here is that final confirmation. And so this is a big bearish candlestick. So, I want to get short as it breaks this because I think that well, it could continue lower. Now, a little bit better of an entry here actually would have been waiting for this next candlestick to essentially pull back some and then entering in on a breakout. That's something I've done a little bit better over time. But that doesn't mean getting in short on this big bearish candlestick is wrong. This is just a little bit. You can see here this is what can happen in if you have a chop range and a big candlestick forms. Well, the next candlestick can reverse it as essentially a trap. And so what I like to do now is wait for this next candlestick to form. And if it goes all the way up and then reverses, I'll get in short. And so here, you know, it almost kind of got knocked me out and then, you know, the big picture play. That's why the big picture is most important. Micro candlestick patterns aren't as important because the big picture generally will come into play at most.

So here, you know, I'm about up one times my risk here. And, you know, I'm up about $70. And so I'm risking about $70 on this trade. And the market then continues to move lower. Has a little bit of a pullback. I go to break even because the idea with that is, well, you know, maybe we're just in this choppy range. You know, here is a minor support level where the market's bounced twice, three times. Maybe it's just going to come down here, test this, and and move back up. And so that's where again reading the market pattern that specific day is so extremely important to how you approach trading. And that's where being flexible to what the market is doing is extremely important. But you can see here it played out in my favor. Moved down. I started to see, okay, there's a downtrend here. I'm going to actually move my stop down some to capture some potential profits if it pulls back on me. And then, you know, it's just waiting to see if it continues lower. And then it makes this pullback here, breaks this low, and that's when I move my stop below because that to me that essentially confirms that this swing lower is in play and it's a good swing low to confirm. And so here it starts to get like I was talking about before is this move up is going to give back all the way in. So in the sense that's making me a target. I'm assuming that the market's going to bounce somewhere in this area. I'm expecting this move to reverse. And so once that's reversed, I want to get out of the trade. If it continues lower in this extreme fashion, great. But if it's going to go down here and pull back, I don't want to give it that much room because it's likely to reverse off of here. And so I want to capture as much of that move and much of the profits as possible. And if it's going to pull back here, looking at these candlesticks at bottoms here, if it's going to come down here and then break this high, I just want to get out. You know, even if it hasn't necessarily broken this downtrend, it's close enough to the zone. I like if it's going to keep continue lower, I think it's likely to keep continuing lower. And so I actually get out here, I believe, on essentially it pulling back. And so make about $200 on risking again about $60. You could trade smaller. The NASDAQ is a little harder to go even smaller size, but on the S&P 500 futures, you can actually risk even smaller.

And so, here's another example. And I have actually upped my size here. And so, this is again showing you that you can slowly scale up and increase your trading size. And so, here I'm risking about $150 on this trade now. And this will help you see as we scale in these trades. All I'm doing, again, these look the exact same, but the beauty of trading is scaling the size. And instead of making $100 from this move, it turns into $300. And so, same thing, just to quickly walk through it, because I know it's going to get repetitive, but that's how trading is, is there's a big spike lower. We're still on the 7:30 market open time frame. The market sold off and now we're looking at that 30 minute reversal timing. to the last two. We're reversing around 15 minutes after the market open. This is where the market's pushing that 30 minutes. Now, the market hasn't reversed here. And so, it's still, you know, hasn't broken this downtrend. And so, this is where as you're trading, you want to be looking at the market and anticipating, okay, if I look for a long here, what does that look like? What am I wanting to see to confirm jumping in on a trade here? Well, you know, right now it's at a zone. What could happen is just because it's broken through here doesn't mean it's not going to reverse. What I call this is a failed breakout. It breaks out of an extreme low, but then it fails to continue lower and actually reverses back up. So, it's okay to break the low of the resistance or support zone and then there's this downtrend still happening. And it doesn't again, it doesn't have to happen exactly at that reversal timing. Think of it as a good rule of thumb and kind of a zone to be thinking about. Just like these support zones, I want to see it reverse in this zone of time. And then from there, it's waiting again for the market to break the trend.

And so here, actually, I do something a little more aggressive because I saw this as this big bearish candlestick as a final attempt to go lower. And then the market got a little sideways here. It made a low here and it started to bottom. And so this is essentially a micro head and shoulders. So you can see here's a shoulder, here's another low, and then here's a higher low. And so, you know, it's still making this pattern, but on a very tiny scale. But I like that because of how rapidly this moved down into this area that I was confident that it was more likely to reverse. And so when it lost steam here, I entered in, put my stop loss below this kind of chop range because I thought, hey, if it if it breaks up here and ss all the way off, I think it's, you know, the trend's likely to continue lower. That totally happens. And then it punches up right away. And so in that case, I'm thinking, okay, this is I'm I'm I've upgraded my size. And when you size up, it's going to be a lot right away. You're going to feel intensity. You know, seeing this money on the chart, I would suggest trying to hide it. But seeing yourself being up a a money way faster than you're normally used to is going to cause you to want to overmanage, like moving your stop loss up quickly or getting out on a limit order quickly. And some of those things are okay. You know, the idea here is what I did was I said, "Okay, I'm up new size. This is a lot. I'm going to scale out two of my contracts right here. I'm I have three contracts in the trade. And so the idea is I'm going to scale out out of 2/3 of the trade. If it moves up here in a very fast way and so here it essentially moved up, made another huge candlestick. I actually moved this up just in case it really spiked, but it started to slow down and I closed out. So I closed out $200 worth and then I just had one contracts left. So I had already captured $200. And so this is how you can start to fluidly manage your trades is, you know, I suggest trying to go for just a two times f fixed riskreward initially and having your fixed stop-loss then maybe moving to, you know, break even once it gets kind of close. But, you know, you can see why I do certain things. And then here, my thought is, okay, well, I want to try I still think that this has the potential to reverse to the market open, which is all the way up here. And so that's a big move. And so I'm going to let, you know, I I've already captured $200. I'm happy with that. You know, if it comes all the way down and knocks me out at break even, so be it. But I'm going to let this have a little bit more wiggle room to see if it can get going here. Now, you know, in this case, you know, I'm up $200 now on this one contract. If I had, you know, my other if I held on to my other two, you know, you start thinking, oh, I'd be up, you know, $700 or something crazy, right? Which would be huge size at that point. But, you know, you got to remember, hey, it was a good to take that off. And if I'm capturing the rest of this, even with one contract, I'm kind of doubling how much I was up. And so, you know, it it spikes up here. And I say, hey, you know, that's a lot of the move already. I would only be expecting it to come up here a little bit more. I might have to hold through a big pullback. I'm just going to, you know, move my stop up right below this candlestick that pulled back because I'm okay holding through a micro pullback, but I don't want this to pull turn into a big pullback. And so I think I believe it just, you know, pulls back there, knocks me out at another $250. And I think that trade made about $460. And so that's, you know, again, a good two to three times my risk off of, you know, against scaling up. And so instead of making what I was before like $200, now this made $4 $500. And so that's a huge thing of remembering that you're working towards scaling up. It's not going to happen super fast, but when it does, it'll be really, really rewarding going through that process.

Here's another quick, super quick example before we size up again. 7:30 market opens, spikes up into that resistance zone. We made a, you know, a pullback here and then a little pullback and then another high. So, I'm still thinking, okay, I'm not jumping in yet. But then it pulls back and makes a lower high. Makes this nice bearish candlestick. Again, thinking about the candlesticks confirming your entry. So, I enter in below the close of this candlestick. And then, if you can guess where my target would be for this is the market open right here. Market opens here at 7:30 my time, 9:30 Eastern Standard Time. And so, you know, I'm expecting to just give this move back up. Even if, you know, the market has a huge trend day where, you know, way further down in the chart, it just trends and sells off for, you know, thousands of dollars. That's not what you're looking to do here. You're looking to just capture this move. And if you capture that move and I'm risking this, you know, I'm risking I think this trade is actually still smaller size. Actually, looking at this, I'm risking about $100 here versus that last trade was a little larger size. And down here would be five or 6x. And so, you know, I put in you see that you see I put in now, you can see here there's a a box. I put in this limit order. And this happens really fast here is all of a sudden news spikes this thing lower and fills my limit order at that crazy level. It happens so fast in seconds that the trade closes. And so this is why having limit orders can be useful sometimes because actually if you look at this that was 8:00 news. That was 30 minutes after the market opens news that 10:00 a.m. news Eastern time and the news came out spiked lower. That's why I put that limit order there because I wanted it to come here. And hey, if it, you know, if it goes down here, so be it, right? I don't know that's going to happen. That's hindsight talking. But if I get out in this area, I'm super happy because that was, you know, if we go back to try and look at the graphic before it closes here, I think it goes up to, you know, here's 345 and this is still glitching lower. It moved so fast and so it was a huge amount of profit on that trade. But that's why having that limit order there, anticipating that news, which is why you really need to be looking at that and aware of that as well, is really important. And in hindsight, actually something I should have done too, is I should have moved this trade to break even because in case it spiked the wrong direction because otherwise it could have spiked the wrong direction and knocked me out at full loss when, you know, that wasn't really necessary to take that risk. But, you know, I'm always improving as well.

