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Warrior Trading Blog

+$9k The Real Struggle of Day Trading | Day Trading Recap

What’s up, everyone? Ross here from Warrior Trading. So recap for today, we’ll go over the trades I took. Traded three stocks in two accounts, my main account and my retirement account. Finishing up about 1400 in my main account and about 7,300 in my retirement. That’s just under $9,000 on the day. Not bad.

 

Reminder as always, my results are not typical. Trading is risky and most beginner traders do lose money.

So take it slow and do yourself a favor and trade in the simulator before you put real money on the line. During this recap, the recap itself is fairly short, about six, seven minutes. Just going to quickly go over the trades I took. And then I’m going to get into talking a little bit about something that I’m sort of dealing with right now, which is trying to keep myself emotionally centered trading during a very choppy market where my P&L has been up and down, up and down, up and down.

I’ll have two or three good green days and then big red day, two or three good green days, a big red day. And while I’m making progress and I’m green on the year, and I’m grateful for that, I’m not up as much as I would be if it weren’t for those red days. And so I have this feeling of frustration, I’m tracking where my P&L would be if I didn’t have each one of those red days.

And I’m like, oh my God, if I hadn’t had those five red days, I’d be way up here. It’s like being in a competition or in a race with yourself, where you’re just feeling like you’re falling further and further and further behind, and there’s no catching up. And I don’t like that feeling. And that feeling can also lead to emotionally activated trading where you start trading overly aggressive, trying to overcompensate.

So I’m going to talk about some of the things that I’ve been thinking about on that topic and a couple techniques that are working for me to help keep emotions lower as we’re coming to the end of the month of March. We’ve got, what, five, six trading days left in the month. I want to just try to finish it up, have a good end of the month and go into April strong because April is pretty exciting. It’s our anniversary month.

Our anniversary month, what’s that? Well it’s seven years ago that I posted our most popular video on YouTube. It now has almost 10 million views. And I’m going to be reteaching the topic of that class this year for 2022. I’m also going to be teaching some other live classes on YouTube that I haven’t announced yet because I’m waiting for you to tell me what you want me to teach.

And so there’s going to be a link down in the description for you to register to our newsletter. When you register, you’ll get an email first with a copy of my best selling book titled How to Day Trade. I want you to read that and I want you to enjoy it. That’s yours for keeping. But you’re also going to get a link to surveys to give me feedback on what topics you’d like me to teach during the month of April.

And we’re also going to give you links to content that we don’t put on YouTube, but is only for traders that are on our newsletter. So make sure you guys register. You can check out the link in the description. We’ll pin it to the top of the comments. And maybe there’ll be a little overlay here that you can look at too.

All right. So that’s some exciting stuff coming for the month of April. And it’s an important reason for me to try to keep my trading dialed in a little bit so I can just… when I’m doing a lot of teaching, I try to trade sort of at a lower level, because when you are trading at the edge of your comfort zone, you’re going to have some really good green days, which is great, but you’re also going to have some big red days. And those big red days, since they’re at the edge of your comfort zone, are going to feel uncomfortable.

They’re not going to feel good. And then when you’re in that state, it can influence other areas of your life. And so if you’ve got big things going on, it may not be helpful to be stacking up emotions. So if you’ve got a wedding coming up, like your own wedding or something, it’s probably not a good idea to be trading at the edge of your comfort zone while you’ve got that other stuff going on.

So since we’ve got a lot of stuff going on for the month of April here at Warrior, I want to try to kind of dial back in, trade nice and easy for the rest of this month, get into the first part of April. Kind of get a little bit of a cushion. If I go red, keep the losses tight so I have small successful red days. And then that can kind of get me a little bit more even going through the month of April. All right. So I hope you guys enjoyed the recap.

As always make sure you’re subscribed to the channel. I will be going live every morning for the morning show for the rest of March and of course through the month of April. So make sure you subscribe to get the notification in the morning when I go live, because some days I go live at like 8:00, 8:30, other days, I don’t go live till 9:00, 9:15. Depends on what’s happening in the market. So make sure you are subscribed. All right. I hope you enjoy the recap and I’ll see you first thing tomorrow morning.

