📚Day Trading and Swing Trading the Currency Market
📚The Little Book of Currency Trading and Millionaire Traders
📚The Education of a Speculator
🚶Jared Dillian
🚶Jake Bernstein
🚶R.N. Eliot
🚶Ralph Vince
🕸️moneymentor.com
📚Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets – John Murphy
🚶Tim Sykes
🚶Cameron Fous
🚶Brian Shannon
🚶Rob Booker
📚One Good Trade
🚶Rob Booker

∙ Strong Work Ethic and Perseverance
Some as early as middle school, many of the traders developed a strong work ethic and a deep appreciation for the value of money. Their early ambitions instilled discipline and the importance of perseverance.

∙ Consistency with Initial Techniques
Many of the traders we interviewed have stuck to the same general trading philosophy they learned at the start of their careers.
⇒For example, traders who began with fundamental analysis and trading news events still rely on those methods. Those who started with technical analysis, focusing on volume and price action, have stayed true to these approaches. Likewise, traders who initially learned to trade cycles and breakouts continue to refine and use these strategies over time.
This shows that you can be successful with a variety of trading methods, as long as you remain consistent and dedicated to mastering your chosen approach.

∙ Your First Few Trades Set the Tone for your Trading Day
Trading is an emotional roller coaster, and many of the traders we’ve interviewed know that the first few trades of the day can set the tone. They carefully pick their initial trades, aiming to build a cushion early on.
This smart move gives them the confidence and financial buffer to let part of the trades run or take bigger positions later in the day, knowing they’ve already pocketed some profits.

∙ Focus on One Instrument or Strategy
Many of the traders we’ve interviewed achieved success by zeroing in on a single trading instrument.
By focusing exclusively on one asset, they develop an intimate understanding of its movements, reactions to news, optimal trading times, and more. Other traders prefer to focus on a single strategy to trade on a small number of instruments.

∙ Seeking Confluences in Trades
They hunt for multiple factors that support a specific trade direction or level, like technical indicators, volume patterns, and prior highs or lows.

∙ Preference for Buying Cheap
They don’t like to chase the price. Instead, they prefer to buy at a discount, often waiting for a pullback before jumping into a trade.

Many of our traders look for breakouts and then wait for a retest of the breakout point before getting in. By doing so, they enter trades at more favorable prices, enhancing their risk to reward ratios.

∙ Three Strikes Rule for Bad Days
This rule helps them stay disciplined and prevents a bad day from turning into a major loss. By taking a break after a rough patch, they keep their cool and come back stronger the next day, ready to hit the market with fresh energy. This straightforward yet powerful strategy ensures that a streak of bad luck doesn’t knock them off their game.

∙ Lower Risk-Reward Ratios in Day Trading
Many of our day traders are successful because they use risk-reward ratios such as 1:1 or even lower. While higher reward, low-risk setups sound great in theory, they’re rare in day trading. Consistently successful traders know that the real secret to success is maintaining a high win rate. Most of their strategies focus on high accuracy, getting in and out of trades quickly. Protecting profits is also important so these traders might use emergency stops with a risk-reward ratio of less than 1:1. However, they will move their stops up swiftly as the trade moves in their favor, locking in profits and minimizing losses.

∙ Day Trading for Consistency and Cash Flow
Aim to match your weekly or biweekly paycheck with your trading profits.

∙ Managing Success Expectations
Start with the expectation that it’s going to be really hard to stay consistent in trading.
Success comes from expanding your time horizon. Instead of looking for results in the short term(day, week, month), traders should let the odds play out in their favor and expect results to come only n the long term(quarter, year).

∙ Ability to Learn and Adapt
Mistakes present a great learning opportunity. Traders who stay successful over many decades are lifelong students. They are finding new ways to learn about the market and themselves. They are also highly adaptable.

∙ Self-Awareness and Regulation
Knowing who you are and aren’t presents an edge. It’s important to be patient with who you are. One can always get better, but it takes time.

∙ Cutting Losses Instead of Trading More
Being profitable in trading isn’t about finding more winning trades. It’s about minimizing losses that eat into your profits.
Tracking and reviewing trades is also one of the key habits to see where money is lost. Any good trader would tell you that this isn’t a one-time exercise.

∙ Tracking and Reviewing Trades
Keeping track of and reviewing their trades is a habit that all successful traders swear by.

∙ Value in Trading Communities
Community is key in all walks of life, and it’s even more essential in trading.

Ultimately, because a chart is a chart is a chart as it relates to technical analysis. So I generally use the same strategies on a 1 minute chart that I use on a daily, weekly, or monthly chart.

📝If you’re in a bad emotional state or you’re physically exhausted, or you’ve had a fight with your spouse that day(especially if about money) or you have health issues requiring heavy medications, it is not a good place to trade from.

📝Consider getting a part or full time job if you have bills to pay, money you can’t afford to lose to trade, money you can’t lose, or you start making terrible mistakes with your money management. When you have extra income coming in, it’s a huge psychological comfort.

The more time I had to make money, the more time I had to sit in front of the computer and the more mistakes I would make.
More screen time was a problem. I came to realize that not every minute of every day should be traded.
When you sit in front of the screens, you want to do something. I was constantly looking for the next trade, the next trade, and the next trade.
In reality, less trading is more.
When you are sitting in front of the computer and you think “I should be trading right now because that’s my job to sit here and be in the market all day long” you are setting yourself up for failure.

📝Be slow, steady, and consistent and focus on the right trade, at the right time, for the right reasons, wins the day, week, or year.

The idea that you should be in the market all the time is not the right course of action for me and for many other people who are actively trading.

♟️💵One of my strategies is the thrust, pullback, thrust(TPT).

Most of my work even to this day comes out of the idea “don’t chase that trade; look for the high probability trend resumption trade!”

“My whole mentality changed from the hunted to the hunter.”
When I started developing signals for the reentry rather than chasing, my whole mentality changed from being the hunted to the hunter. Instead of being the hunted, the person running in on the big green bar or after a large move, only to get stopped out and watch it go right back the other way, I started seeing the green bar, watching it pull back, and then I would wait. I wanted to see it come back out of my indicators before I would get in. That way, I’m in the momentum for the new run back into the direction of the trend.

