How To Start Trading As A Beginner In 2026 (Full Course)

I'm gonna show you exactly how I would start day trading if I had to start over as a total beginner. Now I've been trading for 10 years, I've made millions of dollars, retired my parents, and I consistently pull profits like this, this, and this on a winning day. But before that, I wasted years, blew accounts, and lost thousands of dollars that I did not need to lose simply because I didn't have the guidance and foundation that I'm gonna give you in this video. We're gonna cover the fundamentals, the tools, and the websites you need trading psychology, the math of trading, the technical analysis that actually matters, along with my full strategy, and then we're going to apply it all to a real life trade. And by the end, you'll have a clear, simplified path to starting your trading career the right way. So let's start with the foundation, how trading actually works. Now, trading has a lot of technical parts, and if you learn them in the wrong order, it will throw you completely off track. So I want to give you the simplest way to understand how markets move and why. So let's take a look at this chart. We're gonna break down the advanced stuff later, but for now, let's focus on why markets move. So when you're looking at a chart, you're looking at one of two things. The market's either going up or the market is going down. Now, in order for the market to go up, there has to be an imbalance of buyers versus sellers, and vice versa. For the market to start coming back down, there has to be an imbalance of sellers versus buyers. Mm-hmm. Now, the moves in between these areas is where we're going to get volatility. Okay, so this is where we're going to try to look to capitalize and make money. And our jobs as traders is to try to find different areas that we can take risk in these areas of volatility and profit from these moves. Now, the way that you would make money is based on how much the asset moves. So for example, let's just say the price of the asset we are trading was, I don't know, $100. And we decided to buy 100 units of this asset. If that price moved to $105, we would make $500, right? Because we have 100 units times a $5 move, and that is the formula to determining how much total profit or loss you're going to be able to create on a trade. And I included loss because trust me, it's not all winning no matter how good you get. Now, Now let's apply this to a real trading opportunity. What you're looking at is SPY, or the general stock market. Let's just say you put $1,000 into the stock market a year ago today, and the market made as much of a move as it made. We can see that where we're at right now, we've moved about 25%. So let's say you put $1,000 into the stock market and you made a 25% move. This would mean that you made $250 over the last year. This is more of an example of investing more than it is trading, and investing and trading are not the same thing. A lot of beginners mix this up, but with investing, you might wait an entire year to make 10, 20, or as you can see, 25% on an amazing year. And that works if you already have a lot of capital or you're more so looking for passive income. But if you're trying to grow a smaller account or eventually create a real income from the markets, then you're going to need to find opportunities inside smaller windows of time. So instead of just looking at an entire year, let's take a look at what can happen in just one day. Even inside this single day, there are a lot of opportunities because as you can see, we have those periods of volatility where the market is pivoting from back to the upside to the downside and so forth. And even if you would have caught just one of these opportunities, say you bought right here and you ended up selling up here. on that opportunity, you would have been able to make a 3-to-1 return. So let's say you risked $100 right here. You could have ended up making $300, and this only took about an hour. Compare that to trying to make the same percentage return over a year, and you can see the big difference between trading and investing. And that's the opportunity that active trading is built around. But as we zoom in and trade smaller time windows, the math and the strategy become much more important. You need to know how to calculate your risk. You need to know where you're buying, where you're selling, and whether the trade actually makes sense or not. Let me give you an example. So if you're totally new, none of this may make any sense, and that's okay. It will once I break down the strategy later. But in this example, I was able to enter the market because I had a repeatable process of determining when I'm expecting that volatility. So I was expecting a big move up and I was able to enter the market with a measured amount of risk, which was about $640,. And as the market started to move in my favor, I was able to go up $1,000, $2,000, and ended up actually closing the trade for over $4,000 in profit. And I'm not showing you this to brag. I'm showing you this because this is what can become possible when you understand the framework, manage your risk, and take this seriously. But before we get into the strategy and the details, let's talk about the tools and the websites that you're going to need to set up for yourself as a beginner. Now, a lot of people think that you need some kind of crazy setup with a bunch of monitors. You don't. You only need 3 things. And then a laptop or a phone to operate them. The first is called TradingView. Now, this is the charting software where you're going to do your technical analysis, which is how you find and plan your trades. The second is a platform to execute trades. TradingView is where you plan, but whenever it comes time to enter a trade, you're going to need to connect to a broker or a prop firm. Now, a broker is where you trade your own money. A prop firm is a company that lets you trade without risking your own money. Now I have a whole YouTube video on prop firms that I'll point you to later in the video, and we'll go through a quick breakdown. But if you're brand new, don't rush into taking a ton of risk yet. I'm going to show you how all of this works first, and later we'll talk about how to get real reps the right way without having to risk a stupid