Day 44 of the $100k Challenge +$8,871.40 and BREAKING $100k Mark! | Ep. #48
Transcription of Episode Day 44 of the $100k Challenge
All right guys. So, here we are, day 44 of the small account challenge and I’m finishing the day up $8,871.40. This is the account that I started on January 1 with $583.15 and today I’m crossing the hundred thousand dollar mark. I didn’t think it was going to be this soon. At the very beginning of the year, I thought this might take me the whole year to get this far but obviously I had some incredibly strong trading in the first three weeks. I was able to quickly get myself up above 25,000 which was the hardest part of the challenge. Through the fortune of having good markets on my side and being able to get the right set-ups and the right trades, I was able to build up the account quickly.
From there, I just really put the pedal to the metal through February with $60,000 of profit and here we are in March. It’s March 8. Let’s see. This week I’m up $20,000. Last week I only made $5,000. On the month right now, I’m up $25,000.
This is definitely not what I was expecting because last week was so slow. I made 6,000 on Monday. I made 6,000 on Tuesday and then here we are $8,000 today. That’s 20 grand from $80,000 to $101,000 in three days of trading. So that’ll do it.
You know this is the whole mission behind this challenge, the rationale, the reason I did this was to show you guys that it is not about how much money you have in your account. If you have skills, you can make money. It’s really that simple. That’s why my focus is to teach you guys how to trade. I don’t want you guys to be followers. I don’t want you to follow me. I don’t want you to follow anyone else. I want to give you the skill because once you have that skill, you can make money.
This is an example where I came in with $583.15. That’s not a lot of money. Even if I was working minimum wage, I could probably over the course of a couple months, at most, put together $583. So, it’s not about having a lot of money. It’s really about having the skill and the experience.
Now, the skill and the experience can both come from trading the simulator. I know that trading in a realtime simulator is a hundred bucks a month and if you were really working minimum wage, you might not be able to afford that. Obviously, the classes we teach are not cheap. If you’re working minimum wage, that may also be difficult to afford but the point is really with a fairly small amount of overhead, almost anyone can get started as a trader. And, if you study, if you work hard, and you really understand the concepts, these are the type of results that are possible.
This is what I did in 44 days. Obviously, these results are not typical. I’ve never seen anyone else do this and I’ve been doing this for a long time but it is the reality. If you have the skill, you can generate some really good profits.
John L10, he’s in the chatroom, I think he already left for the day but he had a fantastic month in February. He made over $50,000, you know $10,000 less than me. He is one of our students. He’s probably going to be making more money than me pretty soon. He’s really crushing it. I don’t know where he’s at on the month right now but he’s doing an absolutely fantastic job trading the same stocks as I’m trading every single day.
My Process Each Day During The Challenge
My process every single day has been the same through this journey. I’ve documented every trade. Everything is going to be posted if it’s not already posted here on the web site, the 2017 Verified Earnings. I’ve got my broker statements. I’ve got the gains from SureTrader from January 1 to February 6 and then I’ve got my trades from SpeedTrader from February 7 to February 28, through the end of last month with my statement. I will upload my statement for March on April 5 or April 6 when I get it and I will show you that these were real trades. This is real money.
There will definitely be people out there who say that there’s no way that this is real. This is all a hologram and a hoax. You know what? Let them say what they want. This is real money. This is the real deal. These are real trades. It’s a real strategy.
We’ve got so many traders in the room trading side-by-side with me looking for these same set-ups and generating profit on these same trades. Of course, I’m super proud of you guys that you’re able to follow along and take these set-ups with me and help grow you own accounts and help get a little bit closer to living the dream. For me, this is obviously a … You know, I feel very, very fortunate to be in a place where I can make $100,000 in what is it 9 weeks? I mean, you know, 44 days but, those were market days so it’s obviously pretty ridiculous.