Now, let's switch it up a little bit. Something I want to show you here is you can trade this on other time frames or markets. So, what I'm trading right here is gold futures. Gold futures are super popular recently because they are going crazy recently. You can see this trade was from months ago where gold was at $3,000 an ounce. Now it's, you know, at four $5,000. I don't even know by the time you're watching this. Who knows where the bubble goes, right? But so also I'm trading on a five-minute chart. And so what you can do is you can scale and trade on a bigger picture time frame if you want a slower type of strategy. I like that more fast-paced one minute chart focusing on the NASDAQ futures and the ES futures because that 30 minute timing in the morning has worked really well for me. But I've also had times where I've looked at, you know, here's gold on a five-minute chart. And I'm looking to you see a double bottom here. There's a trend that's broken. There's a major support zone here. It's just not on this recording chart. And then I'm just looking to see, okay, well, I think the market's going to gold here is going to reverse this move down and go higher. And so these kind of trades take a lot longer time just because it's on a fiveminute chart. And so you have to realize that when you're trading, you know, over this each candlestick here is five minutes. And so this is, you know, 45 minutes, an hour just to make this kind of move. But another thing here is you can see I'm a lot larger size now. I'm risking about $500. Here's 1x and I'm up probably about that same amount. Visually, it looks like I'm about and so I'm risking $500 here. And so this is on the micro gold futures. And so you can be trading this as well on smaller size if you want to trade things other than just the indexes.

And so once this gets going, just like always, move up to break even because hey, if it pulls back after making this nice move up all the way down to here, just call it for the day. You know, don't get married to a specific trade. There's so many times where I, you know, it looks amazing and it's, you know, it's even on a big picture, you know, it's, oh wow, I've caught a huge bottom. There's so much potential for it to go up to, you know, $8,000 a coin or an ounce and, you know, if I hold on to this, I'll just make a crazy amount of money. The market doesn't like to play by those rules. And a lot of times, even if that theory is right, trading to hold that is way more complicated because it's more likely that it's going to have a pullback at some point in that and start to maybe look weaker and, you know, have a bigger pullback. You know, this is a nice move up, but based on my theories of having big moves ups that get reversed, well, I could see a world where this comes up, pulls back all the way down here, and then continues higher. And I don't want to hold through that whole swing. And so, instead, what I do here is I move my stop up, and it knocks me out as it starts to pull back. But again, because I'm larger size, I'm okay with taking this trade off here because it's still a really nice win dollarwise. And so, you have to keep that in mind as well when you're scaling up with these trades.

Here's another example of taking a more bigger picture, longer term timeframe trading. And so, the market here opened all the way at 7:30 all the way over here. You can see based on the time, we're already past that. Had a sell-off and then I'm looking for this major trend that it's had in the day to reverse. And so it makes a bottom here, makes a big swing up here, pulls back, makes a higher low, and then I get in, I put a stop order above this bullish candlestick cuz I think, hey, I think it's going to pull back here and push higher. And so from there, I put my stop. Always putting my stop below a major swing. If it's a long or you know, if it's a short, putting it below a major swing high. And then from there, I let the market play out. And so essentially, if I go to this is easier to see if I zoom to where there was a five-minute chart pulled up is five-minute chart. We had a sell-off, we had a push higher, and then it basically made just a bottom here. Made a higher low. And so what I'm looking to see here is this push to the higher side on a five-minute chart. And this is of the NASDAQ. And so again, this is how you can trade on a fivem minute if you want to trade something a little slower. And so as it's broken this swing high, I made a new swing high. I moved this trade to break even because I think, hey, if it pulls back again, I'm just going to call it for the day. I would rather see after this big bullish candlestick. It pulls back some. Totally understandable after a big bullish candlestick. A lot of the times big candlesticks get reversed to about 50% of the their move and then it will continue if it's going to continue in that candlestick's direction. And so that's what I was kind of waiting for. It kind of bottomed a little bit and then moved up and then I moved my stop up a tiny bit with the idea that hey, it made a little swing low here. I'll just pull my stop up a little bit more. And then I'm looking for you see my tool here where I have my risk at $500. It's actually a little bit more because this is for six contracts. I'm actually at seven. So up here is probably more like $1,200. But it'll be basically two times my risk. And so that's a good target for half the trade. But because it didn't quite get there, I actually moved my stop up here. And so here I closed up about four contracts as it pulled back just cuz I thought, hey, it got to a good spot. I'll close out some. And so that closed off about $400, $500. And then you see here I have still I have three contracts left. And then it's kind of seeing, okay, what is this pullback going to do? Does it have more potential or is it just going to kind of stall and, you know, I'll just close out. And so here, you know, I moved my stop up a little bit more, but you can start to see if you just look at the candlesticks here, it's kind of just stalling out. What I would want to see is, you know, some follow through in these candlesticks. And it's also broken this trend line. So that's a good signal that, okay, my stop's probably in a good spot. And you know I'll get out if it just continues lower and I won't move this. And so this is a good situation where closing those contracts out further up actually got me a better price than waiting. And so even here if you were just going for a strict limit of 2x sometimes that is actually more profitable than having a more fluid style like I do here. And so there's nothing wrong with you could always just do a strict two times your risk and just be done with the day. If you want to just keep your trading simple, there is nothing wrong with that. That'll make it so you don't have to think about all this stuff while you're managing it. You just focus on the entry, which is honestly 90% of trading anyway. And then, you know, it either works out in your favor or it doesn't. And you know, I would suggest at least moving up to break even once like it goes to one and a half times in your favor just to, you know, be a little safer there.

And again, the remember the idea of these trades going back to more of a one minute chart example of kind of my bread and butter and what I highly suggest you focus on is, you know, looking for just these timing windows of here's 8:00. The market pretty much put a top in here. It's broken this uptrend. It's at a resistance level and then we start to top here. Here. And so this one's a little funkier than some of the other ones. And so I want you to look at that is here. It made a big bearish candlestick, but then I didn't jump in based on a break of that initially. I waited for to see how the candlesticks after reacted and then I got in on a break of that low. And that's what I like as my more newer signal because a lot of the time is okay, this is a big swing down. If it pulls back and breaks that swing down, that's strong because sometimes this will be a bottom. Like here, here's a big bearish candlestick, but it didn't actually break the low of that. Same thing here, bearish candlestick, you know, broke it by one tick, but it didn't really continue lower. And so, a lot of the times in these uptrends, what you'll have is over here is a great example. There's a big pullback and then the next candle just reverses it. Here's a big candlestick. It's kind of hard to see. Maybe I'll zoom forward in the trade. It'll show a little better is you know big candlestick here big bearish one pulling back and then it just the next candle just completely reverses it even here big bearish candlestick broke a little bit but then the next you know kind of move up completely reverses it and so what I like to see is you know this is a little bit smaller of an example but the price movement from here to here is pretty good and instead of you know coming down here bottoming and then just ripping back higher like it was doing before is you can see it's changing is the market came down here, pulled up and actually had two kind of choppy candlesticks without much strength to them. And so in that case, I think, well, if it breaks here, well, I think that actually a good signal to go down. And as well, in that case, I think that helps confirm.

This lower high and then, you know, betting that the market's going to go down. And as well, as always, with my target of going back to basically the market open as a a great initial target.

Now, you know, there's kind of some chop here. And so it's not like some of the examples we've had where it's just a clean move up. This could cause some issues on the way down. And so you want to be aware of that is that there's not as much of a void of price movement in this area. There's a lot of back and forth which generates more stability in that area and so it makes it more likely for it to come down here and have issues. But, you know, since my stop's up here, I'm going to probably move break even once we kind of get down here somewhere. And, you know, I have my buy limit here. If it just kind of spikes down there, and I'll move it and adjust it accordingly to how the market's moving.

And so, here, you know, I'm up like almost $1,000, 2x. And, you know, this is, if you go back in the video and look at some of the earlier examples, this is like the exact same strategy, right? Just more contracts. You can see here I'm trading 12 now of the micro NASDAQ. And so it pulls back here. You know, I I didn't want to give it too much wiggle room. It looks like it's going to knock me out here. And you know, I'm up about 1x, $700, $600. So, I wasn't up that,000 bucks, but again, always trying to be fluid with the idea that, hey, I think it could run into resistance down here. And I don't want to give it too much wiggle room.

And you can see, zooming forwards a little bit there, pretty good spike there. And so, all I was looking for was holding this tight downtrend. And then when that breaks, well, it could shift and remove in the other direction. That's what you want to be thinking about with these trades is what is the market likely to do if it breaks this downtrend or this trend? You know, what does that mean? Will it, you know, what will be the recovery of this? It could totally come back all the way up to here and then maybe it moves down. So, at that point, you know, I'm basically back at break even. And so, that's how I like to think about trades of when I'm managing them. and assuming what the market is going to do.

Now, here we're going to jump up to a larger size trade example again where I'm risking $1,500 on the trade. Now, I've sized up again and you see triple is now $4,500 on 3x win. And so, that is a lot of money. And that's a long ways from risking $50. And so, you can see the power of I'm doing the exact same thing here. the market.

Now, this is a live recording, so I apologize for the chart moving around and stuff. This is a recording of me trading it in real time versus, you know, me just having a a recording of it that I can easily zoom through. But, so what you can see here is I'm doing the exact same thing. The market opened up here at 7:30 and then at 7:45 it pretty much bottomed here and it I got a support zone. It had a big these big candlesticks here are a big flush lower. And so I'm thinking, okay, that has a good reason to reverse. And if I zoom back here a little bit, what you can see is there's a big downtrend here. And so this spiking lower, I think, is this trends. The market likes to do final attempts to continue lower. Essentially, think about it like a bubble. You know, the market is trending up. It's trending up and then when it gets to the end of the bubble where it just go it starts to go crazy where it just goes parabolic and you know the price like let's say of like Bitcoin you know it goes from $1,000 to or to $10,000 in like a week and then this move from here to here took months. The same thing is happening here on the flip side is the market here was trending lower and lower, lower and lower. It took hours to do this and then all of a sudden in minutes it moves this much price where you know it took to move that much price it took, you know, an hour or 40 minutes, you know, way more amount of time. And because it's had this downtrend where it kind of broke and then does that, that is a signal where it's the trend is going to end a lot of the time. And so I see this as almost the bubble is breaking in the reverse direction.