amount of money. Now, the third thing is a trade journal, and you're going to use this to track the trades that you take, why you took them, what happened, and whether or not you followed your rules. Now, journaling Sounds boring, I get it. But if you don't track what you're doing, then you will have no idea what is actually working and what is just luck. Now, there are a lot of paid journals that you can go out and spend money on, but I developed one that is a full software that you can get totally free just for watching this video. And I left a link down in the description where you can access that, as well as a full ebook that goes over everything I'm teaching you here today. That way you can have that to reference to later. So the basic setup that you're gonna need as a trader is pretty simple. TradingView to read and plan the trade, a platform to execute the trade, and a journal to track your results. That way you can improve. Now, once you have those three, you have everything that you need to start learning the right way. Now let's jump into TradingView and break down what you are looking at when you open a chart. Once you get to TradingView.com, your screen is going to look like this. Now, to get to the charts, you're going to click products and then you want to click SuperCharts, and that is going to bring you back to that chart that we were looking at earlier. So what we're looking at in this example is NQ, or the NASDAQ futures market. But there are a lot of different pairs that you could trade. For example, you could trade Bitcoin. You could also look at trading the general stock market, the S&P 500, which is SPX. You could look at trading Tesla. There are tons of different assets or pairs or markets that you can trade. And in order to get to these, you just go up here and click the symbol search. To organize the markets you're watching, you're going to need a watchlist. So you're going to go over here to the right and you're going to click Watchlist and you would click this plus button to add a market to your watchlist. So let's just say we wanted to add the stock market. We would add SPX and you just click on this right here. And now you're going to have SPX over here in your watchlist and you can organize all the different markets in here pretty easily. Now, what we've looked at up to this point is called a line chart, but not really anybody is actually going to be trading using a line chart. Instead, we're going to use something called candlesticks. Now candlesticks are really simple, and I know whenever I was a beginner, this felt overwhelming to look at. So let's take a second to break these down. Now, when it comes to candlesticks, these are just showing you a visualization of the data of different time ranges in the market. So for example, let's say each candlestick represents 1 hour. Okay. We'll just say that each of these represent 1 hour and the green candlesticks, which mean bullish, and bullish means price went up, show that in that 1-hour, price ended up ending the hour, or closing, higher than it opened. So if price opened right here, and then it traveled upwards, and ended up closing up here, well then that would be a bullish hour, so you'd have a green candlestick. Now we have something called wicks that show where price actually traveled to, but maybe it wasn't able to finish out the hour there. This shows that there were some sellers that ended up selling and creating volatility up here at this high, and the market wasn't able to stay there and ended up closing a bit lower. And the same goes for the low. This means that right here at the bottom, buyers stepped in and pushed the market up. But for there to be a wick, price had to travel lower than the open during that 1-hour period. And the same goes for a bearish candle. This means that at the beginning or the open of that 1-hour timeframe, that the market was higher than it was when it closed. So if the market traveled down and it ended the hour lower than it started the hour, you would have a bearish or a red candle. And the same thing with the wicks. This just means that the market might have traveled up to this price area, but sellers stepped in and pushed the market down. And for the lower wick, this means that the market did travel down lower to this area, but buyers stepped in and pushed it back higher and ended up closing right here. Now, the part of the candle that has color to it is the body. And this just shows you the distance from the open to the close. Now, you may have noticed that my candles are different colors. These are just custom. I made my bullish candles blue and my bearish candles black. If you want to change cosmetic stuff like that, you would go over to the settings and you can just go over and change the symbol. And you can click right here and change the different colors of your borders and wicks and your candle bodies. So now that we've covered the different tools and platforms you're going to be using and the basics of charts and candlesticks, Let's talk about something that almost all beginners are going to trip up on when they first start, which is trading psychology. Now, trading psychology, simply put, is just the mental game of trading. And it's complicated because trading can be stressful whenever you're going through your ups and downs. But, you know, a lot of people are going to tell you this is the most important part of trading, right? And it is important. But psychology only matters if you actually have a real strategy to trust because At the end of the day, trading psychology is just your ability to trust that your system works over time. That way you can stay consistent through losing streaks. But the problem is most beginners try to build confidence before they even understand the analysis they're doing or their trading rules or really even knowing if their strategy is actually profitable. So they get stuck in this black box of mindset and motivation and hopping from different strategy to strategy. And they think the answer to their problems is that they need more discipline, more confidence, or more emotional control. And yes, you do need all of these things. But if you don't understand what you're looking for on the chart and you don't have a strategy that you can actually test, then there is nothing real to have trust in yet. That is why later in this video, I'm going to give you the full strategy that I use and show you how to start trading the right way and think about things the way that a professional thinks about it. And that way we're not just talking about a bunch of mindset and we're actually building a strong foundation. But before we get there, there are 3 things that you do need to retrain your mind around. 