This has been an incredible month and a half and I just am so grateful that I made the decision to start day trading. That I didn’t give up when I blew up my first account. That I didn’t give up on the day when I lost $30,000 and cut my account in half. That I didn’t give up after all of those days when I let revenge get the best of me, let my emotions get the best of me. I always got back on the horse. And I always got back on the horse because I knew the potential that the market offered. I mean I could see that right away. You guys can all see that. This is the potential the market offered. Even though I never saw anyone do something maybe as dramatic as this, I certainly saw people who said they made millions of dollars a day trading and so I knew it was possible if I could master it.
Don’t be a Jack of All Trades
It all comes down to understanding one strategy. It’s like a swimmer. If you’ve got one, either the breaststroke, the crawl, the backstroke, if you got one technique, you can survive, right? But if you’ve got no techniques, you’re going to sink. If you’re sort of good at all of them but you really can’t swim that well, you’re probably also going to sink. You need to be able to have one strategy if you’re a swimmer. It’s the same with the market.
This is not about being a jack-of-all-trades. A jack-of-all-trades, and this is no pun intended, but a jack-of-all-trades is someone who’s so-so at everything and that is what a lot of Vermonters are like. Especially growing up with all the farms around here, a lot of farmers can work on the lawnmower. You know how to do a little bit of plumbing. You know how to do a little electrical. You could do a little roofing. You’ve got to be able to do a little bit of everything because that’s how you survive a rural lifestyle.
With the market, and really with today’s economy, it’s all about specialization. You have to specialize. When you specialize, then you start to gain a skillset that’s highly valuable. That’s why you have people that specialize specifically in repairing certain types of cars. You know, everything’s gotten so narrow in the skillset that you need for these different things. Trading is the same way. If you want to be a successful trader, you need to master one strategy. A jack-of-all-trades and a master of none is not something that works in the market and I know that from years of experience trading myself and years of working with students, watching students who are kind of so-so at five different strategies, who are trying to do five different things.
Now today I actually traded two different types of strategies. I traded my reversal strategy on Qualcomm, made 350 bucks and then I traded good old fashioned momentum strategy on AUXO and MYOS and I made $8,500. So, you can see which of those strategies is really paying the bills. That’s the one that I’ve really mastered. The reversals I like but Qualcomm is a $60 stock. I took 2,000 shares and I had $120,000 cash into that trade. Actually, I had $90,000 cash and I guess $30,000 of margin. Even with that amount of money, I was only able to make 350 bucks.
Whereas, with MYOS, this was a $3 stock, I had 15,000 shares not 17 so I had $45,000 into it. I had half the amount of money, half the amount of exposure and I was able to make eight times as much money. AUXO, I took 20,000 shares, it’s a good amount of risk. That was a $5 stock. On that one, I put almost $100,000 out there but I got a 6% return on the money in a matter of 15 minutes. That’s big. If you look at my gains today in total, my account is up almost 10% in a single day.
If I put all of my money right now, if I put this into a mutual fund for the rest of the year, I mean I would be lucky if it made 10% over the rest of the year. So, the bar is pretty low. When you come out to trade, to make more than 10%, you’re beating the market typically. If you can do 15, 20, 30%, you’re really beating the market. And, for me, obviously the percentage gains are … I mean it’s kind of a joke to even calculate my percentage gain from $583 up to a hundred grand.
Setting the Record Straight on Scalability
But, here’s the thing, and I’ve had a lot of people say this, and so let’s set the record straight here — People have said, “Ross, give me a break. I don’t believe that this is real money because if it was real money, you would have taken at the beginning of the year a $50,000 account and you’d be turning it into a million dollars or you’d be taking a $500,000 account and turning it into a billion dollars. Why aren’t you a billionaire yet if you can do this?” I said, “Okay here’s the problem, if I want to take a $500,000 account and turn it into a billion dollars, I would have to multiply every single trade that I took every single share by at least a thousand times.” You’re not going to be be able to buy 300,000 shares of these stocks. I mean you would have to be taking position size to the point where you’re actually taking a small stake in the company. You know, like a 5 or 10% stake in some of these companies, maybe even more for some of the low float stocks. That’s not realistic.
