Why You Can't Learn To Trade In A Week

Welcome back, guys. Today we're breaking down why you cannot learn to trade in a week. This myth that's going out there on YouTube, on TikTok, on Instagram, Twitch, that it is quick, it's easy, it's fast. You can get in the market and you can learn to trade real fast and make real gains. I'm going to break down why that isn't the case and what you need to consider before you buy into this. All right, so let's do this. Okay, so first of all, disclaimer: this is for education purposes only. This is not financial information or advice. I'm not a financial advisor. I don't trade your money. I don't I don't want to trade your money. I don't want you to trade my money. I want you as somebody who is looking at getting in the market to make sound financial decisions and not get caught losing your whole portfolio following some really bad financial advice online. So this is just for education purposes. Anything that I throw in this video, please just take it under consideration, come to your own conclusions, and seek out the help of a financial advisor if you still feel lost. Okay, that being said, let's get down to the topic. Okay, so why are we tackling this topic at all? Well, as you guys know, I do a livestream, 9 AM every morning when the market opens. As the market starts to slow down though, into the day, we tend to look around at a whole bunch of different stuff. I do breakdowns of tickers and whatnot, and we tripped across a video from a guy named Garen Phillips who was making the claim that he learned how to day trade in a week. Okay, so that immediately set off a red flag for me of how big could this possibly be, this concept, this notion? He's got millions of views on this thing, 23 million views on how he learned to day trade in a week. As we dug a little deeper, we went into some other videos that he had and wanted to see what kind of success he had over the long term after his first week. And what we found was multiple account blowups, not one, not two, 3 account blowups that he publicly announced at least, as well as paper trading that worked or did not work. Now, as I went a little bit further off stream and started looking at other videos that make the same claim, what you'll find is one of two things: people making the claim that they learned really, really quickly with no follow-up. There's nothing afterwards, you don't see anything about how that performed. There's not a lot of detail about which tickers, how they took those plays, what that looks like, or you do see an extended period of videos and you see a lot of blowups happen along the way, guys. That is why we are tackling the topic here today, guys. I don't want you to have to learn how to trade the market by blowing up accounts over and over and over again. Now, I can speak to this as somebody who's fairly new in the market. I only started actively trading as of January last year. When I started, I started with $2,200 US inside a US margin account here in Canada. I've livestreamed and I've shared Full disclosure on my account since I started trading to make sure that I was honest, I wasn't fudging numbers. First year we saw 2,700% increase on the portfolio and all the way up to $50,000 US. As of right now, that portfolio is still sitting at $70,000, so it's still growing slowly through this year. At one point it was up 120% on the year. We've since had a 50% drawdown on the account, but I am speaking to this as a relatively new trader. I just want to frame it like that. Why are we talking about this? We're talking about it because I don't want you to blow accounts. I want you to see what it takes to trade properly and why you can't possibly learn to trade in a week. Let's get down to it. The biggest reason, guys, and we're going to start with a really big one out the gate, and the big one is this: trading requires experience. Not specifically experience in trading the market directly, but it requires experience. And that experience comes with life experience and education that you pull from that. Okay? So people that typically are very successful in the market are people that have built up their knowledge over a period of time. Post-secondary schooling is one way to go about that. For myself, I learned it through 10, 15 years actually working in the marketing space and understanding how businesses operate in that, that line of thinking. But it really is about experience and you cannot rush experience. You cannot cram a year, 2 years, 5 years of experience into a week. It's not possible. It can't be done. So when you see people making this claim of, oh, this is easy to do. I don't need to understand anything that's happening here. I just need to evaluate a headline, buy it, and then I'll win, right? Or I just need to look at a chart and if I've memorized, you know, 10 patterns that candles form as they move up and down, I'm going to make all kinds of money. I'm going to beat the market. Guys, big red warning label, caution. When somebody says it's Easy to do. It's not, it's not. The market is not easy to do. I assure you, there are people that have been at this for decades that still get their butt handed to them, okay? So, it's not easy to learn the market. You have to get the experience. You have to understand both the businesses you're trading, whether you're a technical trader or an FA trader. You're going to have to get that understanding and experience, and that takes time. Don't let anybody sell you on the bill of goods that you can expect to see radical gains in a day, a week, an hour. It's just not going to work that way. And for those that aspire to do that, after hearing stories of 1 or 2 people that manage that, I assure you, for every 1 or 2 people that saw really phenomenal gains after only a week of being in the market, they will either lose those gains very quickly, or