1. First, you have to retrain the idea that losing is always bad. As humans, anytime we lose at something, we read it like we're not doing good enough, or that we did something wrong, or something needs to change. And yes, this makes sense in a lot of parts of life. Winners are celebrated in sports and almost everywhere else, so our brains are trained to think this way, but trading does not work that way. As weird as that sounds right now, you will see why in a second. Now second, you have to retrain the idea that being wrong always means that you don't know what you're doing. When we're wrong and we lose money on a trade, we feel like we need to change the process. In trading, that's not always the case. You have to flip that idea upside down. Third, you have to retrain the idea that making money on a trade automatically made it a good trade, because that is not the case whatsoever. A good trade is not about the outcome of one trade. It is about whether the trade followed a process where the math works out for you to be profitable over time. Because we're not here to get rich off one trade, we're here to try to build an income over a repeatable process. So before we talk about strategy, we need to understand that math that can get you there. So think of it this way, anytime we enter the market, one of two things happens. Price moves in our favor and we make money, or it moves against us and we lose money. Now that part is simple and obvious, but how we manage those two outcomes is what decides whether we become profitable in the long term. Now, the first thing that we figure out on any trade is how much we are risking. That can be a percentage of our account, or it can be a fixed dollar amount. For this example, let's say the distance from our entry to our stop loss represents $100 of risk. If we enter here, and the price moves down to this level, then we cut the trade for a $100 loss. That lower level is what we call a stop loss. It's where we're saying, if price gets here, then I was wrong. Get me out. Where you put your entry, stop loss, and target comes from your strategy, which we're going to cover later. But for now, let's just focus on the math. If price moves up towards our target, then we know what we can potentially make. So before we ever enter, we know where we're getting in, where we are wrong, and where we're taking profits if we're right. Now let's talk about our— So R just means 1 unit of risk. If you risk $100 on your trades, then your R is $100. If a trade loses, then you are down 1R. If the trade moves 3 times your risk and in your favor, then you make 3R. So if 1R is $100, a +3R win is $300. And this matters because it lets us think in risk units instead of getting emotional over every the dollar. We're not just saying, "I made money," or, "I lost money." We're asking, "How much did I make compared to what I risked?" Now, remember the trade that I showed you earlier. I risked a little over $600 to make $4,000. And with the right strategy, higher risk to reward becomes a key factor in profitability. Now, a lot of beginners think they need to be right all the time to make money, but that is just not true. Let's say we take 10 trades, and every loss that you take is 1R. So let's just say we lost 6 of the trades. That is -6R, and if 1R is $100, then our losses are $600 in total. But if the 4 trades win, and each one makes us 3R, then that gives us +12R, or $1,200 on the winning side. So even though we lost more trades than we won, we still ended up positive. We made $1,200 from winners, and lost $600 from losers, and we ended up keeping $600 overall, all while being wrong 60% of the time. As you can see, trading is not about being right on every trade or even being right on most trades. It is just about keeping your risk consistent and making sure that your winners are bigger than your losers. If we go through trading thinking that losing is bad and being wrong is bad, we will never put ourselves in situations where we can actually win. Losses are simply the cost of doing business in the the market, and making money on one trade doesn't make it a good trade, losing money on one trade does not automatically make it a bad trade. What matters is whether or not you followed a repeatable process while keeping your risk contained. If you're throwing money into trades without knowing your risk, then you have no idea whether what you're doing works over the long term. You might get lucky on one trade, but you're one bad decision away from giving it all back. Trading has nothing to do with being right or wrong on one individual trade, but it has everything to do with knowing how much you make when you're right, how much you lose when you're wrong, and how often each one of those situations happens. Now, this is how you determine whether or not you're profitable. It simply comes down to keeping your risk uniform, knowing your average win, knowing your average loss, and tracking how often each one happens. Now it all comes down to the relationship between your win rate and your average risk to reward. As you can see right here, there is a chart that shows you the different correlations that you need to have. So let's just say if you have an average 3:1 risk to reward and you only win 40% of the time, like that example we used earlier, you can see that that is a profitable strategy. So as long as the relationship between these two metrics makes sense, it doesn't really matter how much you win or lose because the game of trading is not about how much we win or lose. It's about how much money we actually can make. Now that you understand how we build positions and how we control risk, Let's go back into TradingView and talk about how we can actually approach the market from a technical analysis standpoint. Now, most beginners are going to get overwhelmed here because there are a million tools, concepts, indicators, and