20 Habits that are essential to become a Highly Profitable Trader (assuming you do not want to fail)

You just haven't become the trader you want to be. Or you're just starting and want to know how the pros have become highly profitable. Well, in this video we show you how. Hi, I'm Mike Belafiore, co founder of SME Capital, a proprietary trading firm located in midtown Manhattan. And I'm also the author of the trading classic One Good Trade and the Playbook. In this video, learn the 20 things you need to do daily, assuming you don't want to fail to become a consistently profitable and then elite trader.

Playbook. So daily you're going to archive a setup that makes the most sense to you.

You may think about reverse engineering the best trades of the day.

We're going to do this in playbook form. So we're going to archive these trades by breaking them down into variables. The big picture, trade strategy, Intraday fundamentals, technical analysis, Reading the tape, trade management. How can you trade this better? So all you guys in the room know how we do the Playbook. If anyone doesn't know how to do this yet, my second book is called the Playbook and we do a ton of reviews in this Playbook template on our YouTube channel. But this is something that you would want to be doing each day as a daily exercise. If you want to learn three real world setups that our traders use, including the simple setup that we teach all of our new traders and the setup that turned one of our traders into a seven figure big money earner, check out the free webinar that we're currently running. Just go ahead and click the link that should be appearing right now at the top right hand corner of your screen. That's going to open up this free registration page in the new window. So don't worry, you're not going to lose this video. You're going to learn more in a couple of hours from this trading workshop than from years of online education. Record your trading screens. Take notes of the important moments from the stocks that you're trading. Watch back the important moments from the tape. This is going to help you to improve your tape reading skills. Tape reading is one of the most important indicators for active traders. One of the guys that I work with outside the firm, one of his keys to getting better is he's a north of $4 million a year trader is to record, to note the key moments and then to go back and watch the tape of these key moments. It's good enough for him, it's good enough for Legend, it should be good enough for you. Mindfulness trading. Your mind can Be a source of edge. Good places to start are Headspace. They have a free training program you can check out. One of my friends encouraged me to use Muse, which I've been experimenting with lately. I've said this in the past. I think that this is going to be. Mindfulness training is going to be as commonplace in the future as exercise is right now. Sleep. Develop an optimal sleep routine, same time to bed. As an example. Measure your sleep and connect its correlation with your performance. So one of our traders internally here has not been sleeping well. One of our traders internally here, who is a very talented trader, has not been doing as well as he used to do. And so we've been talking to him about improving his sleep program. So I wear an OURA ring.

Gives me all the data that I actually need.

About my sleep. It gives me a sleep score. It records how long I'm sleeping, the quality of sleep that I'm getting.

My heart rate while I'm sleeping, my heart rate variability.

If you, some of the elite traders, if they sleep poorly and some of you might do, you might consider decreasing your risk if you've had a bad night of sleep. Trader view. Tag your trades. Put your daily thoughts. You can use this as your daily trading journal. Measure your trades. Alright, so you're tagging breaking news trade in Disney. How do you do over the month in a breaking news trade? You're giving yourself a gift of having these important trading stats. What we do during monthly meetings, which you guys will sit in when you go live and if some of you in the room ever get to go live, what we do is we sit in teams and review our months and traders because they've tagged their trades and they've measured their trade, they come in at the end of each month and they say I'm really good at breaking news trades. I'm really good at changing fundamentals trades. I'm not really very good at.

Swing trades, not really good at reversal trades. And that informs them about what they should be doing more of and what they should be doing more of bigger. And that informs them of trades that they can eliminate so that performance is better. Book of charts. Find the chart of the day, mark it up, archive it.

Over the weekend. Review your book of charts, flip through them. You should be keeping chart after chart after chart. This is going to help you internalize the most powerful chart setups. This is a habit that I co opted from one of the guys who became a really great trader here. Seven figure trader here. I noticed that he was doing this.