So, there’s a liquidity issue and this is something I’ve always known about my strategy. That there’s a limit. So, on the one hand, I could have started trading something … started with large caps or something like that knowing that those stocks maybe can afford a little bit more scalic. I might be able to buy 20,000 shares of Facebook and put 2 million dollars into the market and day trade it. I might be able to do that but even then, you have the issue of liquidity, of your own liquidity, of do you have enough money in your account.
Facebook obviously doesn’t have the type of ATR that a lot of these small caps have so you’d be settling on smaller percentage gains. That’s ultimately what happens. The larger your account gets, the smaller the percentage gains. Of course if you do 5% return on a 2 million dollar investment, that’s certainly a lot of money. I’m not going to disagree with that but that wasn’t the place for me to start because when I started, I had a small account so I couldn’t afford to trade with Facebook. I couldn’t afford to trade probably even with Qualcomm. I just couldn’t afford to.
I had to focus on those stocks priced between $3 and $10 that had the potential to move 30, 40, 50%. That’s where the big opportunity is and that’s why we see so much relative volume surge into these types of stocks each day when they get momentum.
You know the parabolic stocks that we see, like the DRYS that goes from $3 to $100 — you know there’s been so many, the DGLY, the LAKE, the AQXP, the KBIOs, the SAEX, there’s just dozens of them, that have gone from $1 or $2 to 20, or 25 or 30. It happens again and again and again. Those are all stocks going from that $2 to $8 range up to 20 and 30. Those are the types of trades that someone with a small account needs to be aggressive on.
Honestly, we haven’t had an amazing parabolic stock this year. The last one we had I would say was DRYS. We’ve had a couple that were really good but not as good as that. If I had been lucky enough to have one of those types of stocks when I was in this mindset to be really, really aggressive, I mean I could have had a 25, 35 maybe $45,000 day but even still my best day of the year so far is $22,000. Now that’s the best day I’ve ever had trading. My worst day I’ve ever had trading was a $30,000 loss. I’m hoping I can have my biggest green day eventually be bigger than my biggest red day. That would be something I would really like to achieve.
In any case, this is a strategy that is really good for growing small accounts. That’s essentially what I’m showing to you here. You could apply the same exact strategy to a $50,000 account or a $500,000 account but you wouldn’t be able to fully utilize all of your leverage and all of your buying power because you can’t buy 200,000 shares of a stock to try to get a 20, 30 cent move. It just doesn’t work that way.
Yes, there is a limit to how far you can scale this strategy but if you want to learn more about strategy that I used to take $583 and turn it into a 100 grand in 44 days, then definitely keep listening. I mean that’s the thing. This would put me on track, I guess, this is a 100 grand in the first quarter. That would put me on track for $400,000 this year. I did $222,000 last year. I don’t know. We’ll see. I’m not going to set the bar that high just because I don’t want to put that pressure on myself. I haven’t decided exactly what I’m going to do from here but for the time being I’m just going keep trading, keep trying to build up this account and keep doing my thing. Maybe I’ll just kind of keep doing this at at least for the foreseeable future and see where it takes me. It’s possible that in six months or eight months, I’ll have doubled the account or tripled the account but the percentage gains are certainly going to decrease.
The only way that I will have a $90,000 day or a $100,000 day or whatever is if I started taking an exceptional amount of risk and I don’t want to put myself into a position where I risk giving back this whole challenge. That would obviously be a really horrible thing to do.
In any case, I just wanted to get those couple of things out of the way. Number one, my goal is to teach you guys the strategy not for you to look at this and think, “Oh, I can just follow Ross on every trade he takes.” No, I don’t want you to do that. Following is not the way you achieve really independence, success, sustainability. What if I fall off the map? Who knows? What if I get hit by a bus and then what? You’ve lost your source of income. You need to be able to … This is the whole thing you teach a man or woman to fish, they eat for a lifetime. That’s what I want to do.
I want to teach you to define these set-ups side-by-side with me and look at John as a role model as well. He’s been doing this side-by-side with me and if I’m out of the office for a week or whatever, it’s not going to slow him down. He’s still going to keep doing his thing. It’s no big deal.