All right. So finishing the day up 7,384 in my retirement plus 1400 in my main account. So just under $9,000 green day and a day that has felt choppy and difficult from the beginning. My first trade was on ALLG earlier pre-market and on this one my first trade was a thousand dollar loss. So I lost a thousand bucks on it. I tried to buy, let’s see, I bought this dip right here at around 1960 and held for a while. Well, 15 minute, 10 minutes or so, until stopping out on this candle there for a thousand dollars loss, I was looking for the curl and a retest of this level here. We did end up getting that.

Despite that, I am still red 1600 on it in my retirement, I’m green 1400 in my main account, I’m down $200 on the stock today. I did not make money on it. So it made the move, but it was choppy and I lost money about… Let’s see, I was up on it and I lost the gains I had on this candle here. That’s where I got stopped out. Trying to buy a dip and then stopping out for a loss.

So disappointing price action on ALLG. DRTS, a little bit of sympathy momentum to it, but held much better. A move from 1350 all the way up to $20 and 65 cents. I made 2,000 bucks on it. Not a big amount of money. I got a partial fill as it squeezed up here around 1350, we got to move up to 14. It halted up. On resumption I did not do a dip and rip.

It ended up going into a second halt. And then on resumption, it squeezed up higher, and I did do a dip here, sold here, but then tried to add back. It ended up halting down, gave back some profit. Traded a couple times in this range for the break over [inaudible 00:06:40], but didn’t make a significant amount of money. So just wasn’t super easy.

And then surprise, biggest winner of the day, LLL, which out of nowhere pre-market squeezed from 350 to 450. I jumped in halfway through the squeeze around four, made $6,000 on the first trade. It pulled back. It made a little bit more in this area, as it ripped up to this next halt. Dip and rip all the way up to five and then a nasty pull back from 537 back down to 450. And then a rip back into another halt up, and then opened a top tick there of 63, which I didn’t see, but then drops all the way back down and now rallying back up.

So I’m starting to feel like at this time of day, I’m exposing myself to the risk of giving back potentially my entire morning of profit for a reward that’s very minimal. And it’s just because of the volatility. We’re seeing these big flushes, the pop and then the huge drop. And even with small size, I just don’t feel like with small size it’s really worth it.

And with medium to big size, I’m putting myself at risk of giving back a lot of profit. DRTS, I took a trade on that in this area for the break over 17, I hit a high of 1739, but now it’s back to 15. So I am feeling like the risk is not justifying the reward at this point in the morning to take any more trades.

And so that’s a good time to throw in the towel. I am at my high of day right now, not including commissions, just under $9,000. I hit a peak of about 8,000 pre-market and then I gave back about half of that on my loss on ALLG, where I went down 1600 on it because I was green on that one, but then I made back that on LLL and DRTS. So anyways, already went from up 8,000 to up only about 4,000. So now I’m grateful to be back to up 9,000. As I see something like this, I don’t even know what to think about a chart like this.

This is a weird chart. I mean, it’s burning long momentum traders and it’s also burning short sellers. So everyone’s getting burned on it. The high there of 37 feels like that’s a double top there, this is an unusual pattern. It really is. I’m not even sure what you would call that pattern because I haven’t seen that in a while. I’m really not sure.

So you’ve just got this double top resistance at 37 and then, look at that, that flushed back down 30, 40 cents. You keep catching drops like that and you could really get smoked. So I don’t know, I might be leaving money on the table here, but I am walking away with money in my pocket, which is pretty good. I don’t know where I’m sitting on the month right now. I haven’t looked in a few days. But I had a good day yesterday, a good day the day before. So have had three good days in a row, today is the smallest of those three days. And the fact is I started trading ALLG pretty early.

I think at most I was up four grand on it. Then out of nowhere, LLL came up and that was my biggest winner of the day. I was like, well, that’s what I’d rather trade, something moving quickly. And if we don’t have something moving quickly, I don’t know. Maybe I should just hang up my hat and come back tomorrow.