NQ is hyper-parabolic, all over the place.
⇒I’ve really enjoyed day trading NQ because of the volatility, the action, the movement, the range, and how that can add up very quickly. It really opens up a lot of opportunities because I thrive on that ebb and flow. I love the movement, that boom, boom, boom, pullback, then resumption! Boom, boom, boom, pullback, then resumption!

Q: Are there certain times of the day when these pullbacks are more effective?
Yes, for day trading, within the first few hours of the market opening. To be clear, these opportunities happen throughout the day but I’m more focused in the morning and I find the most vigorous moves frequently happen anywhere between 8:30~1.
You’ll see the same opportunity during the European session after the European market opens. There’s an energy that takes place for a few hours until they go into their lunchtime, and then again, after 8:30 am.

Q: What’s your favorite time frame?
I’m looking for synchronicity between the daily, hourly, 5 min, 1 min charts whenever possible. If I see a discrepancy between the hourly and the daily charts, that’s a market condition I refer to as mom and dad fighting. You have two big heavy hitter time frames where if one is going up, the other one’s going down, the market is all but guaranteed to be very choppy intraday.
But I’m typically executing off that 1 or 2 min time frame. I don’t look for extended moves. I’m not looking to try to put on a trade and let it run for hours because statistically speaking, it’s not going to.⇒♟️A difference in trend between hourly and daily chart = choppy range day

Waiting for the right trade at the right time, for the right reasons, is everything.

I am focusing on that TPT resumption.

Q: If there is one tip that you can provide to anyone who wants to become a full-time trader, what would it be?
Have some humility. The market is always right, only our opinions of the market are wrong, so be patient.
There’s always the next great trade around the corner. So, have the patience to wait for the next great trade, and have the humility to understand that the market is always right. Think like the hunter, not the hunted. It should be respected and not feared.

I base my trading on volume. Vertical volumes tell you when the activity happened, while horizontal volumes show you where it happened and how much. I really trust both horizontal and vertical volumes. These are the only indicators I use in my charts.

To be honest, I’ve found that short trades are generally more successful than long trades in this strategy. Day trading with this perspective tends to favor short trades because they are quicker and often deeper. When the market goes down, it’s common to see drop of 1, 2, 3, or even 4%. However, market rises are usually more gradual, often around 0.7% on a good day. So,💵 to make real money day trading, it’s often better to go short.💵 Only about 2 out of 10 days present a strong opportunity for long trades.

Q: Do you have a daily profit target?
💵No, let me explain. I’ve done this many times. Some days, you’re perfectly in sync with the market. on those days, if you could trade 20 out of 24 hours, you should. But there are also days when you’re completely off, and after two trades, you should just call it quits and say “Okay, not for me today.”

♟️I like to use horizontal volumes for swing trading to identify potential areas for reversals and targets.

♟️When day trading, I focus not only on price breakouts but more on volatility breakouts. This happens when the market accelerates, and the number of trades per second or minute increases, often coinciding with a price breakout from a resistance level.

For day trading, if you use tools like standard deviation with volume-weighted average price (VWAP), you need to be skilled in mean reversion strategies. Sometimes, the price moves to the first standard deviation and then reverts, so you must be prepared for this. Other times, it breaks through and accelerates to the second or third standard deviation.
♟️My charts typically show three standard deviations plus the VWAP.

♟️When considering volumes for day trading, focus on the visible range of the last 4–10 days.
📝It’s important to understand where traders who bought two or three days ago might be feeling pressure if prices drop.
If prices recover, these traders are likely to sell quickly because they are no longer aiming for profit; they just want to break even. They see a black hole below them and will escape immediately once prices recover.
⇒📝That’s why you can often identify resistance levels where there has been significant volume over the past 5~10 days.

📝If you ask traders how much emotion affects their trading, most would say at least 80%. In reality it’s likely closer to 90%.
You need to minimize emotional influence to let your skills shine. How can you do that? You can train for it.
First, do not paper trade because it doesn’t involve the emotional connection to real money. Instead, start trading with a small amount of money and gradually increase it. This will help you manage your emotions. Over time, add more money to your account.

You’ll likely find you can handle only a small amount of money comfortably. If you stay within your limits, you can trade successfully. Trading below your limit isn’t effective either because it won’t engage you. Find the right amount for you, and you’ll be able to trade effectively.

♟️VWAP and standard deviations, later adding horizontal volume to my analysis.

♟️If I plan to go long, I check if the price is above the VWAP, as this indicates that the stock is more bought than sold by the big players. My goal is to “copy paste” the actions of the big players because they have the power to affect the market.

♟️Standard deviations can act as support or resistance levels, and when combined with horizontal volumes, they provide interesting levels for trading.

♟️I typically trade using a 5 min chart.
⇒If there’s low volatility and I need to trade, I might drop down to a one-minute chart, but that’s usually too aggressive for my style. However, a 15-minute chart tends to be too slow and boring for day trading.

Q: What is the number-one trading tip you can give to a new trader?
First, avoid paper trading. As soon as you gain enough confidence with the market, start trading with real money.
Next, plan your strategy. This isn’t about deciding to buy or sell under certain conditions. It’s about planning how much money you can afford to lose. You need to decide what you’ll do if the market moves in your favor: will you sell at a target, trail your profits, or maybe sell half your position and move your stop to breakeven and let it run?
Money management is the cornerstone of trading. Once you start trading with real money, focus on developing a solid money management plan. With good money management, even a coin flip can be profitable. The specific strategies for buying or selling come later, but many people mistakenly start with that.

If you want to be a successful trader, planning is crucial. You need a plan, including contingencies for when things don’t go as expected with your money management strategy.

Maintaining self-confidence is crucial for success. Without it, you will likely fail.
⇒To sustain that confidence, you must adhere to your money management strategy.