strategies that people are going to tell you to learn. You're going to hear about support and resistance, market structure, trend lines, Fibonacci, candle patterns, supply and demand, order blocks, fair value gaps. I mean, there are endless different things that people claim are the best thing. And sure, some of these tools are useful, but after 10 years of trading, I've realized that the tool itself is not really what matters most. What matters is understanding the job the tool does and simplifying your process so you can get the same outcome with less work. Because without a clear way to organize your analysis, you end up staring at the chart with 15 different conflicting ideas in your head and you can't ever make decisions. So the way that I simplify technical analysis is with an approach I call CZT. CZT stands for condition, Condition, zone, trigger. The condition is what type of market we are in. Are we bullish or are we bearish? Do we expect the market to move fast or slow? Is the market trending or is it consolidating? Now, the zone is where I'm actually looking for trades. Bad trades happen when you don't know where price actually matters because then you're going to get faked out consistently just trying to trade random patterns. Now, the trigger is the final signal that I need once price reaches one of my zones., and this is going to tell me whether or not that zone is valid or whether I should just leave it alone and wait for the next one. Later on in this video, I'm going to walk you through real trade examples and show you how the full CZT strategy works. But first, you need to understand the core concepts behind it. So for that, let's go back and hop on a chart. Now, most people are going to focus on trend and support and resistance. And while this is easy to understand, it's pretty cookie-cutter stuff and it really isn't going to make you much money. So I'm going to jump to something that actually works and we're going to keep it simple so it's still beginner friendly. So when we're looking at the market, we have to understand that the market is going to be in one of two different conditions. It's going to be either moving kind of sideways and this is called balance, or the market's going to be expanding and it's— that's going to be called imbalance. So the market is going to move from areas of balance to areas of imbalance like you see right here. And that's what we talked about earlier with volatility. And then it's gonna at some point move back to balance. Now let's just say if you're looking at a higher timeframe like we did earlier, these moves are gonna be a little harder to see. So you'll just see the ups and the downs and the ups. But what's actually happening at these little areas is that on a lower timeframe, you're getting— This. This kind of price movement. Now, the overall goal of what we're trying to do is determine when the market is leaving a state of balance and going into a state of imbalance. That's how we're going to catch fast moves that have good risk to reward and maintain a higher win rate. Now, when it comes to areas of balance, price is usually going to move slower and choppier, which makes for more difficult trading conditions. And then areas of imbalance are usually going to be very fast, cleaner, one-directional price movement. that make for easier trading conditions. Because if we look at the market from a very simple idea of just trend, and we say that higher highs and higher lows are a bullish market, that's great, but it doesn't really help us actually make money. Because if you look at price, you will see that there are a lot of jagged edges. And as you can see right here, the market was in an area of balance before imbalance, and then what happened? The market hit another area of imbalance, before imbalance, and the market is gonna repeat this. You can see another area of balance right here, and then slight imbalance to the upside. So our job is trying to determine when we're gonna come out of these little areas, and we wanna catch those sharp moves, that way we can actually make money. You can try to do this with just price action and determine, you know, where we are expecting this to happen by just looking at candles, but there is a simple tool that is gonna help you do this with a much better approach. Now to access this tool, you're gonna go up here and click the indicators button. An indicator is just a tool that overlays on top of your chart and can help you get different insights from what you're looking at. So you click this right here and you're gonna just type in SVP and this opens up the session volume profile. You're gonna wanna click the SVP HD. Then it's gonna be showing over here at the top left and you wanna go over and click the settings and you want to make sure that you set this up the exact same way you see right here. So you're going to change this to custom and you're going to change it to 9:30 to 4 p.m. And this is going to be on New York time. Now, the reason for this is because this is the cash session. It's where a lot of the volume happens. And we're going to get to why that's important in a second. You want to make sure the volume is just set to up/down and then this should already be 70. You're going to go to the style And if you want yours to look like mine, you can go through and just change your up volume and the down volume to the same color. I have this gray right here selected. And then you wanna make sure you have these 3 boxes checked, the VAH, the VAL, and the POC. I'm gonna change the POC to red just because I'm gonna be explaining some stuff to you guys, but personally, I like having them all the same color. It just keeps the chart looking clean. But all of these colors and stuff are totally up to you. Doesn't make a difference in the data you're actually looking at. Now, once you do that, you're going to have this on your screen. And guys, I know you're looking at this and thinking, oh my gosh, what is this? It's really simple. I'm going to break it down. So if you've been trading for any period of time, you've probably heard about the concept of volume. Now, volume just means how many shares or contracts or how many units were traded during a set range. Now, typical volume is going to be viewed like this here at the bottom. So what this