So that’s what I’m going to do. We did have great opportunities Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Today, Thursday, it’s been a little slower and it’s been choppy. So while there’s opportunity in here, it’s also quite difficult to manage risk. So that maybe makes it so it’s really not much of an opportunity. So that’s it for me here for Thursday, a short recap, not really much to go over, but traded LLL, DRTS and ALG.

Little profit in the main account, more profit in the retirement account. So not a $10,000, five figure day, but a green day nonetheless. And hey, seven, eight, $9,000 is nothing to sneeze at. That’s a good day all things considered. Keeping things in perspective. That’s a fantastic day. So have to be grateful for that. If those are my bad days, that’s great.

The big green days will happen, and when I first saw ALLG, I was like, okay, here we go. We might get something on this. We might get a breakthrough yesterday’s high, a move up to 24, then 25, 26, 27. It’s not unthinkable. We had that kind of move on ISPO. Now ISPO was a bit of the exception, but it’s a similar setup in that both are recent IPOs.

And then when DRTS started to open up, I thought, okay, well maybe I didn’t make a lot of money in this first move, but let’s see if it holds this level, gets back over volume weight average price, and we get another move to the high. Well, but at this point it’s coming back down too much. So it just doesn’t feel like that’s going to happen.

TCAT hitting the scanners. And we’ve had a number of stocks hitting the scans today, but I’ve been pretty selective about what I’m willing to trade. I think that’s been the right decision. So I’m going to shut it down here. Be grateful that I’m green and try again tomorrow. And see if I can finish this week with a green day on Friday. It doesn’t have to be a home run, but just a small green day or a small red day. So what’s a successful red day? A red day where you manage your risk well, so your losses are manageable, they’re small relative to your risk tolerance, and where you don’t give in to FOMO. You don’t average down, you don’t double down, you don’t revenge trade and you don’t dig the hole deeper and deeper and deeper.

So you can have a successful red day. And that’s important to get good at because red days are part of being a trader. You’re going to have red days 20% of the time, maybe more depending on your strategy. So if you’re going to be red one out of every four, five days, you better get good at just having successful red days. That is part of the strategy.

It’s just the way it is. So keep those red days tight. Don’t over trade when the market’s clearly got a headwind against you, and it’s not feeling hot. Wait for the next day for it to open up. Now that’s easier said than done because in the moment you’re feeling like I would feel so much better about myself if I was up any amount today instead of red, because being red doesn’t feel good, it feels like I’ve… You fill in the blank, it’s different for different people.

For me, it’s a feeling of if I’m red, then I feel like I’m a loser because I’ve lost money. Or I feel like how long can you keep losing money before you’re like, wow, this isn’t working anymore. And that brings back all the fears that I had at the very beginning of learning how to trade. And so you kind of talk about with psychology and stuff like that, how these early events in childhood and things like that can have such a profound impact on your life. I think in trading early events that are early in your trading career can have a very profound effect in the way you emotionally respond to loss. And so for me, starting trading from a bit of a point of desperation, from a very emotionally fueled place of having lost my father to cancer, having gotten some money from him that I was going to try to actively trade the markets with, losing the money, the tremendous feeling of guilt, of losing that hard earned money just so quickly in the market. The pressure that if I didn’t make this work, what would that mean about me? What would he think of me if he was still alive? All of that emotion is wrapped up into my trading career because that’s the foundation that I’ve built my career on.

And that’s really, really hard to overcome. And I’ve been doing this for over 10 years. And so I’m at a place where I’m still not totally past it. And on some days, or in some weeks or some months, or some years, it hits me harder. And this has been a difficult year in some ways, because I haven’t made as much as I made at the same period of time last year.