Now this is, you know, it's not a what you consider to be your normal like big bubble, right? Where, you know, Bitcoin will goes to 10,000, 100,000 and then sells off, right? Those are big picture bubbles. These are what I consider to be bubbles on a one minute chart, right? They only happen over like 2 hours, but the market and price can still get overextended in an unhealthy way to have to snap back. And then these red lines I actually put on my chart are those reversal timings I look for for 15 minutes and 30 minutes after the market open. And so when it comes down to this level and starts to chop here a little bit, put in a big bullish candlestick, I'm not entering in on this thinking, okay, this is it, you know, I'm going to catch a big move. I'm going through my step entry checklist. I am being calm about it. I am waiting for the market to set up how I want. Like if you literally look at me right here, I am literally just sitting watching this, listening to music, patiently waiting, seeing what the market's doing, and then when it enters in or then when my signal actually shows up, then I entering on the trade.

So what I'm looking for here is I'm seeing, okay, I like this move. It's showing big bullish movement. I want to see it pull back. I want to see it make that higher low. I need to see that trend confirmation. I need to see where it makes a higher low, which is to me the structure of the market showing you that it's it's going to actually reverse instead of me trying to predict, well, okay, it's had a huge move. I think, you know, we're at a support level. I think this is where it's going to reverse. That's not what you want to do with trading. You want to have the market show you that it's starting to reverse. And so here I'm looking to see, okay, is it going to just bounce up here and move down or I put in a buy stop up here actually? Because if it breaks this high, I want to jump in because that to me confirms that it made a a higher low and then this swing also got taken out after it made a pretty good pullback in a fast-paced moving market. And so here it takes a minute to fill, but then I, you know, jump in the trade and I put my stop below this swing because I think that's a good spot. You know, that's where that higher low is confirmed. And then from there, you know, I'm looking at five minute. Okay, we have a big potential to make a big move up here. But also, you know, I'm going to look at, okay, well, the initial target might just be the market open or giving back this small move here. And so coming into it, that's where, you know, you want to look at the big picture, but you also want to look at the small picture of what's likely, you know, where are those essentially those tiers of levels of where I would either, you know, think the market's going to slow down or if it breaks that, where could it continue going? That's where you can either scale out or I like to try and hold on to where it starts to actually hit one of those levels and slow down enough that I think it's going to reverse. But other people, you know, that like to say, okay, well, it hits here, I'll close out, you know, half of my trade and then here another half and then here I'll close out the rest. And so again, this is just where the beauty of size comes into play. You can see I've entered in here and one candlestick I'm now up $1,500 on a one minute chart. And so dealing with this is hard. It's a it's mentally strenuous having that much money change in minutes. And so what you have to do is scale up slowly. This is why you start at that small amount. You actually start demo trading first and then switching to real money and slowly scaling up because that's going to really help you. So when you know you're essentially building the foundation and the building blocks of mentally dealing with taking trades like this that are a lot of freaking money and being able to not freak out and say, you know, I'm going to leave my stop down here and I'm going to have a mental stop and I'm going to be able to do that consistently and not, you know, do make some impulsive move and go with the reads of what the market's doing. you know, only wait until it gets up here, hold until it breaks this uptrend, you know, because if you just sit here and watch the swings of this money, it's up and down 100 $1,000 insanely fast. And, you know, if if you read into this, oh, this is a huge spike. This is where I think it's going to reverse. It's very easy to do that, you know, down here and leave all this money on the table. And so, that's why you have to spend a lot of time slowly scaling over time.

And if you haven't got it yet, this platform I'm using here is called Ninja Trader. I have used it for over five years. It's super powerful for, as you have seen throughout this video, managing trades, entering trades really fluidly. You can get third-party add-ons like this one where it it helps me target how much I'm trying to risk. And then also, you know, shows me targets of, okay, four four times my risk, I'm up 6,000. Three times I'm up 45. And so they help you a lot with trying to trade and manage. And then these, you know, these tradable buttons on the screen are built into the platform. And so there I highly recommend getting it if you want to trade futures. I'll leave a link for it in the description below or you can scan this QR code right here.

And so getting back to this trade is pretty much same thing as always with my strategies as I'm looking as we go up. You know, this was the initial target, but we've broken that. So I'm looking at okay, what's the next one? this resistance zone. I've pulled back from, you know, further left on the chart, looking at like a five-minute or a 15-inute chart, kind of looking at where the big swings are. And as well, looking at this, we haven't really seen this as much. This is such a rapidly moving trend that just like this being a rapidly moving trend, it could snap the other direction very quickly. I got you got to take that into consideration. This is a big move up that could snap in the other direction very quickly. And so because of that, I want to be very aggressive with my stop loss because I don't want it to pull back on me this much. That would be giving up, I don't know, $2,000, $2,500. And the likelihood of that happening is higher and higher as it kind of does this. But these trends can also last a long time. And so I don't want to leave that money on the table either. And so in this case, kind of moved up. We had another big bullish candlestick here and I have my stop right below it because my thought is well, okay, we've had big bullish candlesticks here and the lows of those haven't been broken this whole move up. And so if it has a big bullish candlestick here and that low gets broken, that is a change of the trend and a change of the momentum. And so right there I closed out for about three times my risk. Super happy with the trade obviously at that new size. And that is a a super big win under the belt. And again, market opened up 7:30. This is done before 8:00. You know, this trade is 15 minutes. And I can, you know, go on with the rest of my day. And you can go on the rest of your day as well with this strategy.

And so this last trade here has something really interesting about the management actually entry that I'll talk about in a second. So here, same thing as always. I've actually changed my timing on my chart. 9:30 the market opens Eastern Standard Time. We have a nice sell-off and then in this window here I'm looking for a potential bottom and so you can see here downtrend as usual drawn. You can even see there's big big rip here and then just looking at the candlesticks it starts to just change. it starts to slow down, goes sideways. And so I'm not going to enter in here because this is just a chop range. And quite often when a chop range happens, it can go longer than you think. And there can be a lot of big candlesticks in here that, like I was saying before, they go in one direction and then just rip in the other direction. And so they don't really give you a good signal. They just give you potentially fakes and traps into the market. And so here instead I am looking for kind of a head and shoulders pattern where the market bottoms here makes a higher low and with this one you can see here we have a this is a huge bearish candlestick this is you know in the ES this is 10 points basically that is a huge candlestick and even compared to you know this is a big swing in the day normally but it's a big candlestick even in relation to these ones and so what that can tell you a lot of time is okay that's a lot of momentum in that direction. Is it going to continue lower? And if it does, well, I think that this trend is going to continue lower and I just won't take a trade, right? I'll stop trading, move on to the next day, and see if the pattern I want to see shows up. But if this comes down here and starts to bottom and move higher, well, I think that is a really good signal of a trap to the downside. it's attempted to go lower and it tried really hard and it just gave up and you know the sellers dried up and buyers came in and bought the heck out of it. And so that's where I say, okay, that's a really nice con confirmation of a higher low confirming this bottoming pattern at the timing I like at a support zone. All of these, you know, my checklist is lining up and then I get in long, you know, put my stop loss below that swing because again, that's a great spot structurally to say, hey, if it breaks this, you know, it's either going to go choppy sideways or it's going to continue lower. or even if it does somehow bounce and then continue higher, it just wasn't meant to be, right? And so then I just kind of hold on, let the trade do its thing. I think I'm risking about $1,300 on this trade. And again, I'm my initial target is the highs of the opening swing. And so from here, you know, that takes a while.

And one thing to think about and to talk about here is this doesn't happen every day. You know these I'm showing you really good setups where if you can wait for a setup to look like this every time your win rate and profitability is going to be really really high. But these don't show up very often. They show up maybe once a week, maybe twice a week, sometimes zero times a week depending on you know the market structure and you know the mode the market's in. Right? But that's where the beauty of scaling comes into play. if you know, I'm not there yet, but you can take one of these trades risking 10 times this. And so, you could be up $10,000, $20,000 in one trade, that's going to be my future of scaling this higher. And so, if I take one trade a week and I'm up 20k, I don't care. You know, you don't need to be a huge trap that I fell into when I was initially trading was trying to capture, you know, all these swings in the market. I didn't make money doing that. And instead of I realized over time is okay, I just need to wait for this specific strategy to set up and then I'm going to slowly scale over time and now I'm finally getting to reasonable size where it be can, you know, even if I take two of these trades a month, you you know, I can still be making like $10,000 a month. And so that's where scaling and the long-term big picture of trading comes into play.