Even the best strategy is useless if you can’t follow it.
⇒Your strategy should suit your abilities and temperament, like a well-fitting coat.

📝If you are day trading, aim for a closer risk to reward ratio, about 1:1.

If you can avoid big losses, which comes down to effective money management, you can survive as a trader.

The first priority is money management. The primary goal of money management is to avoid big losses. Normal gains and losses are part of daily trading. The aim is to eventually achieve substantial profits while minimizing losses.

Intraday trading is more about grabbing opportunities quickly rather than holding on for a trend.
In my day trading, I have a target and aim for a high win rate, rather than trying to capture a larger move.

♟️Our current approach, using time-based strategies, is far superior.

Learn how systems work, learn what makes a good system. Learning to code would be beneficial, too. If you can’t, find someone to help you. Find a platform that you can code on; start building a system that can help you even if it’s just on paper.

For swing trading, you should go back at least 10~20 years to cover all the bull and bear cycles and see how your strategy performs under various market conditions.
For day trading, a couple of years is usually enough because it’s more active and short term.
Still, you won’t really know until you code it. I’ve had many great ideas that looked promising visually, but once I coded them, they turned out to be garbage. Coding helps eliminate human bias.

As you gain confidence in day trading, gradually increase your trade sizes based on skill, not greed.

You’re never going to be perfect. You’re always going to be learning. The markets are always going to be changing.

♟️I might casually look at the close for another opportunity or two, but the big opportunities are in the first 1.5 hours of trading.

Every incremental gain I have makes a difference. Becoming a better reader of the tape, having better focus, keeping that mental acuity, and so on. That requires good sleep, nutrition, and for me, a rigorous workout routine.

♟️For the S&P, most of my trades are minutes, maybe an hour or two at most.

Trades are normally very quick, usually anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes, sometimes less than a minute.

♟️The core of my strategy is support and resistance, sometimes mean reversion, sometimes trend focused.

Multiple time frames, when the higher time frames and the lower time frames are coming together. I might execute my trade on a 1 or 5 minute chart, but what does that 30 minute chart look like? What’s the 60 minute, what’s the 4 hour chart like? Are they all kind of coming together? Because it’s so important to get that confluence.
Looking at the option flow is another huge factor. Is there a lot of call volume, a lot of put volume? What type of volume is coming in the underlying instrument you’re trading?

I have a way of seeing the market that very few people have, because I’ve put in the hours.

You really need to align your temperament and your risk tolerance for the style of trading you’re doing.

When I get into a trade, I’m expecting the trade to start working nearly immediately. If it doesn’t, that means I’m wrong. It’s okay to be wrong, but it does mean that I’m wrong and I’m already starting to think about closing this, stepping back, reevaluating, and maybe getting back into the trade at a later time.
I don’t try to rationalize a bad decision.

📝If you want to make a career out of trading, you need to have a robust platform and a high-quality data feed.

Have very realistic expectations.
Patience.
You have to start with the expectation that it’s going to be really hard and will always be really hard.
You need to really love it.
⇒You have to really love this because it’s going to kick you in the ass every single day or at least once or twice a week. You have to love it, you have to live it, you have to breath it. It needs to be ingrained in you, but if you’re just doing it because you wanna make some extra money, it won’t work.

📝Trading is a non-stop learning.

♟️Sunny has consistently observed that the market tends to rise by 1.2 average true ranges before pulling back, and then again by 2 average true ranges before another pullback.

I see patterns and formations.

I’m a technical analyst, so I see chart patterns and things that I know from the 746 books I’ve read.

I trade three to five times a day with the little swings that go on intraday. I use my custom SunnyBands indicator for everything I do. I trade e-mini S&P 500 futures on a 5 min chart, and stocks a daily chart.

♟️The SunnyBands are just an extension of the DMA. The upper inner band is 1.2 average true ranges from the DMA. And the outer band is 2.0 average true ranges from the DMA.

📝I found over and over again that the market will go up 1.2 average true ranges and then pull back. And then it’ll go up 2 average true ranges and pull back.

♟️When the market’s trending, the two DMAs will stay close together. And they’ll go up.
When the market’s making a saddle(going neutral), that’s a period of sideways action.

♟️The key is having an indicator that’s recalculating based on what the market is doing.

♟️I do look at the open of the day, the low of the day, and the high of the day, or of the session. I only trade the day session.

After this many years of watching the same thing over and over every day, you feel the rhythms.

Q:If you had to give any advice for newer traders who want to be at the level where you are now in trading, what would you tell them?
Read, read, read.

If you have a month of positive trades that would be enough to support you and your family, then you can go live.

In the beginning of my trading journey, I would come home and trade the US morning session, which was my afternoon in the UK.
♟️The strategy was trading trend pullbacks on 5 minute entries. I would look for a lot of trend confluence across multiple time frames. Then once I got consistent, I start fading my chosen markets at the end of the day if they met my reversal criteria.

I was very quick to lose a lot of the indicators. I know they can work for some traders, but for me it was very much price action and moving averages.

If you are a trader reading this and you have been aggressively blowing up a trading account, make sure you take the time to analyze why.

Nowadays, I don’t go anywhere near the five minute chart. I’m primarily a position and swing trader. I do have intraday swing entries. So I will use 4 and 1 hour charts to scale into some of the positions. I still trade with the trend, but I also trade reversals, which make up far less of my overall number of trades. I keep it fairly simple. Support and resistance with moving averages are the main elements I use to determine the market condition. I don’t trade the common moving average cross patterns. Instead, I’m using moving averages for♟️ confluence and momentum.

I want to know over the weeks, months, and years that what I’m trading has an edge. You can’t have that kind of consistency unless you always trade a clear setup.

I typically hold trades for an average of 2~3 weeks, but I sometimes have setups that are entered and closed in a day if there’s a fixed smaller target.

Q: What can traders do to make getting funded easier?
The first thing I would say is take your time.
📚I suggest traders to become consistent and have ownership of their own strategy first.
Out of all the people I’ve worked with over the last three years, the ones who have been consistently successful with getting funded and staying funded did it trading with their own strategy and money first.
The ones who have struggled are the ones who have gone straight from learning to trade to then trading a funded account.