shows is that during this one interval, since we're on a 5-minute chart, it's going to say during this candle, there was this much volume traded, which you can see there was 24,000 contracts traded at that level. So this shows you volume that is separated by time. But volume by time is useful, but it's limited. We want to see volume by price. So think of it like this. This is a price level. If you look over to the right, where my cursor is, it's gonna say 30,359. That's just the price level we're at. So what this is showing you is in that area, what volume was traded. So whenever you're looking at this bar right here, it just shows you how much volume was traded at that price level. Now that you understand the core concepts behind reading the market, let's turn this into a strategy that you can practice. Now, most beginners are gonna start in the wrong place. They look for the entry first, They want the indicator or the pattern, the candle, or the exact moment that's going to tell them whether to buy or to sell. But a real strategy starts before the entry. It starts with observation. So you're going to want to watch the market and ask, what keeps repeating? Where does price spend time? Where does it move quickly? What areas does it accept? What areas does it reject? Where does one side really start to take control? And for me, a lot of developing CZT came from watching price around value. Price would balance in one area, and then it would reject the edge of the value and come back in. Or, if it got accepted, meaning it stayed outside of that value, it would start moving to another area, and usually it would move from one area of balance to imbalance to another area of balance. Now, this kind of became the concept behind how I traded. So, balance turning into imbalance, value being accepted or rejected, and price showing whether the market wanted to stay in the same area, or if it wanted to— Mm-hmm. Expand an imbalance and give me volatility to move to a new one. And from there, I turn this concept into rules, and this is how you build a strategy. So CZT is the rule set. Condition tells me what type of market I am in. Zone tells me where I am actually allowed to look for the trade. Trigger tells me what price has to show me at the zone before I get involved. So the question is not whether I feel like buying or selling, or I have a take on what I think's gonna happen. The question is whether or not the trade passes this checklist. What condition is present? What zone is price trading into? And what trigger confirms that this is a good trade? Where is the trade wrong? What would make me skip the trade? And a lot of traders never get to this point. They learn a strategy from a video, but the strategy is too narrow, and it looks great in the video and perfect examples, but then the live market gives them something close, but not exact. And then they start either just not being able to trade or they build a lot of bad habits and start overtrading. And this is just how people go down the wrong road in trading. And a lot of it comes back to the way that trading is taught to beginners. Now, this isn't because the trader is a bad trader or because they're dumb. It's because the rules they have don't tell them what to do whenever there is not a picture-perfect clean setup. Setup. And if your strategy only gives you one perfect trade a week and your goal is to build a real income, then you're going to feel pressure to force things. So you need something that is specific enough to protect you, but flexible enough to show up consistently. And CZT is built around outcomes, not this specific rigid rule set. You'll see a lot of strategies that are way too rigid and they're too specific on the exact condition or the exact zone or one type of trigger when in reality the zones you're using can change, the trigger can change, the market can be slower or faster, and the process though has to stay the same. So once you have the concept and the rules, you want to evaluate things based on, okay, if I have different conditions, which is the condition? Okay. If that's the case, what are the zones that I'm looking for? And then at the zones, what triggers am I looking for? And there's different pieces of analysis that go into these things. So you want to make your strategy modular, meaning all these different concepts just go into each bucket and you're not overthinking which one to use and you understand they all mean the same thing. Now, once you have the concept of the strategy and the rules down, then you want to evaluate the outcomes over time. Now, how often does this happen? How often does it work? When it works, how much does it usually pay? When it fails, how much does it usually lose? Does the math still hold up over the long term? Now, something that can help with this process is using a feature on TradingView called Replay. And what this is going to do is actually let you go back and live through a trading day as it happens. So you would just click this button and then you could just go back and click the start of a trading day and then you can actually watch the trading day unfold. You could see how the volume profile was developing as the day started and you'll be able to see different opportunities as they were happening. And this is useful to be able to recognize the setup, the condition of the market, mark your zones, and then identify your triggers. And that way you can actually see in practice where your entry, stop, and target would have been. But replay alone is not going to give you full confidence. I want to be very clear that this process, which is called backtesting, it teaches you things. Yes, it does give you some value, but there is no real hesitation, there's no real frustration, there's no urge to make money back that you lost, and there's no boredom that you'll have like whenever you're actually trading because real money isn't on the line. So I want you to start and go through and trade 50 setups on Replay. Find the condition, mark the zone, wait for your trigger and place your trades, record what happened, but this is just gonna give you a sample to review. And after that, you want to make sure that you use the demo platform to learn fluency in how to place orders and how to do all that. And I'll walk you through that in just a