And so here's an example of where the market slowly scaled higher. And you can see I moved to break even and you know I was given a lot of wiggle room here because I thought this trend versus compared to that last trade where it just shot up in an unhealthy way. This trend is very healthy. We're having pullbacks. Big pullback here. Hard to hold through but then another pullback here. Another pullback here. And so I'm thinking, okay, I'm just going to let it pull back on me. And I'm just going to, you know, because it's in this trend where it's just slowly chugging higher. And so even though you know a pullback like this is scary, especially after it's broken this uptrend, you got to look to the left, right? The market generally repeats what it does to the left. It had a big candlestick here, pullback, reversed, big candlestick, you know, pullback here, reversed, big candlestick here. I'll actually scroll forwards because you can't really see that, but big candlestick here, but it, you know, gobbled that up. Every time it pulls back, the buyers come in and gobble it up. And so that's why I'm trying to hold with the swings. And I hold a pretty big pullback here. I think my stop was here before, almost kind of knocked me out, but then gets gobbled up and makes a new high. And so I'm going to I'm going to pull my stop up to there. Now, because it's broken this uptrend, and it's at a resistance level, you got to think, okay, even though I want to hold on to this trade, again, remember, you can't get married to this trade. And if you look at here, this trade is hours. This was a very long trade. Not every trade happens forever or short amount of time. You know, I entered in this trade at, let's say, 10:30. two hours later, I'm still in the trade and it's still just chugging along and I'm still, you know, as I'm seeing here, there's, okay, here's the next resistance zone. If it breaks through that, here's the next one. And so, this is where sometimes you can capture a huge swing in the market and it can turn into a lot of money. And so, here it started to, you know, made a big push up, starts to flag out. I'm thinking, okay, maybe I I would assume that this is going to break higher, but if it doesn't, I'm going to look to get out. And so here it actually this happened pretty quick, but it had a weird spike out of nowhere right here. And so I actually move my stop loss up to here cuz I think, hey, that's a good spot. If it breaks this low after that pullback already, I think it's going to continue lower because remember, every time it has a pullback, it continues higher. And so this pullback here, even though it happened, even though it happened in one candlestick, it should continue higher off of that. And if it doesn't, the structure of the market's changing and I want to get out. And so here, it eventually knocks me out here at about I think it's $3,500 down here. But, you know, great trade, but it took, you know, 3 hours I think for, you know, two and a half, three hours by the time this actually happened. And so that's where, you know, managing it depending on how it h how it plays out can be really important because if I just traded this for half hour, I would have been out at a lot less money and left money on the table here.

So let's go over the basics of futures so you can have a clear understanding of how they work. Futures work differently than stocks in many ways, but once you understand them, it's very, very simple, just like trading a normal stock. That's what drew them to me in the beginning. If you buy it and it goes up, you make money. And if it goes down, you lose money. The first big difference is when you buy one share of, let's say, Apple, you can hold that share as long as you want. You own a piece of that company and it never expires unless the company goes bankrupt. With futures, you aren't actually buying a share of something. You're buying a contract agreement. And the value of that is based on the market it's connected with. So for example, if you buy one futures contract of the oil's market, the contract value goes up if the price in oil increases and the contracts value goes down if it decreases. The exact same way your share price of Apple would go up and down. So when it comes to trading, there's really no difference there. But the only thing is the futures contracts expire unlike shares. The length of a futures contract depends on the market you're trading, but generally it's one or three months. This is the one reason why futures are better for short-term trading. It's not something you hold long term. For you and me, they're really day trading assets.

Now, technically, when you buy an oil futures contract, you are buying the ability to buy a,000 barrels of oil at a certain price. But in reality, you're never doing that. You are just using this contract as leverage because buying this contract costs a fraction of the price of purchasing a thousand barrels of oil, but you get the value increase or decrease of those 1,000 barrels of oil. It's the exact same thing as buying a house with a loan. You get the increase or decrease in the value of the house, but you only have to put up a fraction of the cost as a down payment. In the trading world, that down payment on the house is called a margin requirement. Just think of it like collateral you have to put up to get one futures contract of oil. For example, buying one contract of the S&P 500 futures can take $500 worth of margin. Your account will have $500 taken away, but then when you sell the contract back, you get that $500 worth of margin back. Now, this isn't taking into account the profit or loss you made on that trade. So, when you see the price of the S&P 500 futures trading at something like 7,000, it doesn't cost you $7,000 to buy one contract. It's based on the margin requirement at the time. Now, the margin requirement differs from market to market and brokerage to brokerage and what time of day it is. So, let's break that down cuz that's kind of confusing.

First off, you have what is called intraday and overnight margin. For example, US stocks are only open during the New York trading session, which is 9:30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time to 400 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. This is the only time you can trade stocks. Futures, on the other hand, are almost open 24 hours a day, 6 days a week. They technically close for a short amount of time after the New York session closes and also over the weekends. But that's how the intraday and overnight margin difference is made. So the requirements for intraday margin are pretty much 22 hours out of the day. Even though it's called intraday, it's technically while the market is trading during the day and trading during the night, you have that lower intraday margin requirement. And then the overnight margin requirement or another way to say it is maintenance margin is just for when the market is actually closed. The whole reason for this is the risk is higher because the market closes and it can have news happen while it's closed and then there can be a huge jump or change in price which adds risk to a trade. And so that's why the brokerages require higher margin. And so the overnight margin requirements are only from that 4:45 p.m. Eastern Standard Time to 6:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. the market's closed for about an hour and so you have to have the higher margin requirement just for that hour every day. And so it's closed for the weekend. And so on Friday at 4:45 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, that lower margin requirement will shoot back up to the overnight margin requirement and then it'll be closed all the way until Sunday at 6:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. This also works for holidays where it's closed and that'll also have a higher margin requirement.

Now, these marginal requirements can change based on brokerage. For the intraday margin, some brokerages don't have a lower margin requirement, which can be around $7,000 for one ES futures contract. Others have low margin requirements. And this is where the power of futures really comes into play. Its platforms like Ninja Trader that I use only require $500 worth of margin for one contract of the S&P 500 futures, which is tiny for how much leverage it actually gives you. But for almost all platforms, the overnight margin, which is initial margin or maintenance margin, is never reduced. It's always at that massive size of $7,000. And you can always find these numbers looking at your specific brokerage. But these can also change if the volatility of the market goes crazy. Usually when the market is crashing like during COVID or any of these last big spikes lower that the market has had since then even the intraday margin like on Ninja Trader can go from $500 to $1,500. And that's because the volatility in the market is so big that they essentially the brokerages require more collateral for you to take a trade because the risk is higher. You'll often get an alert from your brokerage to know when this is happening.

Now, another minor difference between future contracts is you have ones like oil where you're actually gaining control over a physical object. If you held your contract to expiration and exercised it, it would settle with barrels of oil. You would technically get an email saying, "This is where you go pick up your thousand barrels of oil." other ones like the indexes, like the S&P 500, they aren't based on a physical object and it's just settled in cash. Now, don't worry, a thousand barrels isn't really going to show up at your house or be delivered to you. If you're day trading or even holding them over a couple of days, this will likely never happen. And even if it does, you can always just sell those back without actually doing anything with them. And when it gets to the end of a contract because they expire, you start trading the new contract. This is called rollover. On Ninja Trader and other platforms, you generally don't have to worry about this as the system will automatically update it or send you a pop-up notification when it's time to do that. And all this means in Ninja Trader is you are changing the ticker symbol, which is technically has the date of the contract in it, to the next one. So for the S&P 500 futures, which expires every 3 months, it's always the same month and third expiration of that month pretty much. You get one that expires every quarter. So you have one that expires 03, 06, 09, and 12. Those are the months of the year. And then you put the year at the end of it. So, if you're looking at the expiration of June 26, the ticker would look like ES6 26, and that's just saying the month of expiration. Now, I've always found that changing over the Monday of expiration week is the way to go. That's when most people switch over so the volume changes to the new contract. Also, this way, you never have to worry about dealing with 1,000 barrels of oil showing up at your house. And at least for Ninja Trader, it will automatically do this generally when it's time on that Monday. It's not really something you have to worry about, but you want to be aware of it.

Now, that $500 worth of margin for one S&P 500 futures contract is still a massive amount for a small account if you're wanting to start trading a small amount and increase your size. So, what you can do is you can trade something called the micro futures contracts. All the large futures contracts like the S&P 500, the NASDAQ, oil, gold, they all have one and they're essentially a tenth of the size. So for the S&P 500 futures, it costs $50 worth of margin to get control over one contract. But the value and price movement you gain is also a tenth of the size. It's a super simple way to start small and grow your account. This is how you can risk as little as $20 per trade. I did the exact same thing with my account when I started. I started trading the S&P 500 futures micro contracts and I slowly traded more and more. I traded one contract, then I took two, then I had three contracts per trade, and over time I eventually switched to the mini contracts. It's a little confusing with having micro and mini, but the mini are the normal size that I currently trade and what you'll eventually scale up to.

Now, the other massive difference between shares and futures is how the movement in price relates to the dollar change of your trade. For shares, it's really simple. They're based on the dollar movement. And so, if it goes up one penny, you make one penny on each share you own. Its value is based on the dollar. Now, with futures, it's completely different. First, the price movement isn't based on money. So, if you're looking at, let's say, the ES futures, one ES contract goes from$7,000 to$7,01. Your contract value doesn't go up $1. It actually goes up $50. And this incremental movement of one is actually called one point. Now, going back to shares, the smallest amount they can move is one penny, right? Apple can move from $100 to $100 and one penny, but this isn't the smallest amount of movement that futures contracts have. The ES futures, the smallest amount they move is 0.25, which is called one tick. One tick is essentially the smallest amount of movement in any futures contract. And that tick size will essentially change. But for the ES, it's 1/4th of the point. So it's valued at each tick movement is $1250. And these change from market to market. And so for the ES futures, the smallest tick is 0.25 25 and it's $50 a point. But for oil, the smallest tick movement is 0.01 and it's valued at $10 a tick. So one point of movement in oil is $1,000. But if you look at the two markets, the amount they move is drastically different. Oil moves on a much smaller scale. So the sizing makes sense. It's generally only valued between $60 and $80 when the ES futures are trading at around $7,000 right now.