for every 1 of those people that was successful, there's 1,000 that blew up accounts. So please be cautious with that first. Understand that as you're starting into the market, you're doing so trying to learn and gain experience. Now, you can draw that experience from your personal life or directly from the market. In either case, it's going to take time. So please be realistic that experience cannot be— you can't expedite experience. You can't just put it on a fast food drive-through lane of, well, I just need my drive-through experience. There it is. It's not going to work that way. Okay guys, that's the first big one. So the next one is going to be, they'll say, yeah, maybe I'm not an expert. Maybe I don't have a ton of experience, but I did learn how to do it, at least the basics of how to trade in a week. Okay. So what you're equating that to then is a toddler with an AK-47. That's essentially what people are making the claim of when they said, I learned the basics. Yeah, you learned enough to be dangerous, and that's really scary. Picture for a moment a 2-year-old walking around with an AK-47. Okay, no safety, just this thing is locked, loaded, ready to go. How comfortable are you feeling with that? Hopefully, hopefully your answer is, I'm not feeling particularly comfortable about that. Um, it may sound like an entertaining YouTube video, but the reality is that can be very, very scary. And it's the same thing that we're seeing on these zero commission platforms. A lot of these new TikTok traders, Instagram traders, people that are coming in and saying, I figured this thing out in a week, I don't understand why people say it's so hard. It's literally a toddler with an AK, guys. They are more than likely going to shoot themselves or somebody near and dear to them than they are going to have success using that tool. Okay, the, the stock market may seem simple in its basic components. Oh, this is easy, I buy low, I sell high, that's how this works. Great. If it was that simple, everybody would do it. There's a lot of people that I have to remind over and over and over again, I am still brand new in the market. I wouldn't say that I'm a pro in the market. I wouldn't say I know any more than somebody who had just walked out of a 4-year program at college at this point. And that's me putting in 16— 14 to 16-hour days for the first year reading bio reports, reading SEC filings, reading how the market works, listening to some really smart people, reading books by guys like Lynch and Buffett, all kinds Millions of work went into that, guys. 6 days a week, 14+ hours a day, reading, studying, just to become knowledgeable enough that I don't feel like I'm going to destroy myself in the market. Okay? So to be clear, are there people out there smarter than me that can learn faster than me? Absolutely. Do I think that they can acquire the knowledge that they need to claim that they know how to trade in a week? It's not, it's just not possible. So experience was number one, guys. Knowledge is number two. Where do we go from here? Well, the third one is a big one. So we've tackled experience. There's no way you can shove that experience into a week. We've tackled knowledge. There's so much knowledge that you need to accumulate and grow with and continue to pick up as you go that it's going to cause problems for you if you claim that you know it all after a week, okay? The last one, guys, that I want to give you is this. There are a lot of people that say, I don't need to know how to trade. I don't need to know what I'm trading. I can just look at what other people are trading. and that's good enough. So I look for somebody that's been successful in the long term, like Warren Buffett, like, um, Jim Cramer, or you go online and see some internet celebrities like Dave Portnoy, and you guys go, okay, great, I'm gonna just trade whatever this guy trades and that's gonna work. This is an abysmal way for you to manage your portfolio, guys, and there is huge risk to this. 9 times out of 10, when you look at guys like Warren Buffett, for example, he is trading in ways that you can't possibly trade in. He is doing things that you can't possibly do either because you don't have the capital or you just don't have the ability due to how your business is set up versus how his business is set up, right? Buffett's got an empire. You can't do what he does, okay? So thinking that you're shadow trading, you're doing the exact same thing that he's doing, uh-uh, you're not. You're not capable of. You also don't have that experience and that knowledge to know when to get in, When to get out, what to do. And so you're often lagging behind them, which can result in some big losses. Then you've got the situation of guys like Garen Phillips, who's blown up multiple accounts, or Dave Portnoy, who plays pretty fast and loose with how he picks his trades. Shadow trading these folks, they'll let you know when they're in a position, and they'll let you know when they've already exited the position, but they're not going to call you up and give you the 411 and the heads up, hey, by the way, you might want to get out before me because I'm making a run for the hills. You're constantly going to be lagging behind. And as they start to take losses, if a guy like Garen Phillips has blown up 3 accounts, you better believe the people that were shadow trading his style of trading or his trade specifically, if they're late getting out, they've most likely blown up their accounts as well. Looking at somebody else's patterns and looking at somebody else's trades and going, I'm just going to do the same thing that they do, it's not going to work for you because you are not that person. Okay? So great, millennials, you told us why we can't Learn how to trade in a week. What can we do? You can definitely start learning, guys. Start developing