second. But I want to be really, really clear on this, guys. The way that you trade whenever you're doing backtesting or demo trading is not going to teach you how to actually trade, okay? Because the reason trading is difficult is because of the risk involved, and there is no risk involved with those habits. They're good, but they just have a place. A lot of people tell you backtest or journal for 6 months. I'm not going to sit here and feed you that bullcrap because I don't agree with it. Now, I can't give you financial advice on what to do, but let's just say I was a beginner. After I had those 50 setups down, I'm going to go live with tiny risk, small enough to where it's not going to bankrupt me, but enough to where I actually feel the emotion of trading. And it doesn't take much for you to do this. Okay? It can be a very, very small amount. Like we're talking risking a few dollars on a trade. As silly as that sounds, it will still be a lot different than just trading on a demo. Now, while you're doing this, this is where the journal really matters. And not so much because you're going to just track your wins and losses and the numbers and all this stuff, but I want you to really track your emotions, how you're feeling. I want you to track the condition, the zone, the trigger, yes, the entry and stop loss and target and the results and risk to reward for sure, But what's more important is the awareness you had of the trade, why you took it, how you felt before, how you feel when you lose, how you feel when you win. Those are the things that are going to matter. You know, did you get impatient while you were waiting? Did you hesitate whenever your setup appeared? Did you move your stop loss when you shouldn't have or take profit too early or try to win money back after a loss? And those are the patterns that are part of your actual trading business because Yes, you have an edge on the screens, meaning you have a good strategy, but in reality, the edge is you. And this is something that I wish I would have learned so much earlier in my trading, which is why I'm making it such a big point in this guide. Because if you can see these emotional triggers clearly, then you can start to build rules and processes around them. Awareness is power in trading because you cannot fix what you are not aware of. Over time, trading becomes more of a business when you look at it like this, rather than just gambling. So observe the market, build rules, practice the rules, collect data, journal your behavior and emotions, and only scale whenever the numbers and your decision-making both say you're ready. Now let's take CZT onto a real chart and start putting the pieces together. That way we can take those core concepts you learned and actually find trades using them. All right, so we're about to break down the CZT trading system. Now, this is my favorite strategy that I've ever used in my entire decade of trading. I use it still to this day, and in fact, in my last trading session, I used this to make $20,000 all while risking only $3,000. I also use this in my live trading room that I only share with my private team of traders, but I'm gonna give this full strategy to you right now for free. We're gonna walk through all the steps. I'm gonna show you how to actually execute trades and give you everything you need. That way, by the end, you have everything you need to start your trading career. Let's get started. The CZT strategy has 3 parts. First is condition, meaning what direction are we expecting the market to go? The second is the zone, meaning where do we actually look to find trades? And last but definitely not least, in fact, the most important part is the trigger, which is how we actually execute our trades, place our stop loss, and find our target. Now we're going to keep this really simple and you only need one timeframe to trade this strategy, which is the 5-minute chart. So make sure you have the 5-minute timeframe selected. We're also only going to be looking for trades in two markets, which is NQ and ES. Now NQ stands for the Nasdaq futures market and ES stands for the S&P 500 futures market. To find these, you would just click up here and just click NQ1! or you could go ES1! Now we're going to be looking for trades from 9:30 AM to 4:00 PM New York time. Now, if you want to translate New York time into your time zone, go down here on the bottom on TradingView, click this button, and then find New York time zone. And once you click that, it will actually have New York time in this little area right here. All right, so I made this 5-step beginner CZT checklist to make this really simple and easy to follow for beginners. And step number 1 is going to be how we find our condition, meaning which direction do we want to trade? So what you want to check for is to see if price price is outside previous value. So as you can see right here in this example, the market is trading under this area of value because remember, we have the value area high, which is marked on your volume profile. And if you draw this out, we can clearly see that the market is way lower than this area of value. So that gives us a bearish direction. Now the next step is to find our zone, meaning where are we going to actually hunt for trades? So we're gonna be either using a previous value level or a volume valley. Now in the second example, we'll go over volume valleys, but for now we're gonna focus on value levels. Since we are looking to be bearish, we want to sell from the low of the value area. Now if you wanna mark out this level, what you can do is go over here, click this dropdown right here, and then go down to the horizontal line, and you can drop that right there on your chart. And now you have got the level you're going to be looking at for trades. And then next is our most important step, which is finding the trigger. Now, a lot of beginners get this wrong because it involves patience. We have to wait for a clean rejection at the zone, meaning we have to wait for the market to trade into our zone and then look for a pattern in order to enter a trade. Now, where a lot of traders mess up is in the waiting in between good trades. But this is extremely important if you want to trade like a professional. Now, one tip that's really good for beginners is at this