It’s better to keep your risk lower once you start trading for a prop firm or a fund, because if you hit a tough run at first, you’re in the red right away. Keep the risk low until you’ve built up a good return, and then you can increase slowly.

Resilience is the most important skill a trader must have to trade a fund successfully.
I would also add the ability to expand your time horizon.
And lastly, self-awareness.

💵It’s important to have your own tested system.

You have to let go of wanting a reward right away.

☕One of the things that has separated me from a lot of the traders out there is not intelligence, but my resilience and perspective.

☕I think that more traders should take the long-term view, despite the fact that a lot of these prop firms and challenge accounts are, without the trader knowing, getting them to think short term: for example: “Can I get to the end of the month and pass the challenge?”

The market rewards traders who manage that long-term perspective, while doing everything correctly consistently over the short term, regardless of the short-term result.

If you want to be good at something, you need to have a lot of determination and the drive to build skill sets.

Being a great gamer definitely gave me confidence that I could become good at trading as well.

You need both the determination and confidence to push through.

However, the big difference with trading is that it forces you to educate yourself in various valuable areas of life such as psychology, economics, and communication skills in case you want to become a money manager.
⇒Even if someone tried trading for a year and didn’t make any money, they would still learn a lot about themselves, their emotions, and how they handle pressure.
⇒It has a lot of beneficial carryovers to other areas of life such as enforcing discipline and being mentally sharp, which provided you with the opportunity to exercise introspection.

If I did a great job playing and still lost because of being unlucky or something, I wouldn’t feel that bad at all. Likewise, I never felt the losses if I did my best job and followed my rules.

Over the years, I’ve learned that being too hard on yourself for mistakes is counterproductive. ⇒You draw the lessons, stop dwelling on them, and move on. It’s a skill you learn over time.

At the start of 2015 I made the conscious decision to only focus on central bank events and news data because I saw they moved the market the most.

Start by setting a realistic expectation. It’s as in any other craft; for example, a surgeon doesn’t start performing operations after one year of studies. Or if they did, it would get ugly.

The brilliant investor Bernard Baruch, who traded during the Great Depression, said that 💭“if you are ready to give up everything else and study the whole history of the market as carefully as a medical student studies anatomy – in addition to having the cool nerves of a gambler and the courage of a lion – you have a ghost of a chance.”

Unless you are willing to commit, you can’t expect to perform. Even if you ultimately end up losing money, you will learn a ton about yourself in terms of how you deal under pressure and maintain your emotions.

To become a good trader, you must put in the work and thoroughly analyze the markets. Consistent success in trading comes from a deep understanding of market dynamics, which requires dedication and extensive research. Always be diligent in your analysis, study historical data, stay informed on current events, and continuously refine your strategies.

To become a successful trader, you need a well-articulated strategy and the discipline to follow it. Clearly defined rules serve as your guide, allowing you to stay calm and execute your strategy with minimal emotion.

Realistically my skills improved over time. I was doing the same things, I knew the same material, but I’d had enough practice of actually executing and reading the order book quickly.

💵Once you really get rid of all those errors you’re making, then you become profitable and can start to scale it up. ⇒If you can just get rid of your errors you can start to make money.

♟️I found my trading recordings so much more important than a screenshot. I could play it back at a quarter of the speed just to see how things were going at certain times, and for bad trades I could see what kind of price action was happening. The recordings absolutely helped, without a doubt.

I don’t look at fundamentals for trade ideas.

♟️We trade based on moving averages. So maybe there’s a 30 day and a 5 day moving average on top of several factors we put in our system. We take a long position after the 5 day crosses over the 30 day. Then if they slowly start to diverge and the 5 day is saying no, but the 30 day is saying yes, we start to scale out of the trade.

My first favorite resource for my type of trading is an order book.
∙I use Bookmap and Quant Tower these days. They both have their positives and negatives, but using a professional order book is great.
∙Another tool would be Grafana, because you can create alerts and use all kinds of metrics.
∙Another free resource is Coinglass. It has a bunch of information from liquidations, open interest, funding rates. It’s one of the first things I check each day.

The average retail trader can absolutely benefit from having an order book platform. After learning and using it for a while, they would become more of a professional. Their work is just more of a professional grade once they incorporate order flow and use it correctly. There’s a long and big learning curve, but if you’re taking trader seriously or as a career, then go for that. Go for the extra step and do it as professionally as you can.

💭”Once you know how to lose, money just falls into your lap. Learning to lose and not chasing money is the key to success.”

Most of the losses came from my revenge trading.

Once you know how to lose, money just falls on your lap. Once you understand losing, which is the main objective, the side effect is money coming your way. Learn to lose. Don’t chase the money.

♟️I do ranges all on the 1 min chart. It starts from the higher time frame, so I start by looking at the daily chart, but since I’m only trading for two hours, all of the work is done on the 1 minute chart in the end.

♟️I use a long-tail stop, meaning a stop loss bigger than the average wick on a daily chart. If I’m wrong on the direction, I should still be able to survive, because a wick is a rejection. Therefore, it should be coming back. On the flip side, I ask for the smallest standard deviation that the market is willing to give me as a target. It’s sort of a range, within a range, within a range.

♟️My average risk to reward ratio can be 4:1 backwards on average. So I’m overall risking 4x more than what I make per trade.

♟️I can reach my target many, many times before the market decides on a direction. I know where the floor and ceiling are in the market and by defining that risk, I feel free to do what I need to do. It’s an averaging game.
⇒It’s not one trade, one outcome. That was a huge revelation to me. The ability to open a second trade to change the outcome of the first. By adding two trades together, you’re in control of the outcome. By adding a third trade, you’re even more in control of the outcome. Now you’ve got three open, what if you remove the first one? You’re still controlling the outcome by booking losses.
⇒I engineer breakeven. That’s what I do all day long.