And this is a little bit like the playbook, but not the same thing because this is specific, specific to your charting skills. Alright, so yesterday in Disney, let's capture that trade and mark it up and keep it. And over the weekend, let's rip through it. We're internalizing the best and most powerful chart setups. Exercise. Develop a weekly exercise routine. How many days you're gonna work out, Execute on that. One of the best decisions I made recently was to hire a personal trainer. Fitness can be a source of edge. Your trading edge can be a source of edge. Your mind can be a source of trading edge. Your body can be a source of trading edge. And your spirituality, argues Dr. Steenbarger in his recent book can be a source of edge. Diet. Develop an eating routine that works best for you. I am chuckling because I still remember the time when I saw a former SME trader literally go to the store and buy a pint of Haagen Dazs ice cream and open it up and proceed to eat it on the trading floor. To which I shook my head and asked Carlton to go speak to him about how you can't eat that in the middle of the day and expect to perform in any way.

I personally stay away from carbs and sugar midday. If I have them, I'm almost useless. Everyone's different. You want to understand that works for you. But look, if you're not disciplined with what you eat, how can you expect to be disciplined when you trade mentoring sessions? Be present.

Dr. Steenbarger said this quite eloquently today. Your job is to come in and be a sponge. The best traders here oftentimes are the ones that have listened to. I don't say that because you should just listen to me. I just say that based on an observation. You want to be present, you want to be listening, you want to be absorbing, you want to ask good questions, you want to win each mentoring session. Technology. Improve your technology skills daily. So we were just talking to Max about this, how he developed the script to catch one of the low floats, which was one of the big winners today. I've noticed with some of the traders that I work with who are doing the best, that they find time. Perhaps surprisingly to me, they find time daily to fix their alerts, work on scripts, work on some modeling. Here we use technology in three ways. Alerts, scripts and models. You're going to start with alerts, then you're going to gravitate towards scripts and you'll play around with models. If you spot a great trade, can you build a filter to spot a trade like it. That's going to be a part of your day. AM prep before the AM meetings. Prepare for the AM meetings. Like you.

Jake, like you are going to run the AM meeting. All right? You should be like our floor manager and prepared like that. Build your stock selection skills. So if you come to the AM meeting and you're not super prepared and you miss some things, you're not getting the experience that you actually can get. Choosing stocks. What you trade is more important than how you trade. Daily report card. This is an exercise that in the future we work with all of you in the room with.

This is something that Dr. Steenbarger encouraged us to start implementing. And so some of the top traders and many of the traders at the firm send a daily report card to Dr. Steenbarger and myself every day and we provide feedback. You pick one goal. You work intensively on this one goal. You develop solutions to achieve this one goal. You complete a report card at the end of each trading session on the progress for that one goal. When you're working on too many things at the same time, often you make no progress at all.

Intensively work on one thing at a time. Talk to traders. You guys have the benefit of of being at a prop firm. There are junior traders and senior traders here from whom you can learn a lot. Eugene, who came to visit us from Russia was really one of the more enjoyable people that we've ever had visit. He was repeatedly reaching out to other traders, introducing himself, talking to other traders. They were very receptive to talking with him. If you reach out to senior traders, they will talk to you if you're quiet.

And they will not talk to you. Okay? You can learn also a lot from junior traders. You guys in the room can learn a lot from each other. It doesn't have to be from a senior trader. You'll have unique experiences. We all hired you for a good reason that you have value to add to this firm and so talk to each other. There's going to be things that you missed.

That you can learn after talking to other traders about and gating trading experience by reviewing trades through discussion with others in the same name that you're trading is adding reps and experience that you're not going to have unless you're talking to other people. Okay. And Jake, you had a great call out today and I was quasi making fun of you for not just saying to me, hey, look at dds, which was one of the really good stock picks of the day.

And I understand the younger generation loves to chat.

You're much better with technology than us. But say, hey, I'm looking at dds. You guys actually are doing a pretty good job of that over your headsets. All right, game plan, big trades. You need to be thinking about what's the next big trade? So here we are. U.S. china trade tariff war is the key headline event for our markets right now, right? What are we going to do if we find out that Trump has walked away from the talks, is not going to sign the agreement?

What are you going to short? What Chinese names you're gonna short? What ETFs are you gonna short? What US products are you gonna short? What US stocks are you gonna short? Be prepared for that. You guys witnessed an experienced trader who had his first 100,000 plus trading day by using this technique. He was game planned, keyed up for if there was gonna be negative news on the US China front. There was he smacked Baba. He had his best trade ever of his life. You want to be thinking about what are the big trades coming? If Disney announces that more subs have been added than expected, what do you do?

We're going to buy, right? That was the big trade of yesterday, right?