Now, one thing to be aware of trading futures is you are overleveraging yourself. Only putting up $500 worth of margin isn't your max loss on a trade. Technically, you own one contract of the ES futures. And if the market suddenly crashes, you could lose more money than your account. Now, I've never had this happen, and it almost never does happen. There's a few ways to protect yourself from this happening. One is always have a stop-loss in place no matter what. And never move it further away, increasing your potential risk once you're in a trade. Because if the market opens and goes against you really quick, this will get you out of the trade as fast as possible, not allowing you to take an overly large loss. And really, the only way to have this happen of stories that I've seen where people do lose more money than their account is they hold something into the market close. So, for example, let's look at a chart right here. This is the S&P 500 futures on a 15-minute. And if you held a contract into the market close right here with a stop-loss down here, well, technically, when the market opened again, it opened all the way down here, which was would completely blow through your stop-loss. That's how you lose a larger amount of money. And so, because of that, just don't hold through the market close. There's really no reason to do that.

Lastly, the only fees that come with trading futures are pretty much commissions and some fees added on by the processing companies that make these trades happen. These will generally differ slightly between futures contracts and also platforms you're trading, but the brokerages are so competitive now. It's pretty much the same across the board. And as well, even though we talked about margin, there's no interest rates or fees with taking out margin, at least for trading futures. So, I know this is an insane amount of information and can get really confusing when you first hear it. I want to go into a chart now and show you the practicality of actually doing this and show you that it's really not that complicated. It seems like a lot initially, but when it actually comes to trading, it's pretty simple.

I want to quickly show you a trade I took from a little while ago to kind of show you the smaller size version of what we're talking about and the practicality of things. And so basically is, you know, I don't want to get into my strategy too much. I just want to kind of look at the practicality of how they work. And so, you know, I see that the market's coming down to an area that I would like to look for a reversal trade off of. And so all I do is on Ninja Trader, you're able to click on the chart to put in a buy stop order. And so I put in a buy stop order right here for three contracts. And I'm saying, okay, if the price hits here again, I want to enter in on a trade. And so it enters in. You can see this is the price, the dollar movement going up and down. And so you can move your stop loss right here just on the screen. And so I had it essentially below this kind of bottom we put in. And then from there, you can kind of see the dollar value go up and down. And it's a smaller amount of money than what I normally trade right now. But this is the practicality and the scaling part of it, which is really, really good. Now, this is still pretty decent size. You can go way smaller than this if you're trading the S&P 500 and trading, you know, one contract versus three. And so just to kind of zoom this through is kind of once it it kind of gets going here is I move my stop loss up to something like break even here and then I start to you can see I I break up my trade into multiple orders and I scaled out here once it kind of got up to a nice amount of profit that I liked. You know you can see here it goes from three contracts to one contract cuz I closed out for a profit on a couple of those. And then from there, so this is how you could see just what one contract would be is you could you could trade these swings and you know get uh a hundred or $200 per contract on a swing like this. And this is how I don't scalp when it comes to futures. Some people look for really small moves. I still look for swing trades on a daily chart. To me, it's a little bit easier to become profitable doing that. And to me, my strategy has worked really well for that. And you can see over here on the left side, the NASDAQ also has one tick. The smallest size it moves is 0.25. It's happening pretty quick. The NASDAQ, you can see, is valued much higher than the S&P 500 futures. The NASDAQ at this time is around 19,000. And I think during this time, the ES was valued at around 5,000. Now, in current market, it's much higher, but it's the same thing. And you can see here that it moves up and down based on 0.25 25 increments. You know, it can jump a little bit because the price is moving so quickly. And so that's how it works out. And you know, usually you can you can I find it just super practical to trade.

And so the first one of these is called a failed breakout. You have the market and anything you're looking at where the market comes up, does something like a double top, you know, that looks like a pretty clean resistance zone. Well, the market will sometimes retest that and actually break out. And so, a lot of traders will think when they first start out, oh, well, it's breaking out. It's going to continue this trend higher, and so I should actually buy. And in reality, over time, I've realized this is a perfect spot where a lot of the times the market will actually fail and it's baiting people back into thinking that it's going to go higher, but it will actually reverse and start a major trend shift. And so this is a huge indicator of potentially a reversal. And so that's the theory of how it works. An example here, as you can see, here is a market looking at a one minute chart. It's kind of had a move up, a selloff, and then you can see right here, if I draw a zone based on these previous highs, barely made a new high here. It barely had a breakout attempt, and then completely reversed. And to me, that shows a failed breakout. And so this is a bigger picture example of what this can look like. Now a smaller example is actually if we look at right here and zoom into this is if we kind of go back in the chart here is you can see right here the market sells off kind of starts to go sideways and then it has this big candlestick here. And so you would think you know a lot of times people would see this as a bare flag which is a continuation pattern. Essentially, the market comes down, consolidates, gets a little bit of that strength back, and then it's going to continue and make another leg lower. But instead, what happens here is you can see this candlestick, huge big bearish candlestick here that moves lower and then immediately afterwards, it starts to reverse and flip higher. Especially with this candlestick as well combined, this becomes a failed breakout to the downside. This is now how you can use it as well on a smaller micro pattern. You initially have up here where it's a bigger picture fail breakout, but this is how you can also use it on the smaller time frames. And we'll learn a lot more about this in my trade example in a few minutes here. But a great way is if you were thinking and looking to buy here, this would signal the low for you. I use this all the time in my trades. This is probably the number one pattern that I use is seeing that this reverses here and it's a failed breakout. So, I'm going to think, okay, well, it's going to fake here. Buyers will come in and push this higher.

Now, to dive into this a tiny bit more, what I would call the next pattern is a bait candlestick. The theory of what this is like is the market's moving down here and all of a sudden it starts to accelerate an extreme amount. And I'm talking, you know, the candlesticks before that have kind of looked like this and then all of a sudden you have a huge candlestick to the downside. And old me would have thought that, okay, well, this is the market's really going to get going here. And sometimes it does happen. But the signal here is if this candlestick reverses if a massive pretty much right after or a couple candlesticks the price fully covers the c recovers the candlestick and breaks the high. To me that is a signal that this has faked lower. Essentially what happens here is you are in a healthy trend to the downside and then it gets overextended here. The market gets so extreme that it has to snap back. I call this an unhealthy move. And on a smaller time frame, if you see this, this is again a very huge bottoming signal. And we'll look at an example here in a second. But once you see this and it recovers, that is a great signal for to continue higher. And I'll talk about how to use that in a trade in a second. Let me show you a real example of this just last week where the market had a big move up here and then had what you know what I just called that little fail breakout to the upside and then it started to reverse lower. And so it started to really get going here and then all of a sudden it had this massive bearish candlestick here. And when I watched this in real time, to me, that was a huge candlestick that signaled, okay, you know, on the on the one side, well, it could just continue lower cuz this is a big trend shift and reversal. But the question is that I want in your mind is, well, what happens if it does reverse this candlestick? That to me starts a signal like this? Because when the market's very volatile, it'll have these bait and switches. And so the next candlestick immediately reversed it here, which is a massive reversal candlestick. And you can see the market actually ended up coming back and testing this area, but it never made a new low. And so how I like to use these and those failed breakouts for trades, and I'll show you a real full example here in a second, but if I'm thinking that this is going to reverse to the upside, now this is the low I want to put my stop. This bottom is not going to get broken if the market is going to trend and continue higher. Now, if this just bottoms here and continues lower, you know, the signal didn't work out, that's fine. Move on, right? Trading, you're not going to win every trade. But the idea here is if this reverses up, this is where you I want my stop to be at because it's a really clean spot and it's behind this extreme bottom that the market's put in using that pattern.

Now, another extremely powerful reversal pattern that almost seems so basic, I use it in every single trade. So, I would highly recommend paying attention to this, even if you feel like you know it, because there's little nuances that really are important to pay attention to with using a head and shoulders pattern. This pattern is probably my most powerful pattern and my bread and butter for my trade setups. And so the basic idea is if you have a downtrend, it's made by lower lows and lower highs. And an uptrend is signaled by higher highs and higher lows. And a head and shoulders is the turning point of that where those lower lows and lower highs start to reverse and start to make that new uptrend. And so I use this to help signal where that is and a bottom in the market. And some really keys about it is that well one this could be a failed breakout. You can combine a failed breakout what we were talking about earlier with the kind of bait candlestick. If the bottom of your head and shoulders down here is signaled with a bait candlestick, it's extremely extremely powerful. I've got a whole candlestick pattern sheet here that walks you through other patterns that I'm not going to go over in this video, but I highly recommend checking it out. You can check it out via this QR code or I'll leave a link for it in the description below. And so, check out this chart example right here where the market right here opens up, starts to sell off, and when you're looking at candlesticks and reading them, just don't read into the micro moves of each candlestick. A lot of people like to look at all the, you know, the dogeis, the hammer candlesticks, all this stuff. And that over complicates things as well with adding more indicators. You can over complicate just reading candlesticks. All I look at is, okay, what is the price doing? We have a big move, a little pullback, another move, a pullback. And so to me, I'm looking at the swings. Okay, we made a lower low, a lower low, a lower high, a lower high. Now we've all of a sudden got accelerated a

little bit here. So, we made a big extreme low, but to me, looking at that is, well, we kind of have a little bait candlestick here, a little reversal. And then if you actually look over here, well, this was a pre-market low. So, if I just draw a little reversal zone here, well, this could actually turn into a failed breakout.