♟️It changes the average price and therefore changes the exit. If the market moves 20 pips between the first and second entry, the average of the two is at 10. The market only needs to go back 10 pips for you to make money. It doesn’t need to go back 20 pips. I’m giving you all the secrets here.

My trades are still open and it’s a fraction of the percentage of my risk. And I since have not gone over my maximum risk of 1% yet. I’m just putting 1/10, 2/10, or 3/10 of my risk in the market. Eventually, I’ve built my trade to 1% of my account and now the average move in my favor can pay me out.

♟️It’s four trades per range box and everything is military.

🧠The trick is to learn how to lose.

I keep these trades open on average about 3~5 minutes. Some trades will be on for two hours, but that’s rare. Those are the shoulders on the bell curve. The top of the bell curve is about 3 to four minutes per trade. So they’re very short-lived trades. The target is one bar on the 1 min chart, three pips. So if i don’t get the entry right or the bars are smaller than normal, I might end up waiting for a couple of bars to make my money.

Focus on learning how to lose before you focus on chasing the money. Learn to manage drawdowns and your capital to avoid tremendous losses. With one trade, you can aim for one outcome. Two trades, it’s an average outcome. So you can control the average, and can create the environment that will allow you to exit. Don’t let the stop loss do the dirty work. Learn to lose. The prop firm business serves its purpose. It has a place in the industry, but you have to learn how to lose.

Perseverance is probably the number one skill traders need to have in order to become successful.
The ability to learn and the willingness to change. We should never be afraid of change.

🔥Look to the future. Don’t worry about the past.

You don’t need to limit yourself to what society says is right.

Get rid of all the garbage on the screen and look at the average true range. That should give you more than enough information, because it doesn’t matter what time frame you’re looking at.
If price bounces off of support or resistance and you target one bar, you can probably win every time.

♟️If you bring the target as low as it can go, on any time frame, the easiest target is one bar of profit.

♟️That average true range is very significant. There’s no need for anything else.
Bollinger Bands are the next best thing. It’s a good substitute for the little range box that I use.

♟️The way my range boxes work, it’s one-half of the bands.

♟️I’m really trying to make three pips in one half the distance between two bands.

♟️If you’re in the upper half, there’s a good chance it’s going to keep going up. That’s the probability.

Volume-weighted average price(VWAP)
EMAs(exponential moving averages)
RSI(relative strength index)
21 EMA

📝I was reading Mike Bellafiore’s book, One Good Trade. It kind of all came together. This was a pivotal moment for me and I’m reading Mike’s book that talks about finding one strategy that gives you an edge. And all of that came together and I built my first strategy. I backtested it, did hundreds of chart markups, and even ended up automating the back-testing as well.

Entry signals should be very simple because that’s just your entry into the market.

Nobody really teaches how to manage a trade well, because that’s very hard to teach. It’s something that is taught really through experience over time. As you get burned enough, you start to see what you need to do differently. You feel that pain, that’s what teaches you.

It took me two years to have my first six months of consistent gains.

The initial drawdowns and losses are part of the game. Everybody’s going to lose money.

📝I stopped moving my stop losses when trades worked against me.
I had to learn to sit and wait.

My personality is that I don’t like to be wrong. I don’t like to lose. And once you swallow that pill, trading gets a lot easier.

Because I’m a day trader, I’m looking to be in and out within a few minutes, maybe a few hours. If we’re not under the previous day’s low, I’m going to be a buyer on the ES futures; just small little scalps long. That’s all I’m looking to do. I’m not trying to catch the big move of the day. I’m looking to come in, make my nut: usually 5~15 points and that’s it. Because I’m usually rocking at about a 7~10 point stop loss.

I know where gold is. I know what oil is doing, but I only really look at it.

Simple is repeatable. I don’t overcomplicate the process.

♟️I typically trade two maybe three hours a day.

I found that traders have a certain mental capacity.

Once you sit there for so long, your decision making ability goes down. Give yourself breaks. Step away.

I’m always using fixed stop losses. What I’m trading is very systematic, where I’m using previous structure or a quick little fib retracements as the stop loss.

I’m aiming to win 60~70% of the time, which I’ve been able to do using a 1R target.
⇒You need to have those stats. If you don’t have those stats, you’re avoiding accountability.

What makes or breaks you is your own individual trade management. Position sizing matters a little bit, entries matter a little bit. All that really matters is realizing gains.
How many traders will pop trades into profit, not realize gains and then close red, thinking the strategy is the problem.
Probably not. You’re the problem. And when you accept that you’re the problem, like I did, and you do the self-work from the meditation stuff I’ve done, the yoga stuff, books, then you start to see how you need to act to become the version you want to be. “How do I act as if that guy in the future will look back on me and say, good job?” That’s how I’m always thinking. When I take a trade, I think to myself, “In an hour, will I be glad I’m in this position based on how this chart looks, based on what price is right now?”
When I take a trade, I think to myself, “In an hour, will I be glad I’m in this position based on how this chart looks based on what price is right now?”

If you have a system, you should ask yourself, “Will I be more upset if I take this trade and I lose? Or will I be more upset with myself if I don’t take it and it wins?”

The goal should actually not be to win more; it should be to lose less.
Study your losses. Figure out what you’re doing wrong.

Self-regulation and limiting your downside are two most important characteristics for a trader.

“I’m going to find wins because I’m trading a strategy that’s back-tested. I’m going to trade a system that is proven to make money. I need to limit the downside.” That’s the proper approach.

People don’t become wealthy from a regular job.

