Day 49 of the $100k Challenge -$5.9k on my 4th Red Day | Ep. #53

All right, guys, so let’s do our mid-day market recap. Here we are, on the other side of that big snow storm. Today is day 49. Now, I want to remind you guys all that Friday, of course, is Saint Patrick’s Day, and so we are hosting a Saint Patrick’s Day sale, which is 30% off everything at Warrior Trading. I’ll put this up here so you guys can see it, for those of you who are in the chat room or watching on Screen Share. So there you go, 30% off everything.

Coupon code is Lucky 30. All right, guys, so if you’re a current member, like a current … Let’s say currently a monthly member, you want to upgrade to the annual, you can upgrade and save 30%. If you’ve been thinking about taking one of the classes, then obviously this is also a great time to get started. So that coupon code is up on the website, Lucky 30. You guys can check it out.

Now, one of the things that I want to talk about today of course is my trading for the last couple days. I seem to have fallen into a little bit of a rut. This has happened to me before. It’s part of trading. One of the things for me is that part of being really transparent about taking $583 and turning it into 100 thousand bucks is showing you the winners and the losers.

Now, I’m like still just so thankful that I crossed the 100 thousand dollar mark before I fell into this rut. It would have been so frustrating to hit like 99 thousand and then drop down. Fortunately, I broke over 100, so I hit my challenge, got to 101 thousand. But now in the last four days, I’ve had four red days. I don’t know the last time I had four, back to back red days. I mean, it’s been a really long time.

Obviously, this is a little disappointing. Today was the worst of them all. I lost 59 hundred bucks, $5,916 in the red. What’s going on here? For those of you on Screen Share or on Facebook Live, I’ll show you the P and L there. I’ve got this one comment from our buddy Camel Rider who says, “It’s part of the game. You continue to inspire me. Thank you.” Which I appreciate.

We do get a lot of thumbs up when I post the losses because of the fact that this is me being transparent. It’s very easy to show the winners. Lots of traders show the winners, but they don’t show the losers, because no one likes to talk about the losers. You don’t like to think about it, having a day where you lose 3 thousand, or 4 thousand, or 6 thousand dollars is not necessarily the type of day that you want to show off to all your friends on Twitter or Facebook, or that makes for really impressive marketing.

But for me, it’s actually kind of the opposite because this is just another example of me being a transparent trader and showing you the ups and the downs. You know yeah, we had a lot of really good ups between January 1st and day 44, which was a week ago today when I broke the 100 thousand dollar mark.

In that hot streak, I had multiple 10 thousand dollar days. I had a 15 thousand dollar day. I even had a 22 thousand dollar day. The market has been really good to me so far this year. But having said that, I have fallen into a little bit of a rut the last four days, and I do need to kind of find a way to respond to that. This is something that we definitely will be talking about as we get ready to launch our new round of live day trade courses.

Again, this is something that I’ve mentioned a couple times, but we’ll be starting a new round of live day trading courses. I believe we’ll be starting on March 27th. That’ll be class one of the new day trade course. For those of you who want to attend those courses live, if you’re a current Warrior Pro student, you’ll of course have access. If you’ve been thinking about joining, this will be a great time.

During that class, we’re going to talk about … One of the classes, one of the chapters, we’ll be talking about how to handle what you do when you fall into a rut and how to get out of it. This has always been my process. My process when I fall into a rut is to step back and to look at what’s working and what’s not working.

I mean, it’s really that simple. This is what’s always saved me is having my metrics. I track all of my trades in Excel, and I of course also track them on Trader View. Now, although I’m not going to be able to import today’s trade into Trader View until tomorrow, at the end of the week,

I’ll be able to import these, and I’ll be able to kind of look at the big picture. Last week, on Monday I made 56 hundred. On Tuesday, I made 62 hundred. And on Wednesday, I made $8,800. In three days, I made 20 grand. But then, things kind of went flat and started to dip down, and in the last four days, I’ve lost 15 thousand.