And then also, just looking at the head and shoulders part, here's kind of the left shoulder where it makes a lower low here. And then we have an extreme low put in with a failed breakout, which is a great combo for these. And then you have the market push up and then it pulls back. And so to form the head and shoulders, I would assume that this would, I would want to see it pop up like this to confirm the head and shoulders being formed. And why this is important here and why you don't just look for this and then buy and bet to the upside is because it's not formed yet. This is the hard part about predicting reversals is, well, the market could do this. It could pull back and then just continue lower. And there's no head and shoulders formed there. There's no switch in, you know, the lower lows turning into a lower high and then a higher high and a higher low and then, you know, you capture a move up. That's why you have to be patient. You know, even though there's a lot of signals here showing that a reversal could happen, you have to wait for this right side of the shoulder to form, pull back, and then start to reverse higher. And then you can jump in on a trade right here. And then, you know, it kind of plays out. It pulls back a little bit, gets a little choppy, but in the end, it has a clean move to the upside that was signaled from this reversal. And this is a trade I actually jumped into. And we'll look at here in a second.

And so, how I use head and shoulders is they are a very good final confirmation that a bottom is getting put in. And I use them a lot of the times as my final entry signal. Now, head and shoulders are more of a conservative reversal pattern. Sometimes the market, now this is the hard part about reversal trading is that the market is in more of a conservative mode where the bottoms are a little slower. And there's other times where, if I kind of talk through the theory here, is where the market will have a move up and then it will make a double top before selling off. It won't necessarily need to make something like a head and shoulders before selling off. It'll happen faster where it makes a head, a double top here, or sometimes what I just call a lower high where it doesn't even really test the extreme and make a double top. And that's the thing a lot of people get mixed up on is you don't need for a double top to happen. It does not need to perfectly touch the same price. If it just does some kind of double test like this, even if it makes a new high, to me that's still a double top. And so to show you a real example here, we have an uptrend and the market makes a high here and then a lower high. And so this signals essentially to me a double top in the market. And if there's other factors that I'm seeing where the market could start to top here, well, that is a great signal to trade off of. And again, you don't want to be blindly using these by themselves all the time because a lot of times there could be a double top right here and it looks like it's going to sell off, but the bigger picture trend takes off. And so that's why you want to combine this stuff with something like a resistance zone or where you see kind of another pattern or a bigger picture trend or another pattern here.

If we go on to the next one is an uptrend line. Is you have an uptrend line that the market's fitting and then all of a sudden, and if you actually draw this on the top side of things too, is all of a sudden it's, it's respecting the lows, it's respecting the highs and then all of a sudden it makes a, a high here that doesn't make it back up to the trend line and it comes down and starts to test this. To me, that's a much more of a, a signal that this could break and sell off. And so using trend lines as well is extremely important. And another thing about trend lines is actually, if we talk about theory here for a second, is if you have a trend line or a channel that the market's in and it's ping ponging like this and it actually breaks to the upside of the channel. Just to extend this real quick, it'll often that signals the trend is over as well. A lot of the times I would think, oh, well, this is going to get going. It's going to, you know, the trend is going to go even higher and faster now. But a lot of times that's it getting overextended and unhealthy and it'll actually pull back. It might make something like a double top. And so this is where you could combine these things again, right? Is you have a, a break to the upside where it's overextended of this upwards channel. And then if the market puts in a double top, well, likely very often this starts a downtrend and the trend is going to shift.

And so this is a recording from my live stream. I literally live stream my trades on YouTube every day starting at 9:00 a.m. Eastern. I highly recommend checking it out. Seeing the stuff in real time is completely different than talking about it in hindsight and in theory and executing it. It is a very hard part about the reality of trading. And so on this day though, if we can combine what we're kind of talking about here in looking for these patterns that the market has, is the basics of what I do with my trading. And you can see I have a reversal trade checklist here. But all I'm looking at here is the, the swings, the lower lows and lower highs. And if a head and shoulder sets up here. And so as I'm seeing this develop, I am seeing that this makes a spike lower. We talked about earlier how it did a little fail breakout essentially of this reversal zone. And then from there, okay, is this going to pull back and make a head and shoulders? And if that does happen, how do I want to execute on a trade to capture the swing back to the upside? Because this right here is most likely going to be the bottom. And so I look for these every single day. I actually trade. And so to zoom through this a little bit, is the market reversed here, set up our head and shoulders, and then I entered in on a trade as it broke the swing high of that head and shoulders to me. Cuz to me, that's a confirmation that the head and shoulders has happened and it's now likely to push higher from there and I can capture a larger swing in the market. And so from there, you know, I put my stop below the extreme low down here cuz to me, the bottom of that head and shoulders is where the market will likely reverse. And then from there, all it is is looking at what the potential is for the market to do. Could it do a huge move up? Could it just do a volatile back and forth? And I'm not going to go too much into managing, but that's how I essentially use these entries to help signal when a trade is going to happen. And you can see here, it took a while for this to get going. That's what I'm talking about here where the market recently has kind of been slow to bottom where you got to be patient and let kind of things play out. And then from there, after a while, it starts to accelerate up. And I can capture a big swing on the day. And this is something I do every single morning. I start, the market opens at 9:30 and I'm, you know, this trade is kind of done by 10:30. And so that's an hour worth of the market being open that I'll be trading. But I do start live streaming if you want to come look at, check it out 30 minutes before. And so go and get that cheat sheet that I talked about in the description below this video. It'll walk you through a lot of other candlestick patterns that are really important that I didn't go over in this video. Okay.

My name is Riley and I've been trading for 9 years at this point. And in this video, I'm going to give you the 13 most important trading lessons I've learned over that time. It's not going to be theory. It's not something that I just pulled off the internet. These are lessons from real trades I've taken, real mistakes, blowing up accounts over and over and having to rebuild from scratch and finally figuring out what worked for me and also from working with thousands of traders and seeing exactly where people get stuck and what actually makes them succeed finally. Now, I do want to say this before we get into this. Some of these lessons might challenge the way you've been thinking about trading. They might go against what you've been told or what you feel like you should be doing to become successful at trading. But I can promise you this, if you actually understand what I'm about to break down, you're going to start looking at trading a completely different way. Because over time, what I've realized is there are a lot of things in trading that feel productive but don't actually move you forwards to becoming consistently profitable. And there are a number of things that completely changed everything for me. And that's what this video is about and how it can do that for you, too. Now, these 13 lessons all really fall into three major groups because almost every trader that is struggling right now is stuck in one of these three areas. One is why traders never actually improve, why even with a good strategy, they're actually still losing money, and what actually makes someone start to become consistently profitable. And underneath all that, what you'll start to see is that most traders are just stuck in a couple of repeating cycles. So whether you're just beginning trading or you're a trader who's been struggling to make money for years or someone who is starting to make money, but you're stuck in what is classified as a boom and bust cycle, this is going to completely change the way you approach trading. And if you actually implement this, it can completely change your trading career.

Now, the first lesson here is simple, but probably the most impactful and where people lose the most money when they first start out is trading is a game of probabilities. And so, because of that, some people when they first start out, they can just get lucky and go on a win streak. And what this does is it makes you feel confident when really it's a false confidence that gives you the ability to think that you figured it out. You can now start to size up. If you've ever heard of the Dunning Krueger effect, you're essentially on the top of what's called is Mount Stupid where your confidence is really, really high, but your actual experience and ability is really low. And so what happens is you can go on win streaks. Like for me, I went on when I first started certain strategies, is I would follow the strategy really well. I would go on a win streak, make a lot of money over a couple weeks because I was following the strategy really well and then so I would get really confident and then I would start to think, okay, well, I've mastered this. I can start to increase my size. I can start to add other types of trades to where I can try and make more money because I've, you know, I've figured the market out. And what ends up happening is you've just hit the far end of the probabilities of going on a win streak. And then of course at some point those probabilities have to come back to the norm. And you go, you start to lose money. And all of a sudden you start to go on a losing streak because you haven't built the experience and knowledge to be able to handle that. And realize what you're doing is you're starting to add more trades that aren't actually successful and you're starting to destroy your account because of that initial lucky win streak. And I've had people email me about losing thousands or tens of thousands of dollars because they size up too quickly. You do not want to judge your trading ability off of a small sample size. You really need to be doing something like 20 to 40 trades and going through months of trading to even have a decent idea of your ability.

So now that you have learned a strategy and started to lose with it consistently, you start to think, okay, well, I need to just learn more about the market and find something that will improve my win rate, try a new strategy maybe because this one's not working out. And so this is what gets you stuck in the first major cycle that can keep traders and kept me trapped for years to be honest. And how it works is you learn a new strategy because there's so many on the internet. Basically, there's infinite possibilities and ways to trade because there's so many different markets. There's so many different time frames. There's just infinite amount of information and possible price movements the market can have. You go learn a new strategy because you think, okay, well, logically in any other space in the world, if you learn more, you're going to get better at it. And with trading, that's not necessarily true. But so, you learn a new strategy and you go and test it out. Maybe has some success for a couple weeks, but ultimately it doesn't work out. And so, then you start to say, "Okay, I'm not getting the results I want." And so, I need to go back to the drawing board and learn a new strategy because this strategy just doesn't work for me or the strategy just sucks. And that's a super logical, intelligent way to approach trading of thinking that the more you learn, the better you'll become. But that's not how trading works. What ends up breaking you out of that cycle is realizing, and it took me years to realize this, but simpler is better. I went through so many ups and downs of losing streaks, blowing accounts, essentially hitting that wall of so much struggle that I wanted to give up. And so my last ditch effort at becoming successful was, okay, I'm going to think about what am I actually good at with trading? What do I feel confident in? And my confidence was that I am good at drawing essentially support and resistance zones. I'm good at big picture looking at where the market is potentially or likely to reverse off of. And so I thought, okay, how could I make a strategy just focusing on that? And I've realized over time and teaching other people and getting feedback from other people. That is the real edge in trading. One strategy, one pattern that you can really master. Instead of trying to master 10 different strategies and having a ton of indicators or a ton of patterns and a ton of signals, you focus on mastering one thing. It's way easier mentally to try and just master one thing and repeat it over and over. When you have that one edge you're focusing on, it's way easier to execute on it, track it, improve on the strategy that you're doing, and consistently focus on repeating it. I highly recommend is trading one asset for this. Trade one type of setup and trade essentially just a short amount of time a day. I'll talk about my strategy a little bit later and how it kind of encompasses all those ideas because what it does is it, it became super easy to consistently repeat.