♟️With my main strategy, I try to identify an A to B range that I’m trading, whether it’s a buy-side or sell-side move. I look at whether it has had one or multiple reactions from that zone.
I’m always searching for areas of interest, particularly areas of highest volume where bigger players have been before. I don’t trade those zones right away; instead, I watch to see how the area reacts first. If that area continues to hold and they keep adding positions around the same price, and it breaks past and then validates as a resistance or support (depending on if it’s a sell or buy), it’s a continuation. If it changes direction in those zones, it indicates that the big players are closing their previous positions and moving in a different direction. When it comes to breakouts, I don’t enter on the first breakout unless it has a very strong reaction. The first breakout is often a fake-out or manipulation. I usually wait for that initial breakout and then look for the true move.
I also try to narrow it down to price as much as possible. Early on, I would get into trades too early and wasn’t patient enough. I had to learn to wait for the setup and be comfortable with sometimes missing the move. If you want good confirmations and high probability setups, you’ll occasionally miss moves and you have to accept that. Or you can take more trades and risk losing more when you’re wrong because you get trigger happy. For me, I feel better letting the trade set up and taking what I consider a valid reaction in those areas versus trying to guess before I have enough information.

Seventy-five percent of my trades are scalp trades on the minute charts, and the rest are intraday trades from the four-hour or higher time frames. I typically trade the same areas consistently but my intraday trades usually occur on days when the market continues in the same direction as the initial play. However, if the price ranges around that price, it can’t be an intraday trade for me because it hasn’t continued and will either hit the full stop or the stop profit. These are the days better suited for scalping.
Intraday trades for my strategy only happen a few days a week. I take them when they set up and I let them run when it happens. I also take some swing trades during the year, but these are mainly for my personal accounts. I don’t swing trade much on the larger accounts, and when I do, it’s usually with oil and commodities.

I always have targets for my scalps.

Scalp traders don’t transition into intraday trades. You scalp within the ranges and then wait for a breakout to take a new intraday trade.

If it’s a higher time frame zone, I want a higher time frame target because that type of volume will match the magnitude of the move.

Either trade those higher risk reward plays less often or trade more frequently and gradually stack your account.

♟️I find gold better for intraday trading than oil, which I only keep oil for swings.
⇒Gold has enough volatility and, even though I trade gold, it’s paired with the US dollar or euro, so it’s still currency related.
⇒I look at correlations a lot and use them as an indicator for divergence. I usually have Gold-USD and Gold-EUR charts pulled up and look for divergences between them.

One of the main things I stress to people is that when you learn a lot, you tend to complicate things. Sometimes you need to come back and re-simplify.

Focus on first making your daily pay, then your biweekly in one week instead of two.

♟️I tend to take 1% or less risk per trade.

Focus more on progress than the results.

Once you have your strategy in place, a good trading day should be based on adhering to your strategy, regardless of whether you win or lose.

Work on one thing at at time.

I’m really big on not chasing price.

The number one skill that it takes to be a successful trader is resilience.

You’ll definitely have times in your trading that are just tough, no way around it. Either you have a purpose bigger than yourself, see past those tough times, apply the lessons, and remain resilient, or you let them overcome you and end up doing something else.

I made the mistake of not letting the trade invalidate and held onto my bias.

♟️I still trade areas of high volume, points of supply and demand, and previous highs and lows.

♟️Now I use an if-then scenario. If the market does this, then I do that. Many of my trading rules are based on this if-then logic.

A scalper at heart, Matt zeros in on 10 point trades. His favorite setup is an initial balance(IBH, IBL) which relies on confluence. For Matt, ♟️an A+ setup occurs when the initial balance breaks out, retests, forms a hammer on the 1 minute chart, and shows Delta skyrocketing; an indicator showing the change of market buying and market selling.

$500 a day adds up over a year. I’d rather sit in front of my charts for eight hours a day, make $500, than work for someone else and do the same amount of money or less.

♟️This involves the initial balance, which is the first hour high and low. After 9:30 a.m. central, if we break out of the initial balance, I’ll look for a retest to get long and ride the trend. If we reject the breakout, I look for a mean reversion play back into the range.
On clear range days, if we reject the initial balance high for example, I’d look for a short back into the mean.
I use the volume profile heavily for range trades and look at Delta to help determine if we’re going long. I hate buying breakouts and will never use a buy stop to let momentum carry me. I prefer to buy on dips because it feels like I’m getting a discount, even if I’m not.

♟️Some of my favorite setups are wick tests, which are pullback continuation trades. These happen all day long.

I follow the “three strikes, I’m out” rule. Sometimes, I stop at two strikes if it’s blatantly obvious that neither trade was even a tick in the money, so I’m just going to call it a day because I’m clearly not seeing the market right. But generally, if I have three strikes or losing trades in a row, I’m done for the day.

♟️So an IB(initial balance) trade retest, it’s basically based off confluence. So if we break out of initial balance, we come back down to retest it, and we hammer on the one minute, and Delta is skyrocketing showing like a ton of market buyers and volume never flipped up that would be like an A+ setup that I want to take.

♟️I use Sierra charts. I have the 5 min chart with volume profile. I have a 1 min chart with initial balance, which is just a high and low marked out. I have a DOM, the depth of market, which shows liquidity and you can see based on how it’s flowing, the aggression of the buyers and sellers. Then I have a 22 range chart that has Delta on it. That’s the whole setup that I use.

Patience and understanding your brain. That second part is a loaded answer but if you don’t understand your own emotions, you’ll never make it in trading. It’s so emotionally heavy. You can do your best to try and be emotionless, which is arguably just as bad as being heavily emotional.
Patience is the easy answer. If you cannot sit in front of your screen and not take a trade, you’re never going to make it as a trader. You have to be able to not take trades and watch the screen.

Community is so important! Everyone needs accountability in their life in some capacity, and accountability and vulnerability are key to getting better. How can you improve if you can’t acknowledge your flaws? How can you improve if no one else acknowledges your flaws? Vulnerability and accountability in trading communities are powerful because most people don’t understand trading. When you share your mistakes and wins with someone who truly understands and can provide feedback, it makes a huge difference.

There’s always something to improve and something to pat yourself on the back for, whether you’re losing or making money. You could be red on the day but had a good entry and just managed it poorly, so you need to work on management. Or you could be green with a bad entry but got lucky and exited well. The goal is to think about how you can be better every single day.