Yes, I’m still net green. I’m still up about 10 thousand on the month. But this is a little disappointing since I was up 25 thousand, and now the month is almost halfway done and I’m only at 10 thousand bucks. So for me, that’s well off what I did last month, which was 60 thousand dollars.

Now, maybe that’ll be the best month I’ll ever have in my career as a trader, and I’ll just have to rest my hat on a 60 thousand dollar month, and for the foreseeable future, I’ll be in the 20, 30 thousand dollar range. That would be fine. I’d be okay with that. 20, 30 thousand dollars a month is 200, 300 thousand dollars a year. So I have no problem with that. But obviously, last month was just really good, and I’d like to think it wasn’t just a one off, that it’s something that I will be able to repeat.

What’s happened in the last couple days? Well, in the last couple days, what I’ve noticed is that I haven’t seen the follow through that I was expecting. Now, yesterday, when I lost 22 hundred or 26 hundred, I actually thought I was trading relatively well. I really didn’t have a problem with any of the trades I took yesterday. They were good set ups, they just didn’t work.

I positioned myself maybe a little too aggressively in terms of share size. But positioning myself aggressively is how I made 100 thousand dollars in 44 days. That’s nothing really that different, it just didn’t work out.

Today though, and a little bit the day before yesterday and the day before that, I was chasing one minute set ups. This is kind of been something that’s hard for me to come to terms with, the fact that sometimes when I chase a five minute set up, it’s absolutely … Or chase a five minute or a one minute set up, it absolutely seems to be that that was the right thing to do.

I’ll show you an example, I’ll just leave this here for you guys to see. I’ll show you an example. CERU today, I had a trader who said … Well, I had a trader who said, “Look, I see your P and L.” You stopped out of whatever it was I even traded, EVRI, and I missed CERU. I said, “Well, yes. In hindsight you could certainly say that.” This went from $2.60 all the way up to $3.40, so a big move.

But where’s the clean five minute set up? There actually wasn’t one. I just kind of squeezed. I mean, the only thing you could say is maybe a red to green move, maybe. You’ve got a little bit of a red to green move here. It dipped down and a break over $2.50, and that got us up to three. But if you missed that red to green move, then where was your entry? When you look at the one minute chart, you can see, “Well, you know, you had a little bit of a one minute pull back right around here at $9.49.

You had another one kind of right around here at $9.48. And another one here, and another one here.” Maybe this was one of the cleanest ones at $10.06. You start to get some cleaner pull backs once it kind of opened up, but all of these would have been chasing on a five minute extension.

You’re extended on the five minute, but on the one minute, these would have been decent spots to get in. In this case, trading the one minute was really the only way to get a good profit on this. By the time you got the five minute set up, where you got three candles of pull back, and the first candle to make a new high, it was already so extended that that got rejected. It didn’t hold that level, right? It just, it popped up and then it dropped back down. This is CERU, a trade where jumping in on the one minute set up was the right thing to do, especially if you missed that first red to green opportunity.

But then, you look at EVIL, which I got in off the high day scanner. I jumped in this one … Sorry, EVRI. I feels more evil. EVRI. Let’s see. There we go. I’m having a typo. This one, you know, I saw it starting to squeeze up, and before I got in, I checked to see is there a headline on this? Because I was like, “Okay, wow. This thing just moved from, you know, $3.50 up to $4.

It’s opening up on the daily chart. 55 million share float. It’s not super low float, but it’s clearly strong.” I check the news and I see that there was a headline, “After hours.” I was like, “Okay. There’s news. It’s surging up. I’m just gonna jump right in at the whole dollar of $4.”

Now, I was buying really into an extension. I mean it was just squeezing up and I bought. I bought it at four, it popped up to a high of $4.27. Then, it pulled back here, down to $3.80. It was like, “Ugh. I go from being up 27 cents to down 20 cents.” It pops here back up to … Ugh, this guy. It pops here back up to a high of $4.10, drops down to $3.73. I hold through its consolidation.