And this kind of goes into lesson four of don't try and master everything. Don't try and trade stocks, options, futures, crypto, and forex all at once. Pick one asset. Literally focus on one market. If it's just one stock, like if you just want to trade Tesla all day long, do that. I only focus on trading the S&P 500 futures, which is just good for simplifying trading, but also starting with a small account and growing it. But essentially the idea is because I watched this one asset day in and day out for years, I have started to master it and really understand how it moves and flows. And this just allows me to have such intuition now about what happens that it feels like sometimes that I have a crystal ball. I don't necessarily make money off of every move that I can see potential happening because that doesn't fit my strategy. But very often I can be saying something like in my trading room of, oh, the market looks like it's likely to do this, like either break a support zone or trend in a certain way. And you know, 20 minutes goes by and that read will be correct. And of course, I'm not right every day and I don't necessarily, you know, have a crystal ball. Of course, the market does things that I don't understand all the time, but mastering that one market has allowed me to have such a confidence in reading it and my ability to read it. And that's only because I have focused so strongly on one specific asset. And over the years, I've tried to expand because I think, okay, well, you fall into that trap of if I can trade more assets, well, that's more potential trades that show up. And so I've tried to expand to trading oil or the NASDAQ sometimes or gold. I've always tried those and ended up really not making as much money and and losing some money because I just don't know those assets as well and always just coming back and focusing on one asset has really been what's successful for me. Because when it comes to trading, how you really make money is scaling up and increasing your trading size to where you know you're not making $50 per trade now, you're making $5,000 per trade.

So, Ninja Trader is literally giving away $250,000 in cash in their demo trading tournament, and you don't have to risk a single dollar of your own money to try and win it. Here's how it works. You sign up for free. All they need is your email for new or existing Ninja Trader users. They give you a demo account loaded with simulated fake money, and you use that to trade in a live market environment. There are three qualifying rounds, each with a $20,000 prize pool. And the top 10% of those move on to the final round that has a $190,000 prize pool. Whoever grows their account the most in that final one wins that massive prize pool broken down over 400 people getting paid. First place is $100,000. And I've been using Ninja Trader for over 5 years. In this competition, the Arena Cup is one of the best ways to get real experience without risking anything. There's genuinely no downside. You can't lose money because it's completely free to join. The spots generally go pretty fast. You can get it via this QR code or the link in the description below.

And so one of the biggest mindset shifts that happened to me over focusing on this stuff and what really helped me break out of that initial losing cycle of the learning loop was focusing on one specific strategy, but also not trying to catch every move. There's so much movement in the market that you'll see the market, you know, especially on a volatile day, it'll go up, down, sideways, it'll have a big move in one direction. And you think when you are looking at the charts, oh my god, there's so much money to be made if I caught every move, how can I do that? And I've tried to do that. I've tried to shift my strategy sometimes to be more aggressive to try and capture all those moves. And what happens every time is I just end up actually losing more money instead of sitting and, you know, maybe not taking a trade for a week or multiple days, but when I do take a trade, I'm way more likely to win. And at the end of the day, all we're looking for is a profit graph to consistently go up over time. And it's hard to not take a trade and try and make money every single day with trading. But over the long run, it's not about every single day. It's about just seeing whatever makes that graph slowly move up. And a lot of times, every person kind of needs to go through that cycle of trying to make more money consistently. But over the years of me trying over and over, I've always come back to taking trades less often and just the best ones is what has actually made me consistent money over time. Even if that requires me to wait multiple days or sometimes even weeks for a trade to show up.

Now, all that's really helpful for breaking out of that first cycle and finally starting to focus on a strategy that will consistently make you money. But a lot of traders and what generally kicks you back into that learning loop and that initial losing cycle is they'll find a strategy that really feels like it works and it's really good, but they'll still end up losing because even once you start to stick to a strategy, learning to master and becoming consistently profitable with it is a whole another losing cycle in itself. Because the whole reason why someone like me can be successful with a strategy. And if you try and execute it the exact same way, you will still lose money is because of what I call the self-sabotage loop. If you've traded for a while now and gone through ups and downs, is you'll realize there's times where you make emotional decisions in trading where you chase a trade that ends up losing because really you shouldn't have been in that trade to begin with and it didn't fit your strategy. Essentially, the big picture is your emotions derail your ability to execute your strategy properly. The whole idea is you have emotions that negatively impact your trading and instead of entering in when your strategy says you should, your emotions essentially hijack your ability to execute it properly. And so they control your actions. And so the whole idea is not letting something like nervousness stop you from entering into a trade or FOMO making you jump in on a trade that you really shouldn't because you think the signal is there when it's really not yet. And so all these emotions affect everyone in slightly different ways. And so you need to start to be aware of those and learn how they affect your trading. Because what you'll realize is you have essentially a cycle of how these emotions consistently over time repeat themselves. And so to kind of give you an example of what my self-sabotage loop looked like, I would try and enter in the trade. And every time I would want to enter into a trade, it would start off with when a trade signal shows up, I would start to get fearful because I had the fear of being wrong. You know what? What if this trade, even though the signal shows up, what if this specific trade doesn't work out and I lose money and I'm wrong? And that was a big ingrained fear in my brain. And so what that would cause me to do and how it would affect my ability to trade is I would skip the trade out of fear, basically. And then so quite often because I, my my recognition of the strategy was good, I would miss a winning trade. And so I would get frustrated because, you know, I, I just missed a winning trade when I saw it. And in reality, I knew I should have got in, but I got scared and I skipped it. And so what that would then cause is I would stay trading and I would look for more setups cuz now, you know, I'm, I'm pissed off. I've missed a good trade. I want to see if another trade sets up that I can take. And so I would then impulsively out of FOMO now jump into a bad trade. You know, the signal wouldn't quite be there, but I thought, "Oh, this looks good enough. I'll just get in because I don't want to miss another trade that ends up winning because then I'll be really, really frustrated." And in the end, what would happen is most likely the trade turns into a loss because, well, it wasn't a good signal. I jumped in impulsively too early. And then that would be turn into more frustration. Honestly, most likely at that point, I'd be a little more than frustrated. I'd be pissed off. And I would either go into revenge trading and take more losses and, you know, start to go into one of those kind of death spirals of a trading account profit graph, which doesn't look good. Or I would, you know, force myself to take a break. Either be done for the day or done for the day and not trade the next day because I'm just so frustrated and I've, you know, I realize, okay, I'm really emotional. I need to take a break. And so, as someone who is working to master a specific strategy, you need to start self-reflecting and realizing, okay, what does my cycle look like? How do I not let these emotions control my actions? Because that will really help you break out of that cycle, that self-sabotage loop, and become consistently profitable.

So, some major lessons that kind of fall into breaking that is a good trade is not the same as a winning trade. This kind of goes back even to lesson one where you can go through a lucky streak of a bunch of wins. Just because at the end of the day, trading is probabilities and a small percentage of people will get lucky over and over and over for a while. But just because they won doesn't mean that they're actually good trades and good entries. That's why winning on bad trades is more damaging, honestly, than taking a loss on a good trade or even a bad trade. Because when it comes down to it, you can take a perfect trade that over the long run is going to make you money and lose. And you can take a terrible trade and win. You can't judge your trades and how you executed and entered in on them based on their one singular outcome. Just this past week, I had multiple trades that went break even, but I think they were perfect entries or even I'll have sometimes losses where I think the entry was great and I did nothing wrong. But once you're in a trade, the market can do anything. No matter how perfect the entry looks, there can just be news that pops out all of a sudden. A tweak could happen that just makes the market just reverse in the other direction all of a sudden and knocks you out at a loss. That's why you can't get married to an individual trade. Every successful trader goes through losses. A lot of good traders have like a 50% win rate. I think mine is like 40%. The goal isn't necessarily to be right every time, which is really hard for a lot of people, myself included. But what your goal is instead is to be focused on executing your strategy successful every time. That's what I see as a win. Those trades that lost for me or become break even, those are still successful trades because I entered in when my strategy said and I managed it how my strategy said. I followed my plan to the tea every time because I know that that is what's successful over time. But I could just be on a losing streak based on probabilities and how the market's playing out at the time that that happens. Yes, it's frustrating and I have emotions that come up, but that's why you want to realize them. Don't let them control your actions and reset for the next trading day. And you want to just focus on repeating what is essentially your trading strategy because that's your edge in the market over and over.