time, after you've marked out your levels, just go ahead and turn your volume profile off. That way you're not paying attention to any noise and you know exactly where you're looking for trades. So this would be the exact process you follow after you've prepared for your day. You've got your level marked out, it's 9:30 AM, and now we we wait. So as you can see, the market does a little bit of back and forth and takes its time getting to our level, but eventually the market will come back into this level. And once it does, we want to wait to see if we get a clean rejection. Now, in order to confirm that we're actually getting a rejection, we want price to trade into the level, and then we want to get a candle closure to the downside back through our level. So what we want to see is a candle having its full body, not just the wick. See how right here we're just trading wicks, we're not closing the bodies, okay? This does not count as a confirmation. What we want to wait for is that full candle closure. This is very important. Now, as you can see right here, we got that candle closure. So at this time, it's time to place our risk and our target and look to enter the trade. Now there's a tool that we can use on TradingView to map this out. And to find this, you're going to go over here to the left and you're going to click this dropdown. Now, since we are looking to sell because we're bearish, you're going to look to have a short position. Long is for buying, which we'll go over in the next example. But for the short position, you're going to click. And as soon as that candle closure on the 5-minute happens, we enter the trade. And we want to take our stop loss and we just want to put it above the nearest area of structure. Now, when I say structure, I mean any candle that has a lower high on either side of it. So if we zoom in here, notice how this candle right here, it has a lower high right here. It has a lower high right there and it acts as a pivot. So that right there is going to act as our stop loss. Now for step number 5, which is our target,— you want to look for either recent structure or the next zone. Now remember, how do we find zones? They're value levels. So what we're going to do now is we're going to turn that volume profile back on by clicking over here. You're going to click show. And what this is going to do is it's going to load back the volume profile. Now, since we're bearish, you're going to be looking for the value area low. So what you want to see happen is the market trade into the value area high, of the previous day when you're bearish and then see a bearish trend and trade into the low. So at this time we are good to go ahead and execute the trade. Now to execute trades on TradingView, you're going to go over here and click sell. Now, depending on whether you've used a broker or a prop firm, you're going to have signed in to that broker on TradingView with a button down here. It's really simple. You just put in your username and password. So in this example, we are going to look to enter a sell and we want to make sure to place our stop loss and our take profit. So if you can see right here, this tool gives you the level, which is $30,592 for our stop loss. So that's where we want to be wrong and get out of the trade, or that's where we want to count that we're wrong and get out of the trade. And then the target, as you can see, is all the way down here at 30,244.50. Okay, so we're going to go for the target 30,244.50. Now, the reason I did that again is we're just targeting this low of this volume profile, and that is going to be the way we set up this trade. So at this time you're in the trade and you can see that we've got $685 at risk. To make $6,200. So let's go ahead and let this trade play out and see how it unfolds. So as you can see, the market starts to move a little bit and then it ends up stopping us out. And this is the part of the video where you're probably like, wait, did this guy really just show us a losing trade? And the answer is yes, because I want you guys to understand how trading actually works. Most of the guys you see on YouTube are just going to show you only wins. And then leave you out to dry when it comes time to actually trade, because trading is wins and losses. Now, here's what you do on how you handle a loss and turn it into a winning day. So what we always give ourself for this strategy is 2 tries. I'm not going to sit here and tell you it's going to be a picture-perfect entry every single time. It's not. I actually want to show you this so you're prepared for the real world. So we just took a loss of about $600 and some change. That's okay, not the end of the world. So we wanna give this setup 2 tries. Now, what I mean by that is if this trade gets stopped out, we wanna watch to see if we get another candle closure down through this level. And if we do, then we are going to look to enter that trade. And sometimes this can be hard when you're a beginner, I get it, but this is what real trading is actually like in trading like a professional. Remember we talked about with the risk to reward. So as you can see, we get another candle closure through this area. And as soon as you got that candle closure, you're going to enter the trade again right there. As soon as that candle closes and you're going to put your stop loss at that recent structure and we're going to target that volume profile value area low. Okay. So the same exact setup, everything is the same. We're just taking a second swing. Now let's see what happens on this second trade. So you're going to let this trade unfold. And as you can see, this trade is off to a much better start, and it runs almost all the way down to the target pretty quickly. And remember, on this trade, if we make profit, it's going to pay $4,895. So you got to just trust the system. And as you can see, the trade ended up hitting the target. So we lost $600 on that first setup, but we ended up making $4,800 on the second setup. Now again, guys, I wanted to show you this because I want to show you the real reality of trading and not just, you know, a super sexy strategy that always works and give you guys a taste of what this is actually going to be like because it's not going to all be wins. But that doesn't really matter because we're not here