So, that was the first thing and then the second thing — the scalability, the strategy and the reason why I’m not a billionaire. Of course, I wish that I had the skillset or the mind to really pour into the fundamentals of a company and say look, this is a stock that’s going to double this year. Who wouldn’t like to have been able to put $500,000 into NVIDIA last year when NVIDIA went from, look at the daily chart, this thing went from what is it like 10 bucks, 20 bucks to over 120. That’s just a different level and that’s not where I’m at. I mean that’s for the guys that are good with that stuff but everyone kind of has their skill.
To me, that’s more that macro kind of picture if you’re looking at the big picture, you’re looking at the fundamentals and I’ve never really been good at that. I focus on very short-term. I focus on the technicals. So, for me, it is 100% technicals. Fundamentals are a very small part of what I do. When I focus on the technicals, I’m looking for a stock today that has high relative volume. Again, when I started trading, a stock like NVIDIA that went from $20 to $120 when I had a really small account, that wouldn’t have been enough to … I mean if I had put $500 into this, at the end of the year I’d have 2,000. That doesn’t do it right? I mean it’s fantastic if you put a 100 million into it but if you put a small amount of money into it, it doesn’t work.
Again, going back to this whole strategy for me evolved from a place of needing to generate relatively consistent returns using a small amount of capital. The goal being $100 a day, $200 a day. When that’s your focus, the skillset that develops is what you see here. It’s not really an ability to be a really strong long-term investor because I was never in the position to really grow that skill.
Now, that we’ve kind of gotten that out of the way, we’ll talk about today’s trades which are really not anything that special. I mean a couple of good trades today that just worked out pretty well and got me over the hill but it’s nothing different from what we’ve seen in the last 43 days looking for momentum.
My Daily Routine
So, what is my process each day? My process is pretty much the same. I pull out my gap scanner, and those of you watching in the chat room I’ll move this out of the way so you can see, so I pull out my gap scanner right here and the first thing I look at you know what’s our gapping stocks? What’s going to open higher than it closed yesterday?
I can see, I’ll show you guys on Facebook, these are the gappers from this morning and these are my gains here today. You can see I started today with $92,000 and 8,800 in total profit. PRKR was our leading gapper and you know what we were watching this yesterday and I’m kind of annoyed that I didn’t do anything with it. The last time PRKR had really good news on a copyright infringement or trademark patent type of thing, it did make a pretty parabolic move but it’s again not my MO to buy a stock at 3:30 in the afternoon and then hold it over night. When was the last time you saw me do that? Literally, during this challenge and through all of last year, I have not done that one time, held a stock overnight.
I said, “Well, you know whatever. I’ll watch it tomorrow morning. We’ll see how it looks and maybe I’ll take a trade.” So, this morning it’s gapping up 40% on 2.3 million shares of volume and I thought, and I thought, “Well, it certainly looks interesting but my concern is that we’re already trending down.” So, you can kind of see that I would say the point that marked the front side of the move to the back side was right around 7:40 am when we broke that 9 moving average. That breakdown there kind of ruined the chart. Again, I’ll show you guys on Facebook live. That point there broke the chart and from there we just sold off. Once the bell rang I was like, “Nah, I don’t think it’s going to be good,” and it just continued to be weak. So nothing on that.
Also on the scanner we had MFIN, only 12,000 shares, TAX, KTOV, SHIP and none of these really looked that great. So, this was actually one of those days where I didn’t take a trade in the first five minutes. I just sat tight. I mean I really just kind of sat tight and waited for something to pop up on the scanners. I mean that’s pretty much my focus. I use that high day MOMO scanner in the back and I’m just waiting for something to pop up.