And a big thing that I realized over time and something that is very important to realize is think of position sizing as a dial of intensity on your emotions. The smaller the size, the less you're going to kind of care about the trade and what happens. And the bigger the size, the more you're going to care about it. And so this plays out in a lot of different ways and will change over time as you grow as a trader. Initially, maybe demo trading is scary because you're trying to execute your strategy, but over time you get used to that and so the dial kind of gets lessened to where you start caring a less and less because the intensity isn't as much. You've adjusted to essentially the intensity size that you're at. And so this is where you want to switch to real money. Even if it's risking $30 per trade. That can when you first start out is intense and increases the intensity, but you care about the individual trade and are focused in a productive way. And then over time, that's how you scale up is you can only increase your size when you get used to the current size you're at and you're emotionally ready to size up. I wouldn't necessarily size up when you go on a big win streak because again, think about the probabilities is you want to be able to handle a loss streak at your size you're trading. That's the true test of if you can handle the trading size you're at. And if you can, then increase your size a little bit to again increase and go up that intensity ladder of trading. That's how you scale up over time. But that's the whole reason why you can't jump up in size too quickly is because you can't deal with it emotionally right away. You want to wait until you get desensitized essentially to the money on the screen. And so anytime you're feeling more emotional, it's okay to size down even for a day. You know, if the market's just intense, volatile, or you're on a loss streak, it's okay to size down for a couple days until you regain that confidence and then you can go back to your normal size. Trading size is a tool. And so, it's important to start using it effectively.

And so, a huge mistake I see a lot of people making, and for good reason, is we all get into trading really to make money. You know, trading is very appealing for the ability to make money in a short period of time. A lot of people get into it with the idea of having a daily P&L target and this is extremely detrimental to your trading because any strategy does not work every single day. The market goes through different cycles and patterns. And so a strategy like mine that is purely reversal focused has times in the market where it can be amazing for weeks and then the market let's say just starts to go into a massive trend and trends for weeks to where reversals don't really happen. And so for me, if I had a daily target P&L, well, that would cause me to force trades on, let's say, conditions that aren't favorable for my strategy. And what that would do is make it more likely for me to lose. And instead, what you want to be doing is only executing your strategy when the market is favorable for it. And you don't know when that's going to happen. It could be every day for a while. It could be to where you have to take a week or two between taking a trade. Again, because the market has any number of infinite possibilities of what it can do, you want to go show up to trading every day. If you're something like me, I'm a day trader. I show up every single day engaged and ready to take a trade. But that does not mean I'm going to take a trade that day or the next day. I am there waiting to see if my setup shows up. If it does, I execute. And if it doesn't, I just move on with my day. That's why for me, I only trade like 60 minutes in the morning because it allows me to just show up, see if my strategy sets up, and go about my day. If I had to sit in front of the market for hours, which I've tried. I've tried to trade for two, three, four hours because logically you think, okay, well, if I trade longer, I'll get more trades because there's more potential for trades to show up, which is true, but in reality that executing and doing that doesn't play out because sitting there for hours on end watching screens is boring at the end of the day. And it allows you to become more impatient over time. The longer I'm sitting here staring at charts, the more impatient I become and the more likely I am to force a bad trade. And I think that applies to pretty much everyone, which is why I suggest trying to trade a short amount of time or trade in increments. Trade for an hour, go take a break for 20 minutes, and then come back and trade for an hour. You want to always be focused on executing your plan properly. That is a winning day, not the outcome or how many trades you took or the profit you made on the day.

And so, what helps you find the real issues with your trading and start to break out of that self-sabotage loop is journaling your trades in some capacity. I think it's important to track why you're entering into each trade because that'll help you realize, okay, am I entering in because of my strategy tells me or am I entering in because FOMO got me in there? And so what you want to do is write down why you got into a trade, you know, based on the pattern. Even if you FOMO in, there's always going to be a pattern you're trying to follow. And so, write down the pattern, but then also the emotions you felt. Even if it's, oh, I was focused and locked in or I was nervous. So many times for me, even now, I jump into a trade and I'm nervous to jump in. But even though I'm nervous now, I've broken out of that self-sabotage loop, I still execute and don't let that nervousness stop me from taking a trade. That's the difference between old me and new me is old me would feel that scared and nervousness and that doubt about the outcome of the trade and skip it. But now I realize it's okay to feel that emotion. It's okay to be nervous on the outcome because it's an unknown outcome and I'm risking a lot of money on this. But I jump in despite that because I know logically that the reasons to jump in are there. My strategy says to get in and having an emotion and feeling an emotion is okay. I just don't want it to control my actions. And so tracking all that is extremely important because you'll start to see your own patterns over time and how your emotions negatively affect your trading. And so you want to create rules to protect yourself because everyone's different in how they react to certain things and how your emotions cause you what to do. And so for me, what I did when I had the issues of getting frustrated and going on revenge trading, I had a rule of I will only take a maximum of two trades a day. I will take, uh, and if that means I take two wins or I take two losses, I would always stop at a maximum of two trades a day because if you take two losses on a day, you're most likely not seeing the market properly. You're either, uh, trading emotionally or not reading things correctly or just the market's not fitting your strategy that day and really you should just call it anyway because it's not a good trading day for you. And on the flip side, having rules to, uh, why to get in. You know, I try to focus on only taking the best setups possible, like what you could call an A+ setup, because for me, I find that being patient and waiting for the best setups is what allows me to be confident in executing them and be more profitable over time. When it comes to trading, it's very easy to know and spot what an A+ setup is because usually it just jumps right out at you. And it's easy to spot what, uh, a horrible setup is. You know, you, you know when it's obviously to not get in. The hard part is dealing with those trades in that gray area where you start to say things like, "Oh, I can kind of see it working out." If you are starting to say that in your mind, which is something I did, cue into that and realize that's kind of your brain trying to mentally gymnastics you into a bad trade. And because you kind of feel that way, that's a signal that you should cue into that says, "Okay, I don't actually have a solid read here. I should avoid taking the trade." Because so many times for me, that would be me jumping into a weak signal and it would turn into a losing trade.

And another thing that really helped me is kind of going back to the amount you trade a day. I found that after about an hour, I would start to kind of, you know, my eyes would gloss over and I would get bored or want to force a trade because I've been laser focused for the last hour. And it's hard to be really, really focused for long periods of time. Because when it comes to trading and watching the markets, even if you're not doing anything, you are making so many decisions. Even if that decision is to stay out of the market and do nothing, because there's just infinite patterns and infinite outcomes of what's going on, there's so much going on in your brain that it is really mentally draining. And it's hard to disconnect the idea from, oh, the, the longer I work, the more money I make. And that's usually correct for most jobs. But with trading, that is not the case. I find that the less I do with trading, the more money I make. If I trade for an hour every day, I trade a lot better because when it comes to trading, it's a decisionmaking game. And so, you have to be making the best decisions you can anytime you're trading. And me personally, I can't do that for 6 hours when it comes to trading. And so, that's how I've created these rules over time to protect myself from what I know works for me and what doesn't. And again, this is just stuff that you, it takes time to learn. That's why you can't become successful with trading in a couple weeks or a couple months. That's really why it takes years to really master trading and to be able to scale because it's so much self-reflection and understanding how you work and and deal with every situation that comes up with trading. And it takes so much time for all those situations to come up for them to repeat themselves and for you to learn how they work and you work with them.

Now, every trader goes through rough patches, especially when you're learning and going through something like a boom and bust cycle. You will go through drawdowns and learning to deal with those and protect yourself from those will help you improve your profitability curve. I used to go through a boom and bust cycle all the time where I had, I would go on a win streak and then give it all back. And this was a lot of because of that self-sabotage loop, but I would get confident and then I would either size up or the market would shift and I wouldn't adjust to the market. And so going through those rough patches, you need to have a plan of what you're going to do. It's important to have things like trying to reduce your trading size until you build that confidence back up and your trades start to win again because there's no point in just blowing through all your profits when things don't seem to be working out. You can cut your size in half and still make good money if you're making wins, but also you're not losing as much money. You know, you don't, as you see that profit graph go down, it starts to affect you more and more emotionally. And because of that, when that happens, you have to start to realize that, okay, I am not in a good emotional state. I can't just be done with trading for the day and reset by the next day. I need more than one day to reset. And so that's where sometimes I would take multiple days off. I would just take the rest of the week off. Whatever you need to reset. Again, it's not about trying to trade every day. It's about showing up to trading when you can make the best decisions possible. And if that means you need to take a week off, that's fine. Trading will always be there. More opportunities will always come. You want to get out of the mindset of you don't want to miss any opportunity that shows up. That will really help you be patient. And honestly, I would say the number one thing that made me successful and I see make other traders successful is learning to be patient. Another thing is if you start to expand and get overly confident and you know, say, okay, I want to trade more markets now, uh, or, you know, new strategies, is cut those out. The best way to improve your trading is cut things away. Don't add things, take things away. And go back to your bread and butter of what you were successful with. Again, it goes back to the whole idea of simple is better. That's what has made me profitable and what I've seen be more successful for other people. They tell me all the time that the way I approach trading and how it's so simple and direct and specific has changed the way that they view trading and how their success has been with trading. And so think about where you are with all these with where you are with these loops and start to think about how you can break out of them and improve your trading. If you want even more lessons that I've learned over the years, I have a free 75 trading lessons PDF that you can get via this QR code or I'll leave a link in the description below. And if you want to learn the strategy that I've been talking about that I use myself every single day and that I've seen really help other traders simplify and focus on what's important, check out this video right here. I'll go into every detail on how you can get started doing it and how you can get started trading with just $4.