I would encourage anyone who has programming skills to get into MetaTrader and start programming trading systems, robots to trade, and you’ll find very quickly that it is very difficult to find huge amounts of alpha from just purely technical strategies. Are there ways to make money from technicals? Absolutely. I still use them in my trading but it didn’t take long before I started realizing that creating 20% gains in the market every year is really, really hard. It’s really hard to find a system that can do that reliably without taking a tremendous amount of risk.

I feel that currencies, indices, and gold, those three can coexist within the same macro forces like the Fed and economic figures.

I think about two to three years in I actually started to be breakeven to slightly profitable.

If you can get to a point where your strategies and systems are producing profits slowly and steadily over time, these small positions can equate to big gains. That was the breakthrough for me.
You can make good money with a lot of different strategies, a lot of different approaches if you also accept that you’re not going to make a lot of money very quickly.
If more people accepted that, there’d be a lot more profitable traders.

♟️One of the things that I learned the most from back-testing was that the actual position sizing and risk management part of your strategy matters more than the technical entries and exits.
📝When you think about, why do people struggle to make money in markets? If you just reverse all the things that they spend all their time on, it’s actually a really good place to start. Most people obsess over the entry, psychology, and risk management. Reversing all of that was a really important starting point for me.

♟️I always try to risk less than 1% because I’m all about that slight, slow, and steady performance, rather than huge ups and huge downs in my trading.

One thing that I really liked about indices is that from a lot of back-testing they go up over time, and they have very strong rallies.

♟️For exits, I use trailing stops. I like market structure, the simple stuff.

♟️My exit style is trailing a stop and letting the market tell me when market structure has changed paths and it’s time to get out.

♟️I have the technical side, the sentiment side, and the fundamental side. So for example, I like to look at the commitment of traders’ report, I like to look at put–call ratios, I like to look at investment or investor surveys. When it comes to sentiment, I’m looking at both the retail side and how institutional traders are positioned.
⇒When it comes to institutional positions, I’m usually agreeing with what they’re doing for the most part. Whereas with retail side I’m generally looking at it as more of a contrarian indicator.
In my checks and balances, in the system that we’ve written I have a couple of people on my team. We’ve built a tool that will fetch this data, then look at it, and automatically assign a numerical plus or minus 1, 2, 3 scoring system that will look at the commitment of traders’ data and retail positioning as displayed by forex brokers, for example.

On the fundamental side I have the four main categories. Economic growth, which is going to include metrics like PMIs(purchasing manager’s index), retail sales, and all the standard indicators. Then, on the inflation side you have numbers like the CPI and PPI(Consumer Price Index and Producer Price Index). All of these are getting numerical scoring within the systems.

I’m not a day trader. I’m a swing trader. The Edge Finder scoring takes into account new data as it comes in but I always weigh the data against the week before.

I take about two or three trades a week and my average trade duration is anywhere from one to seven days but my really big winners could last a long time. The losers are really quick and I get smacked in the face right away, sometimes more than once in a single day. When I’m trying to enter on a pullback, and that pullback becomes a bigger pullback, I might get stopped out a few times in a single day, but psychologically, a little rule for myself is I don’t like to take two losers in a day so I usually will stop trading after that.

I don’t want to be long the dollar and long the Nasdaq at the same time because there’s some inverse relations.

About 2.5 years to get to a point where I wasn’t losing money. Three years was about the time that I started making some money and when I say some it was very modest amounts of money.

Q: What are your favorite indicators?
I love the fed watch tool and I love the analytical tools that WeBull gives me. There’re so many stats to look at my trading performance versus traditional brokerages.
In terms of indicators I like simple momentum indicators on Tradingview. I have this indicator that I use that’s basically two moving averages and it shades between the two. I love that stuff like that gives me a visual of momentum or no momentum in the market.
So simple moving average crossover indicators just help me to get an idea, but they are not the lead driver to why I’m entering a trade or not. Just helpful resources to spot momentum.

Q: Can we sum up your strategy as being a♟️ trend follower that who looks for pullback in the direction of your fundamental bias with entries on four-hour or daily charts?
Nick: Yes, without any indicators on the chart, I’m just looking for higher highs, higher lows with a moving average crossover to help visualize it. You can see it really quick when you’re flipping through charts. You can say, oh, that one just flipped from bullish or bearish, the other way. So it’s just a visual helper but, yes, I’m looking for a pullback into a market structure area.
I like break and retests.

Rob Booker was a big influencer for me. His thing was there would be a lot more profitable traders if they learned to shrink their position size. He had a tip on there that he would always say, which was 💭if you want to make $1,000 a day, you’ve got to learn how to make $1 a day and keep it first. I love that way of thinking. Most people just come in with big position sizes.

My one tip would be: reduce your position size, and see what happens in your trading. It will make you trade with a more level head. It will allow you to handle drawdowns a lot better. You still need to incorporate an edge and do all your back-testing, but assuming that you’ve done a lot of that, reducing your position sizes is the biggest tip I can give anybody.

Q: Do you think there’s a specific skill that it takes to become a successful full-time trader? Nick: I think it’s less of a skill and more of a genuine interest in markets. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who is very successful in markets who isn’t absolutely in love with learning about them.

♟️ strategy focuses on looking for confluence of Fibonacci retracements and price levels.

Stocks take a lot of research. You really have to understand and research the companies.

I look at oil, the Russell, the Dow, and Nasdaq, but I predominantly trade NQ.

♟️You start looking for Fibs on a higher time frame, like a daily or a weekly chart in some cases and you start marking off support and resistance. Then you start drilling it down into the lower time frames all the way down to a 5 minute chart. The one thing that I took away from that course and still do today is you just don’t ignore high time frames.
⇒You’ve got to look at the big picture and understand, where are we at in the big picture? That’s really what helps. Even today, I’ll mark off support resistance on higher time frame charts, and color-code them according to the time frame. So if it’s a daily or weekly level, or even a monthly level, in some cases, I’ll color that one color so that when I drill down to my five-minute charts I can identify key levels.

I chart Fibonacci levels manually.