I give it a chance. It’s holding at a 20 moving average. But then obviously on this candle here, I had to throw in the towel. I did. I got stopped out with slippage, and it came all the way down to $3.63. I filled at $3.66. I even accidentally went short and lost on the short as well. Because I was short at 66, which was the low of the pull back. 63 was the low, but I was short three cents above the low.

Just so, so frustrating. On this one, in hindsight, I should’ve waited for a one minute pull back. I jumped in at the whole dollar thinking that it was showing strength and it would continue to be strong. Obviously it just rolled over shortly after I got in. I suppose I had an opportunity to sell here, but this was a very short pop. I was thinking it would hold that level and continue.

That was that one. KOOL I did try to do a red to green move on. You can see here, first candle to make a new high was at $3.45. I got in there at $3.45, we popped up to 47, and then dropped back down. So a relatively small loss on that, $134. Today was one of those days where I just didn’t get the follow through on that one trade that I took. It put me at my max loss, and then I wasn’t able to continue trading.

For those of you on Facebook, I’ll be uploading this recap over to YouTube, so you guys will be able to see it there and see the charts that I’m talking about and everything like that. I’ll upload this a little later this afternoon. Okay so, again, this is one of those days where I’m in the red. I think that when I sort of think about what am I doing right, what am I doing wrong?

If I look at my average losses this week, they’re 12 cents. So 12 cent losses this week. Well, what were my average losses last week? My average losses last week were, let’s see, looks like eight cents. Yeah, sorry. It was actually 10 cents last week. So my average losses, the average loss really hasn’t changed that much. So then what’s else has changed?

Average success rate is only 33%, so that’s really bad. My average profit is only four cents, because this week, I’ve only had one really good winner, and it was only 10 cents, which is horrible. I mean, it’s really, really horrible. And I’ve had two trades that were either break even, or just two cent winners. So my average winners are small, and my success rate is low right now.

What can I kind of draw out of that? Well, number one, I’ve been chasing one minute set ups maybe a little bit too much. Not yesterday, but definitely on EVRI. EVRI was a one minute set up that I chased. KOOL was fine, it was acceptable, didn’t work out. AUXO was a trade that I took on Monday. If we go back to that one on Monday, let’s see, this one I jumped into out of the gates and I think that I got in it too high, similar to EVRI.

I didn’t wait for a clean, one minute pull back before I got in. I just sort of jumped in knowing it was strong, and it had been strong on some of the previous days. The real … And that was the same thing that happened on Friday when I lost on SNGX. On Friday, SNGX, these are all stocks that I got in off the high day scanner, but I didn’t wait for a pull back before getting in.

I just, as soon as I saw it hitting, I jumped right in. That, in a strong market, works just fine. But in a weak market, it really doesn’t work at all. So, SNGX on Friday, you can see this thing popped up to $2.88, and then came all the way back down. So it was not clean at all. All right, and that’s kind of … So that’s the big takeaway that I’ve noticed in the last four days.

That I’ve been jumping into one minute set ups, expecting to see continuation, because that’s certainly what we saw last month and the month before, and these last four days, we really haven’t been seeing that. What I have done is waited for some five minute set ups. Let’s see, NVLS yesterday, I took a five minute set up on this one.

Remember I said I didn’t want to chase it, I wanted to wait for the five minute set up. I waited for the five minute set up. The first candle to make a new high was my entry on the five minute chart, and we went from $3.44 to $3.47. We broke out by three cents and then we failed. So that was a false break out. I’ll show you guys who are watching on Facebook Live. That right there’s a false break out.

It popped up, it broke the high by three cents, and then it dropped back down and got rejected. Obviously that didn’t work. That’s kind of, again, where I looked at that set up and I felt like if I had gotten in on the one minute chart, I would have done better. I waited for a five minute set up and I ended up getting stopped out. When you look at the one minute chart on NVLS, I’ll pull this back for you guys as well, you look at it and you realize that it didn’t pull back once. I mean, you can’t see a pull back there. It just went basically straight up and then rolled over.