to win. We're here to make money. And as soon as you let go of your ego of having wins every time, the sooner you're going to become a profitable trader. And that is my mission for this video. I want as many of you guys to become profitable as possible. All right. So let's hop into our second example. Now, in this example, when we look at the condition, we do see the price is outside previous value, but we see that it's bullish because we're above the previous value area high. So when we mark out our zones, we want to look for previous value levels or volume valleys. Now, in that last example, there weren't any volume valleys, but in this one there are. So what we're going to do is we're going to take that horizontal line tool. And first, you can mark out the really obvious one, which is that previous day's value area high. Now I wanna take a little bit of a closer look inside this volume profile, because what we see right here is a low volume node or a valley. So see how we kind of have like a mountain and then a drop-off and a little bit of a valley between the mountains. So these little areas you see that are in between the mountain peaks, those can be very reactive areas. So we're gonna mark out each one of these zones. That way we have multiple levels to trade from. Now, you don't have to be picture perfect with this. You know, you don't— again, don't, don't be too rigid. Really, it's just where the valley starts. Don't overthink this. A lot of people will think that you have to get it extremely perfect. Remember, if the market hits into, you know, the first little part of it, it's probably going to hit into the second part. Again, don't overthink this. So now what we want to wait for is a clean rejection at one of these zones. So here is 9:30 AM. And again, what we want to do is we want to wait for the market to hit into one of these levels. So let's let this day play out. We're going to go ahead and turn off our other volume profile to kind of keep our charts clean. And again, I cannot stress how important that is for beginners. It is just less stuff you're watching at once, the better. As you can see right here, though, we hit into our first level. Now, in this example, we didn't really get a nice rejection away from it. Now, this is something that is very, very important to make sure to filter out losing trades is you want to see a nice push away in the opposing direction. So you want to see a bullish candle if you're looking for a bullish setup. So as you can see, we don't really get that and the market makes another dig back into our level. Totally fine. This doesn't mean that the setup's invalidated. So now we want to see is a nice bullish closure back away from the level to confirm that buyers are stepping in, and as you can see right here, that is exactly what we got. So to map out this trade, we're actually going to go over here again to these position tools. And since we are looking for a buy, we're going to be clicking the long position button. Same as before, we're going to enter the trade right here and we're going to put our stop loss right at that previous swing point. Now, in an example like this, when you have a very clean point of structure and you can see that the market is just trending bullishly, and we're bullish, we're going to look to target the structure rather than just targeting the opposite volume profile level. So as you can see right here, we have a good risk to reward of about 2 to 1. And on this trade we had $1,400 at risk to make $3,000. Now, I want to be clear, you don't have to risk this much. If that amount sounds a lot, which it is to a beginner, it should be. You can actually go to MNQ and you can trade this market and it will be 1/10 of the risk. So you could take this trade for about $140 of risk to make $300. So don't worry, you don't got to risk thousands of dollars to start doing this. MNQ just means the micro market, and it's made specifically for people who want to take less risk. But after we've got our trade set up, what we want to do is just let the trade unfold. And as you can see, the market makes a nice reaction away from our zone, makes a little bit of a pause right here. And I want to point this out because a lot of newer traders are going to get scared right here. And you might close your trade and think that this is okay. It's really not though, because the difference in that $2,400 to $3,000 might not sound like a lot, but it is, and it adds up over time. You have to stay consistent to maintain an edge in the markets. Remember the risk math that we talked about earlier, and most of the time you'll end up regretting it because the market ends up and actually going up and taking out your target anyways. So on that trade that took about— 2 minutes. 3 hours and it made us $3,000. Not too bad if you ask me. So every day I want you to follow the same system. Identify the condition. Are we bullish or bearish? Mark out your zones and then wait for your trigger. And right after you take a trade, make sure to journal it, guys. I gave you the free trading journal. If you didn't already get that, download that in the link in the description and make sure to actually do this. This is the highest leverage habit that any trader can have, and it's what separates professionals from people who are just playing around. And then every single day you're going to stay consistent and repeat this strategy. Now, before you risk this on real money, I want you to test this over a sample size of at least 50 examples. Go on replay mode just like I am right here and go back and make sure you get the hang of this before you throw some money on it. And now you have the roadmap that I wish I had whenever I first started. You understand the tools, the math, the psychology, and even a full strategy. And even though that we've made trading simple, remember guys, simple does not mean easy. You need reps, you need examples, you need more context before risking real money. So I wanna leave a playlist on the screen that goes way deeper into a lot of the concepts that we covered here. So make sure to watch that, make sure to journal and take this seriously, guys. Also, I post tons of free content here on YouTube. So subscribe to the channel if this video is valuable to you, and I'll see you in the next video. Bye.