The first one today was MYOS. MYOS is a stock that made a really big move, now I guess it’s about a month ago where it squeezed up from $1.30 to $7 in one day. We’ve seen 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 so far at least 5 maybe 6 pretty impressive days, that each gave us some pretty good opportunities for gains. I’ve made a good amount of money on this stock this year. When someone said, “Hey, Ross, look at MYOS. It’s spiking up,” part of me was like, “Well, I’ll take a look at it but I don’t think the daily chart’s very good because the last time it didn’t hold that level,” which was this red day. But, I was like, “All right. I’ll take a look at it. I’ll see how it was.” And, I see it popping up and I immediately thought, “Okay, actually this does look good because it’s above the 200 moving average. It’s above the 20. It’s above the 50. It’s also above the 9 moving average.” So, it’s above those resistance points, number one. Number two it’s still of course a former runner with a relatively low float and number three at this point ,it’s already up 10, 15% so it’s getting some volume. I said, “All right. I’m going to jump in this.” I jumped in with about 15,500 shares with an average of 355.
My average was a little on the high side and the reason is because I added it at 45 and then I added again over the half dollar. So, it just ended up giving me a higher average. I got filled at the top of that order. We popped up to a high of 375. So, immediately on 15,000 shares, I was up 3 grand and then it drops all the way down to 335 and I was down 2 grand or maybe actually 3 grand. I was very quickly like okay.
What’s that rule that I made two weeks ago when I had a couple of stocks do this to me? The rule was when it comes back up to break even, get out flat. Don’t try to make it a winner anymore. If you can at break even, consider yourself lucky because you were just down $2,000 or $3,000. So, it starts to pop back up and I was basically like you know what, I like the set-up. I’m just going to hold it. I held it. It pops up to a high of 86 and I’m thinking $4, back of my mind target and then it flushed down to 343.
So on this one, as it started to flush down, it hit 86 and then it pulled back down to 360 and there were I think there was maybe a 12,000 share bid at 360 and I saw the bid there. It was like 12,000 and then it was 10,000, 8,000, 7,000 and I said, “You know what? I got to just bail.” I hit the bid and I was out. I only made an average of 16 cents total on that one and I sold partial. I sold some in the 80s but I think only 6,000 shares or something like that. It just didn’t end up being exactly what I wanted. I was thinking it had the potential over $4 to really get some action. It got a little bit of resistance in that area and then washed right back down. That was essentially a false breakout on the 5 minute chart.
So, I take the MYOS trade and make 2300 bucks and I’m like, “All right, that’s good.” In the back of my mind I wasn’t even thinking $100,000 was even going to happen today. I was just like, “Yup, good trade. Now what’s next?” The next one was QCOM. This came up on our scanner as early as 9:35 surging up on the scanner. It was on the reversal scanner because it had 5, 7, 8 and then 9 and 10 consecutive green candles. So, you guys can see this again for those of you on Facebook, you can see all those consecutive green candles. This is just a matter of statistics. When you have this many green candles, you eventually need to get a red candle. They’re not going to stay green forever. So I just said, “Well look, the first candle to go red, I’m going to short,” and that’s what I did. I just shorted 2,000 shares off the high at $58 — 5802 was my short.
Now the low of this candle right here was 5801 and I actually thought I shorted it on this red doge. I actually thought this was going to break the whole $1.58 right away and I didn’t want to short a 5798, the low of the previous one minute candle. I figured I would just short just a little early because I want to short at the whole dollar. I also thought once we break that whole dollar, we might flush through and all of a sudden drop back down to 5790 and then I won’t get filled. I was like, “I’ll take a short.”
So I shorted 2,000 shares at 5802 with my stop at high of day. The high of day on this was 5808. So I was risking 6 cents, $120. That’s not a lot of risk. So I risked 6 cents. We dropped down to 5790 and then we popped back up and right here when we were hovering at 58, I had my hand on the buy button to cover. I was about to cover if we broke over 58 but we didn’t. We dropped back down to 5781 and down here down to the 20 moving average, down to 5768 and down to 5767 and then I covered as we started to pop back up. I covered 1,000 shares right around 88, 87, another 500 shares around 70. I think another 250 around 68 and then finally the last 125 shares once I was almost all out.