your own trading methodology and do it low and slow, okay? Take your time. Think about when you first started to learn how to ride a bike, right? Or the first time you went swimming. You didn't dive in the deep end. You didn't go down a slalom on your bike, right? You took the time, you learned the steps, you went slow and steady, and you picked up speed as you got comfortable. That's really what I did. That's what I see successful people doing over and over and over again, is that they approach it low, slow, and steady. Develop your own trading methodology. That edge that we talked about, that edge, you're going to have to find it for yourself. Nobody's going to be able to point you to it. Now, what I can give you guys are some of these tips that I have found successful and will help you discover your edge. It's the same points that we just covered, guys, of what not to do, but reversed. Experience, get experience. There's a lot of people that advocate for paper trading. That is an option out there, guys. I personally advocate that you get a low, $500, $600 account and start trading that in the real world, really small amounts, and just get accustomed to what that trading feels like, what the ins look like, what the outs look like, holding a real cash money position. When it goes up, when do you sell? When it goes down, when do you get out? That real-world experience with a small cash account can be a great tuition to save you pains down the road. For knowledge, guys, down below I have a link to a reading list that I've used over the past year and a half to build my own trading methodology. There are books in there about psychology, there's books in there about business, there's books in there about entrepreneurship, there's books in there of course about the market, technical analysis, fundamental analysis. There are historical books in there. So there's all kinds of stuff in there, guys, that are great reads. But 8 different people could read all of those books and come up with 8 different edges that they themselves see in the market. Okay, so take the time Invest in yourself, invest in your knowledge, listen to people that have had success and they're willing to disclose publicly what they're doing. Find people that are consistently successful. Find any kind of knowledge that you can that is going to give you a benefit or help you develop your edge. Okay, if the book list down there helps, great. If the videos that I can put out can help you in some way, great. There's other great streams that I've linked down below there, guys, that you can check out. Redemption Trades, Stock Guy, Martini Rita, These guys are phenomenal. They make steady gains over a long period of time. They've, they've proven that they, they've got that consistency to stay in the market. And that exposure that you have with different streamers on Twitch, on YouTube, on, on, on, on any of these platforms, guys, they're going to give you a bit of a diversity and understanding, oh, there are all different kinds of edge and this is what everybody else is kind of doing. I wonder what my spin is on the market. It's clearly not going to be how how this guy trades, or that person trades, or that lady trades, but you have to develop your own. But understanding that there's such a diversity out there might click off some light bulbs for what your edge might be. Experience, knowledge. Trade a real money account in small amounts. Don't look to make big gains, just look to make reasonable gains consistently over and over and over and over again. Acquire knowledge as fast as you can. Build up your own trading methodology. Discover your own edge. No. What kind of stocks you like to trade, when you like to trade them, how long you like to hold them for, when you like to get in, when you like to get out. Really sit down and, and keep a log of that. Get a trading journal and make sure that you keep notes of, okay, this is what I'm doing in my thought process, and this is how I'm going to take this trade, and this is— did it work? Did it not work? Did it blow up in my face? This is going to be your best ally. But again, this is going to be a low, slow process. This is going to take you weeks, months, years, decades. To perfect, okay? And you may never perfect it. I think if you ask Buffett if he had it down perfect, he'd tell you no. So remember, guys, that promise of it looks too good to be true— can I learn to trade the stock market in a week and just become a day trader, and that's going to make me millions, and overnight I'll never have to work again because I've got the stock market— for everyone that's out there, guys, there's probably a million that blow it up and aren't able to deliver on that. So please keep that in mind. Let me know your thoughts though. What do you think down below? Can you learn to day trade, or can you learn to trade in a week? Can you learn to master the market where others have failed over decades in a simple 7 days? Let me know what you think. If you guys have any other questions about Millennial, what about this, what about that, please let me know down below. I am pulling your guys' comments to give me ideas for additional videos down the road. I am putting out videos every single day, so if this video was useful for you, you've watched it all, Like, comment, subscribe down below. I do greatly appreciate that, guys. And of course, as always, any questions that you have, I will try to answer in the comments. I will be back tomorrow with another livestream, guys. Every day, Monday through Friday, I livestream market open. I then put out a video here on YouTube, and Saturdays I do several hours of due diligence and research for the upcoming week. So you're welcome to join me there. If you have questions live, I'll do my best to answer those as well. So have an amazing day until tomorrow. Catch you later.