Here’s the thing, the fear of missing out can sometimes encourage us to get into these trades when they’re squeezing up, because we don’t want to miss the winner right? We don’t want to miss that opportunity. But obviously when they get to this point, if they don’t pull back, they’re not giving us a safe opportunity. They’re not giving us the ability to manage our risk, and so we really shouldn’t take the trade.

I would say waiting for a pull back is probably the most important thing. Jumping in when stocks are squeezing is risky. Being aggressive and taking risk is how I grew my account, and when you’re in a strong market, with really good follow through, which we certainly saw earlier this year, you can get away with that.

But it can also get you a little complacent, and it can build in some bad habits, because when the market becomes a little slower and a little more tricky, you have to adapt. I haven’t been as quick to adapt. I’ve been kind of continuing to do the same thing, and just sort of figuring, “Well, I’ll keep doing the same thing. I’ll take some losses, but you know, when it starts to turn, then I’ll just, you know, start moving back up.”

At the same time, I can only go so long on a red streak before I have to just really make a change. This is sort of what I propose for myself would be that instead of buying at half dollars or whole dollars, which is what I did on EVRI, I got in at the whole dollar, four dollars. Instead of buying half dollar or whole dollar entries, for the time being, I’m going to wait for one minute or five minute pull backs.

Now, I will trade the one minute chart if we have a one minute bull flag. If we have a clean pull back, I’ll trade the pull back, whether it’s on the one minute or the five minute, and whether it’s a bull flag, or a flat top break out. But I’m not going to buy into the extension, because right now that’s not working. Obviously, every trader needs to be able to adapt and to make some adjustments to their strategy based on the way the market is.

Right now, the market is a little bit tricky. I’ve given back some profit and it doesn’t seem, at least right now, like it’s bouncing back quickly. I also know that Thursdays and Fridays are not my best day, and here we are Wednesday, tomorrow’s Thursday, then Friday.

So I’m going to make this adjustment going into the end of the week. This week is not going to be about finishing green. I’m down 10 thousand on the week. This week is going to be about really … I mean it’s just about breaking that cold streak and starting to get some green trades under my belt and kind of rebuild that confidence. But if there aren’t good set ups and there aren’t clean set ups, then maybe I just won’t trade.

I mean, it’s better to not trade than to lose 5 thousand dollars, obviously. That’s kind of the thing that I’ll be looking at. I still want to look at reversal trades when I see them. I’ll again, trade the one minute and the five minute on those set ups. But for momentum, I am going to just be a little bit more selective about what I’m willing to trade.

That may mean I trade a little bit less, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think that when you have strong markets, you put the pedal to the metal, you get aggressive, you stack up the profits. And then when the markets are slow, you got to ease back, and I haven’t been as quick to ease back.

That’s in part because of the fact that I’ve already had two times this year where I had two day red streaks where I had … This was back in February that I lost 5 thousand … No, let’s see. What day was that? Yeah, I lost 4 thousand on a Thursday and then 5 thousand on the Friday, bounced back on Monday with an 8 thousand dollar winner.

Yes, I had two big red days, but I bounced right back. That’s happened twice this year that I had two big red days and then I bounced right back. That’s sort of why I thought after one red day, “Well, that’s no big deal. I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing.” Two red days, “All right, well, not ideal. The third day I’ll bounce back.” Third red day, you know I was thinking, “Today, this EVRI looked good. I would jump in four dollars, target $4.25, $4.50.”

We just keep kind of getting these quick rejections. Right now, this is definitely a market that short sellers are going to love. They’re going to be able to do pretty well because all of these spikes seem to get rejected.

But remember, these are the same short sellers that last month were complaining that these stocks were so irrationally strong. The market sometimes favors one side, sometimes favors the other, and we have these waves and these cycles. What, for momentum traders, will probably bring about the next hot streak or the next really strong cycle will be a stock that goes 100, 200, 300% intraday.