Overall, this was a super solid trade, super clean. Now, we also had a good 5 minute set-up because this candle at the top was a doge and so we knew the first candle to make a new low on the 5 minute was also something to watch so with my short at 58, the low of this candle was 5790 but I didn’t want to double there because I already had 2,000 shares. I didn’t really want 4,000 and I didn’t know if this would be weak enough to roll over.
The other thing in the back of my mind was of course, what if this stock gets halted pending news. I mean, what if? It opens at $65. With 4,000 shares, that could be horrible. I could lose $50,000. It could get pretty bad. That’s part of the issue there, knowing that I got a lot of capital tied up just to trade with a little bit less size. So, 2,000 shares, nice easy trade at $350.
At that point I kind of thought, “All right. Maybe I’m done for the day. Things are slowing down.” I saw people throwing out in the room AUXO. I pulled it up and I was like, “All right, I see it,” but when I first pulled it up, there wasn’t much volume on it — 50,000 or 70,000 shares. You guys were like, “Oh well. Take a look at it. It’s a recent reverse split and there’s a 750 price target on it.” I was like, “All right, I’ll watch it and if it starts to get volume, I’ll just wait for a little pull-back opportunity.” I started watching it right around 4, 410, 412. So it goes to 410. It goes up to 425 and I was like all right and then in this candle, it goes up to 435 and I was like okay, all right, whoa and then here we go up to 472. So now I’m like okay maybe I’m missing the whole thing and I said, “I’m going to wait for the first red candle.” We got a red candle right here. This candle hit a high of 483 and pulled back to 459.
At this point, I was like clearly this stock has a lot of potential. It’s already moved up quite a bit. It has that recent reverse split potential that we’ve seen on some of these other stocks like GEVO and KBSF and some other ones. For those reasons, definitely worth keeping a close eye on. So, I said, “First red candle, next candle to make a new high will be my entry. Ideally, I’d like a nice clean bull flag — a nice clean pullback but if I don’t get it, then that’s fine. I’ll just jump in at 83.” Jumped in 5,000 shares at 83 and we pop up from 83 up to the 90s and I used my hotkey, Ctrl 1, to add 2,500 shares. I press it once and twice. Now I’ve got 10,000 shares. I press it a third time and a fourth time — now I’ve got 15,000 shares. When we’re right at $5, I said, “All, I’m just going to add another 5,000” — 20,000 shares with an average of 494.
Now, this was risky because my stop potentially on this was all the way back down to 450. It might have been hard to keep the stop much tighter than that. So the risk was higher on this. I think on this one I realized this is a home run potential stock. It’s got everything I want. I’m seeing lots of traders throwing it out on Twitter and stock twits, people are watching it. I’m going to jump in and let’s see what it can do.
The Trade that Put me Over $100k
So, I’m in 20,000 shares at 494. We pop up to a high of 43 and then we pulled back here down to 05. We come back up to 40 and when we can’t break that level right there, that’s when I said, “That’s it. I’m throwing in the towel.” I sold at 535 and 525 and that was it — $6,454.
This had the potential maybe to go over 550 up to 575 up to 6. It just couldn’t do it today. For whatever reason, didn’t have that amount of momentum but it was enough to lock up $6,000 and put me over the $100,000 mark. That was the last trade here of this challenge and I’m definitely thankful for it.
Almost every single one of these, I found using my trade idea stock scanners. Between the trade idea stock scanners and our community where this morning we had around 1300 or traders all logged in at once. You know between traders calling out ideas in our chatroom, stock twits, Twitter and of course trade ideas, I’ve been able to find the momentum each day. It’s the same process. I look for the gap scans. I look for the set-up and then I usually wait for the first pullback, whether it’s on the 1 minute or the 5 minute timeframe. That’s pretty much it for today.
Tomorrow we’ll keep doing our recaps. We’ll keep trading and we’ll just keep growing this account one day at a time. The real thing that I wanted to do was show you guys that you could take $583 and turn it into 100 grand. I’ve achieved my mission and I hope you guys have enjoyed watching me on this journey. It’s been at times very stressful and at times embarrassing when I’ve made mistakes, taken big losses and had to admit that I made a mistake, that I got emotional, that I got too aggressive. You guys have been able to see the whole thing. You can watch it all on YouTube from day 1 all the way up here through day 44.