And so there’s a feeling of inadequacy. I’m not where I should be, disappointment in myself, frustration. What if I have a red month, what if I have a red year? What does that mean? The feeling that you’re only as good as your last trade, all of that stuff creeps back up. And so if you’ve got stuff like that going on, which there’s a great chance you do because we know trading is risky, we know that there’s a lot of triggers in the market that create these emotional responses. Then the best I think advice I could give is to try to recognize that you’re having that sort of internal dialogue that’s coloring the way you’re responding to red days.

Like, why am I so upset that I’m red? What is really the big deal here?

If I was down 9,000 today, how would I feel versus being up 9,000? And if you pose that question to yourself and you realize that being down the amount that you’re up today, you would feel devastated. Then another question is, how much does that amount of money actually change your life today? Does being down 9,000 in my case actually change my life today? No, it would be in my retirement account. It really doesn’t change anything. And is it most likely going to be water under the bridge a week from now or month from now?

If the answer’s yes then why is it having such a strong effect on your mood today? So trying to see it and recognize that that’s a tendency that you have, I think that’s a really important thing that I’m working on. And then trying to be more gentle with yourself as you sort of work through that.

If you’re starting to say mean things about yourself, those things are not helpful. It doesn’t help you to call yourself names. It doesn’t help you to throw your computer out the window. None of that helps you. It’s not kind. And those things that you might be saying about yourself most likely are not true. They’re colored by the lens of the emotion, which is so powerful.

You can be so meshed with that emotion, that it feels that is your reality. When in fact it’s just your perception. And people that have a different perception can tolerate possibly much, much, much, much larger losses than you without having any response. And that’s because they are in a position with possibly a lot more confidence, more experience, and maybe are just less emotionally triggered for a number of reasons that help them. But there’s sometimes just the luck of the draw being the way you are, your personality and this and that.

So anyways, I think that days like today, if I can have a small green day, like right now I have the opportunity of continuing to trade here for the rest of the day. And on the last trade I took on LLL on resumption from this [inaudible 00:18:43] I bought 12,000 shares. That was right here at 515 or so. And I was looking for that dip and rip. I got out maybe for break even, or a small loss. And I realized, I was like, man, after I dropped, that could have ruined your day. So maybe you should not be taking that level of risk right now.

And if you’re not able to sort of regulate how much risk you’re taking, then maybe the best thing to do is at a certain point walk away completely and say, “All right, I’m going to take a break and not trade for the rest of the day because I need to protect this progress that I’m making by having small green days and small red days.” And having big red days or having days where I swing from being up 25,000 to red 25,000, which happened to me, what was it, last week? Those can be very triggering. “And so to protect myself from that happening, I just need to avoid overtrading. Overstaying my welcome. Because the risk is just too high.

I have to avoid checking my phone throughout the afternoon because if I check it and I see that sure enough LLL ripped through 550 up to 650, 750, made new highs on the daily and is at $8, I’m going to feel FOMO. I’m going to feel frustration. I’m going to feel disappointment. I’m going to have such an uncomfortable feeling that the only way to alleviate that feeling is to come back and make money. Because if I come back and make money, then I don’t feel that I’ve missed out. But then that has me coming back later in the afternoon, I clearly missed a huge move, which you can’t make up for the fact that you missed it. So then if you overcompensate for missing that by trading it too high, then next thing you know, you could be the guy who’s down on the stock that’s up 400% on the day.

I’ve been that guy, that was me on Monday. Was it LLL? No, I don’t remember what stock it was, but in any case we had that 400% mover on NRSN I think it was, and I managed to lose money on it. Why? Because I over traded it. I missed the big part of the moves, and then I came back later in the day I didn’t trade it well. So I ended up trading it in this area and giving back the profit I had. And it was super frustrating. And so I just think it’s really important as part of building a strong foundation as a trader that you take steps to try to avoid falling into these traps in the market.

FOMO is a huge trap. If you find yourself giving into FOMO, then you’re going to start to find that you’re going to be on an emotional rollercoaster. And it’s your choice if you want to stay on it or step off it. But I’m trying to find a little bit more balance there. And that’s especially important for me right now, because I’m not having as good of a year as I had last year. So last year when I was really, really doing super well and I was having like $50,000 days back to back to back to back, I had such a cushion on the year, I had such a level of confidence that I was like, I can afford over trading. And even if I do over trade, I’m sure that I can probably make it back on another one because things are just so hot.