Anyone who shorts on these spikes, who have gotten spoiled shorting all of the spikes, are going to get that reminder that, “Whoa, some of these stocks can be irrationally strong.” Kind of the reminder that I’m getting to manage risk a little bit better, they’ll get next week.

Right now, I’m kind of giving my money to the short sellers. Next week, I’ll be taking money from them. That’s just sort of the way it is sometimes with these stocks. You need two sides to every trade, and right now, I seem to be on the wrong side. But I’m just going to step back a little bit, reevaluate, focus on buying pull back set ups, stop at the low of the set up, size down a little bit until I start to see cleaner follow through.

Then, once I kind of get my legs back underneath me, and we start to see some good momentum, then pedal to the metal, and I’ll be pushing back up. Yes, this is a little bit of a setback here the last four days. Again, glad that I was able to break 100 thousand dollars before this setback, so at least I did achieve my goal.

Really just barely got over the line. But hey, you finished the race, you finished the race. But trading is not about this short term sprint. It’s really a marathon. Yeah, I got the sprint done, and now it’s just kind of time to settle back into the long haul of things. That just means grinding and working on building up those profits. Sizing down for right now so if I have a fifth red day, or a sixth red day, I don’t go red on the month.

I’m still up 10 thousand on the month. I could afford to walk away for a couple of days and just kind of reset. But I think instead I’ll just keep trading, but size down so I’m kind of … As I’m getting closer to sort of my bare minimum on the month, I’m starting to feel like, “Whoa. I’ve gotta …” I’m kind of like running out of cushion to just continue to throw trades out there. I need to start being a lot more selective.

Again, any time I’ve fallen into a rut in the past, this is what I’ve done. I’ve stepped back, I’ve looked at my analytics, I’ve looked at my metrics, my strategy. What’s working? What’s not working? In the last few days, what has not been working has been chasing one minute set ups on half dollars and whole dollars. Even good five minute set ups have not been working well, so regardless of the set up, size is coming down.

But the set ups that have been working better have been, and this is just in the last week or two, have been the one minute or five minute pull backs. The clean bull flags, the clean flat top break outs, whether it’s on a one minute or a five minute time frame. But those are essentially pull back opportunities where it’s easier to manage risk.

All right, so that’s what I would suggest you guys do if you ever fall into a little bit of a hot … Or, you come off a hot streak and fall into a little bit of a cold streak. Step back, look at your metrics, look at what’s working, what’s not working. For me, probably the biggest issue is accuracy is low, because chasing these set ups hasn’t been panning out. Number two, I’m not seeing the big winners.

Now, I might not see the big winners regardless of what I’m trading right now because the market is just slow. But I can minimize those big draw downs by reducing size. All right, so that’s where we’re at today, day 49. Still the 100 thousand dollar challenge. Like I said, just kind of settling in now for trading through the rest of the year and working towards building up this account as much as I can.

Again, reminder guys, obviously Friday is Saint Patrick’s day, so we’ve got the Lucky 30, 30% off coupon code going. For those of you who are current members, and you want to upgrade to a quarterly or a annual subscription, you can upgrade to the annual subscription. I think it’s $620. That gives you a year of access to the chat room. It’s like $50 a month, which is obviously ridiculously low.

That would get you into the annual chat room. If you’ve been thinking about joining one of the classes, you want to focus on education, understanding my strategy and all of its details, then this obviously is a great time to get set up there. We will be doing live classes starting on March 27th.

I’ll be teaching the classes live, and that’ll be every day for about two and a half, three weeks. You guys will be able to sit in and watch me teach those live classes, which will be a lot of fun. I’ve been spending a lot of time rebuilding and kind of updating the current curriculum, sort of for all of the things that I’ve learned in the last few months trading. The new course book right now is looking like it’s 808 pages.

I’ll be excited to start teaching you guys that in about two weeks. All right, so there’ll be more info on that coming soon, but just so you guys know for anyone that was thinking about getting set up during the Saint Patrick’s Day sales. Okay, guys, so that’s it for now, and I will see you all first thing tomorrow morning. Okay, thanks guys.

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