Again, if you guys have questions, those of you on Facebook or YouTube, you can post them in the comment section. Those of you in the chatroom, I’ll answer questions for you here. So, yes, we are burning the celebratory candle today. It smells like victory. This is a good one. This candle’s been in the box, sitting next to my desk and I’ve been thinking about the day I would open it up. I was thinking maybe it would be a week or two from now but I’m super happy to do that today.
Let’s see, to answer your questions, now Daniel, I had some days during this challenge that were pretty bad. My worst day I lost $13,000. It’s not to say that every single day was a green day. I’ll obviously have the re-cap maybe I’ll do the re-cap at the end of the week going over this whole challenge. But yeah, you know, I definitely had some pretty bad days and I had get back on the horse and put the pieces back together and regain my confidence a little bit. This has happened to me enough times in my trading career though that I was able to get back on that horse knowing that look I’m the same guy that made $200,000 last year. I’m the same guy who lost 30 grand and then made back every single penny of it and then some obviously. I can do this. I’ve got this.
Confidence Comes from Experience
That confidence comes with experience. As a beginner trader, it’s really important that you trade with smaller size. When you have set backs, they’re not as devastating. For me as a beginner trader when I lost, first losing 15,000 on a bad trade and then losing 30,000 on another bad trade, those are really, really big losses for me at that point. It felt insurmountable for me to be able to bounce back and get over it but I did and you guys can too. Anyone who is sitting where I am, who is a profitable trader and is consistent knows what its like to have those days where you get beaten up and you take a big loss. It’s humbling. That’s one of the things I say about this job. Yes, we can be very, very successful. We can make a lot of money but you can’t get spoiled with that because you know you’re going to have a day where the market slaps you in the face and you give back some profit. I think for most traders that helps keep us humble on the fact that in one day I probably just made more than most Vermonters make in two months.
Mark, earlier in this journey of building this small account, during the first couple of days, my strategy for cutting losses was a little different. My trades for the most part they had to work almost immediately or I would get out. Most of my losers were really short trades because I would get into the trade and it would drop right away and I would sell. I would just be out. Or, if I got in and it was pausing and I was up only 3 or 4 cents, I would just get out because I couldn’t afford a loss. I mean I started with only $83 cushion over the minimum account size. I really couldn’t afford more than one loss.
That’s kind of what it was like. I’d get in. I’m expecting an immediate breakout. Now I’m expecting an immediate breakout because I’m buying at the apex point. I’m buying the first 5 minute candle to make a new high, the first one minute candle to make a new high. So, I’m buying a set-up that is very well-recognized and if it doesn’t work, there’s something wrong with it, maybe the stock is too heavy, maybe there’s a hidden seller, whatever the case may be but I just would get out. Now, the problem is that’s become harder to do as my position sizes have increased. You can’t usually just market in with 20,000 shares and then get right out a minute later if you don’t like it because you’re going to loose 20 cents maybe in slippage. You have to have more conviction. You do have to hold through some of these pullbacks sometimes. I’m willing to hold through a pullback on the right type of stock. A stock that has that home run potential. Again, that means being pretty selective about the stocks I’m willing to trade.
Today I took three trades. This week total I’ve taken an average of 3 trades a day. Yesterday I took 4. The day before I took 3. It’s not about trading a lot. I’m up $20,000 this week on 10 trades. You know, $2,000 average winner and obviously they aren’t all winners but it just goes to show it’s not about trading a lot. It’s just about being really selective. My accuracy this week is 70%. Average winners this week are 25 cents; average losers are 11 cents; 2 to 1 profit loss ration; average shares size 10,000 shares.
Again, I’ll answer more questions in the comments so always come back and leave your questions. I’ll make sure I’ll get to them a little bit later on. Otherwise, I’ll see you guys all first thing tomorrow morning. All right, day 45. Thanks guys.