♟️Start by looking at the previous day’s levels. If you dive straight into Fibonacci, it can become overwhelming very quickly. Focus on the previous day’s levels first. The market reacts to these levels, which can include Fibonacci levels, as well as the previous day’s open, high, low, close, the opening range, and initial balance. These are simple yet very effective strategies for trading.

Q: How do you use the previous day levels?
Vince: My recommendation is to first understand the previous day’s movement and the big-picture levels. Then you just need to see what price does around those levels. Does it accept it? Does it reject it? How does it respond around those levels? I’m fascinated with market profile. My market profile charts separate the regular trading hours from the overnight session. I’m not that concerned about the overnight session, but I like to see it separate from the regular trading hours. When you set up a market profile chart correctly you can very quickly identify those levels easily. Then I mark those levels off on 30 min charts so none of it happens quickly. A lot of times I’ll set alerts at the previous day’s level so I don’t have to be watching it. If an alert goes off, then I’ll usually wait to see on a 5 min chart if price establishes or rejects the level.

♟️If I’m looking to go short, I want to see that next candle open in the direction before I take the trade.

♟️I don’t enter on the first touch.

♟️The great thing with Fibonacci is that it gives you targets. At all all-time highs, you can use Fibonacci extensions to put potential price targets.

♟️I’m always looking for confluence, and anytime I can have three forms of confluence at a level, I feel pretty confident in that trade. I generally would never take a trade based on Fibonacci alone.
I need a support or resistance level, a previous day’s level, or some sort of level there for me to feel confident in taking that trade.

In my own brokerage account, I would rather wait for really high time frame confluence and then trend trade, meaning, I would try to get in and hold a position.

📝With prop accounts you need to scalp.

When people hear the word scalp, they start thinking that it means simply entering and exiting quickly and hoping that it works out. But that’s not what scalping the markets is about. You still need to have some sort of confluence, or some reason why you took that trade. You still need to
have a strategy behind it and if you lack a strategy, you’re probably going to fail.

Trying to call tops and bottoms simply doesn’t work.
⇒Trying to call the top, trying to call the bottom doesn’t work. I always look for pullbacks.
On a day that has an established trend, I let it trend and if I miss that entry, I look for the pullback. I like to see some sort of confluence on a pullback, to enter and scalp in the direction of the trend. I only ever scalp in the direction of a trend, and if there isn’t a trend on a day I’m going to sit out.

Q: Would it be accurate to say that you use♟️ higher timeframe Fibonacci levels to identify longer-term support and resistance, and then use Fibonacci on intraday highs and lows for short-term levels? You look for retracements to intraday support in the direction of the uptrend and exit when it reaches longer-term Fibonacci levels?
That’s it in a nutshell. I’m also always watching the previous day’s value area, which is very important to me.
📝If you open inside the previous day’s value area, it can often lead to a choppy open.
📝However, if the price action driven by Asia and London opens outside the previous day’s value – which encompasses 70% of the previous day’s activity – and then trades back into that value area and gets accepted, there’s an 80% chance it will fill that value area.
I think the value area plays are often overlooked by many traders. It’s a very simple concept to understand and a great play for new traders.
♟️When the price accepts into the value area, there is an 80% chance it will fill to the top or bottom of that area. Even if it doesn’t completely fill, it usually offers a great scalp opportunity as it moves up or down within the value area.

Bookmap is a completely stand-alone platform. You need to purchase a separate Rhythmic connection to see certain features within Bookmap.
I usually have three platforms open at all times: Bookmap, Thinkorswim, and NinjaTrader. I execute all trades in NinjaTrader, while Bookmap is a visual reference to see where liquidity is and set alerts for big orders.

I’ve blown up hundreds of prop accounts.

♟️I don’t trade the news. I don’t trade the open and I don’t trade the close.

What works for one person isn’t necessarily going to work for the next.
Early on, I started logging my trades in an Excel spreadsheet to identify patterns in my success. I found that my best trades typically happened between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. EST.

It’s also crucial not to just jump into the charts. You need to understand the overall market sentiment, upcoming earnings reports, and any breaking news. Even though I don’t trade the news, being aware of it is essential.

The market gets its jitters out in the morning then there’s a little intraday trend that you can capitalize on.
Sometimes it goes both directions, then you’re kind of pushing into the European time frame zone’s lunch period where things kind of go stagnate, go sideways.

I prefer waiting for the first trade at a great level or confluence to ensure it works. I start to build that little cushion for the day, even if it’s just a couple of hundred dollars, to set a positive tone.

A part of me doesn’t want the anxiety and stress so I look for the higher time frame or the better confluence, and try to take fewer trades.

I typically enter and exit with one to three contracts. If the price quickly moves in my favor and I build a good cushion, I pull my stop into profit to protect against the downside. If the price continues in my favor, I might scale in much bigger but typically it is one to three contracts in and out.

Q: How are your targets determined?
Vince: Everyone talks about risk/reward. That’s just not my style. I enter one to three contracts based on the confluence that I see. If I have only one or two pieces of confluence, it’s going to be a one contract entry. If I have multiple pieces of confluence and its higher time frame confluence, I’ll enter much more aggressively and those targets are based on that entry. That’s what I like to tell traders, that I trail my stops when I can. If I’m in a trade that’s moving in my favor, I like to trail based on confluence. I enter on confluence, and place my profit targets on confluence.
I never anticipate. For example, if I enter a value area play at the low of the value area and the price moves up to the top, I will definitely set my profit target a few ticks or a point or two below the top. As the price moves up, I tighten my stop really close within three points to see how the market reacts. If the price doesn’t pullback, I start moving my target up.

I tell traders to trade them in groups of three to five accounts at a time.
Get those to a mini target for the day, then select another group.

♟️Look at the big picture over 30, 60, or 90 days.

📝Scale with accounts, not with contracts.

Never withdraw part of that trailing drawdown.

Try living off your trading income while continuing your current job. Put your employment income in the bank and don’t touch it; live solely off your trading income for a few months. If you can manage that, then you might be ready to go full-time. If you can’t, then you’re not ready yet.