That’s not this market today. And right now sitting at, I don’t know what I’m at on the year, like 175,000 or 200 grand on the year. I’m two big red days away from potentially, I mean in one trade, if I got emotionally impulsive on an ALLG or a DRTS and bought 25,000 shares, I could lose a hundred grand.

Now that would be pretty bad, but it wouldn’t be impossible for me to have one day where I could give back 50% of my profit on the year. And then if I think the emotions are tough right now, they’re going to be a lot worse if something like that happens. So I’ve just got to be really, really careful to get in, get green and get out. And until I’ve been able to build a little bit more of a cushion on the year and until maybe we see a couple more weeks like this week, this week’s been phenomenal. So if we see a couple more weeks like this week, then maybe I can start to play a little bit in the deep end of the pool and take a little bit more risk, but right now I’ve got to keep it tight.

So I made some money here between 8:00 and 11:00 this morning, just under 9,000 bucks, and I’m going to shut it down. I’m not going to look at my screens for the rest of the day, and I’ll come back tomorrow ready for what Friday has to offer. So thanks as always for students tuning in. For those on YouTube, listening to the recap, I’ll put a link here, we’ll put it probably down in the… maybe pin it to the top comments and put it in the description. So it’s our anniversary in April. We’re going to celebrate the whole month of April. It’s the anniversary of when I opened Warrior Trading.

And it’s the anniversary of when I taught a year later my video on YouTube that is our most popular with almost 10 million views. It was class one of 12 of how to day trade. So that was the first class that I taught. It was a 12 chapter class and I put the first class on YouTube in 2015. So seven years ago. It’s got almost 10 million views now. And I’m going to reteach that class this year. It’ll be reteaching chapter one, class one, and that’s going to be this month. And also I’m going to teach a number of other classes on YouTube, put some free content out there, try to get people excited, inspired.

And so for those on YouTube, I would love for you to register and sign up for our newsletter. So we will email you a survey with some questions about what type of classes you want me to teach on YouTube. Students will post that survey link in the chat here so you can contribute as well. Those will be classes, they’ll be free on YouTube.

I’ll do them as a YouTube live broadcast. I’m not going to teach the entire curriculum, but some select chapters that maybe people are particularly interested in or people think would be especially helpful for beginner traders out there. People on the newsletter will also get a copy of my book, How to Day Trade, which I also also wrote in 2015. And we’ve got some other things that we’re going to be sending out to people on the newsletter. We send out daily emails with the link to the recap, the stocks that I traded on the day, and just keep you guys informed about what’s going on in the community and everything else.

So if you’re not already on that newsletter and you’re out there on YouTube, make sure you sign up and that way you can participate a little bit more in the stuff we’ve got going on for the month of April, which is right around the corner. So looking forward to April, it’s going to be a fun month. And yeah, if I can finish the month of March kind of slow and steady without any big red days, even if it’s without any big green days because I’m not taking as much risk, that is okay. I will live to trade another… Just get through the month and then keep myself nice and centered on even keel going into April. We’ve got a lot of stuff going on. I really don’t want to be bogged down with the emotional baggage of feeling upset about my trading and everything else. So I want to try to have a good month and that means finishing March in good shape and just keeping things slow and steady.

All right. So that’s it for me. I hope you guys enjoyed the recap and I will see you first thing here tomorrow morning, right around… Well, I’ll be streaming for students probably a little after 8:00 AM on Warrior. And YouTube, I’ll start the broadcast anywhere between 8:45 and 9:15, depending on what’s going on in the market. All right. Thanks, everyone. Have a great rest of the day. See you tomorrow.

Hope you really enjoyed that video and make sure you hit the thumbs up and subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already, our goal is to hit one million subscribers this year, but we won’t get there without your help. So please, please, please hit that subscribe button.