All right, what are we going to do if Beyond Meats comes out with terrible news that people are getting sick from their burgers? What are we going to do? You want to be thinking ahead. What is the really big trade? How are you going to react? What's your risk going to be for that trade? How much you're going to risk? What's the target going to be? What's your exit going to be? What's your train plan, your trade plan going to be our game plan before the AM meeting. We talked about this today during our 11 o' clock mentoring session. So you're gonna have 1, 2, 3 ideas where you want to spend a lot of focus on. That's going to be your most. That's going to be your most focused and you only have like 4, 5, 6. I'm going to set alerts for that. I'm not going to watch that that closely. I'm going to save my attention for my big stocks, my big ideas. 1, 2, 3. Nano sent me a Gchat today talking about how he game planned on the open to trade Cisco. And that was a great idea. And then he found himself getting into something else. It was a lesser trade that gave back his wins in Cisco. To me, that's just an issue of committing to your game plan, writing down because it's so easy in real time to get sucked into something else. It's so easy in real time to forget where your money really can come from. But you need to sit down before the AM meeting and say here are my top three ideas.

Here's what I'm going to spend most of my time on. Here's where I think I can make most of my money. Here's idea 4, 5, 6 I'm just going to set alerts for that. If they hit great prices, I might play around with it.

Then. Having said that, we're always going to just be open minded to if something really good comes into focus. Like Disney yesterday was something that hit midday. Okay, so what stocks are going to receive the most focus. What's your top idea? Where you're going to set alerts for great trades. It's easy to lose sight of where you can make the most money when the market's open if you do not complete a game plan. Daily Gratitude Exercise so I Learned this from Dr. Menaker. I actually practiced this with my children.

Before they go to bed each night. And so I asked them what are the three things that they're grateful for from the day.

They usually give me like 10.

But we practice this every day and what this allows you to do. There's a post on SME training about this, but essentially ask them what are the three things you're grateful for and they yell it out. And what it does is it helps to keep things in perspective. You know, when you are recognizing the things that bring joy outside of trading a loss and a trade is much more manageable, you can put it into perspective. It doesn't really hurt as much. I can tell you that since I've had kids I none of my losses have bothered me as much as before. Train your brain so this is a new idea that we've never talked about in this room or openly. And this is something that Dr. Steenberg and I have been playing around with. So There's a site, brainhq.com you guys may have noticed that I've been playing these video games before they open. It is Brain hq. And so I'm trying to get smarter.

I think it's working a little bit. And so.

We talked about mindfulness being something that is going to be one of those things that everybody does in the future that they don't quite do and is not accepted right now. This is going to be one of those things as well. And so there are games and sites you can go to where you really can train your brain to be faster, focus better, more attuned. We are, we are electronic performance athletes. We are data processing athletes. And so since we sit in front of screens eight hours a day and more, we need to have our brains tuned up to be as sharp as possible. And so this is one of those sites you can go to and 15, 20 minutes a day, you can start working on your processing power. For those of you who need a star endorsement, Tom Brady has incorporated this into his training. For those of you who hate the Patriots, still have to admire him for being really good at his sport relationships. Plan time to excel in your friendships. Plan time to excel with your significant other. Or for some of you in the room, others, no judgment here.

You guys are young. It is New York City. Enjoy yourselves.

So there's a lot of science that shows that happiness improves performance.

Dr. Steenberg would talk a lot about.

You. Having fulfillment outside of trading will very much impact how you do when we turn the lights on. Learn daily. Develop a daily learning routine. Read podcasts. Each day I walk through Central park and I listen to audible.

And I am, I'm learning rip through charts. So develop a daily system to rip through charts. Look at your daily and weekly charts. Where the longer term breakouts and breakdowns gonna come from. Shark does this very well. There are people, people here who rip through lots of daily and weekly charts looking for important breakouts on longer term levels. There are traders who trade intraday.

Only looking for these daily, weekly breakout charts that they're researching. All right, so SME challenge. Create a daily routine filled with effective habits.

These are ideas for you guys to consider. This is a template for you guys to consider. This is not me saying to you, this is what you should be doing. Everybody's different. Make your own routine.

There's a lot of good ideas in this. Some of you are going to want to add more ideas to this.

Perhaps one of them may be spend each time, each day expanding your network.

Others of you are going to want to condense it.

Totally fine.

But create it. But create it. Okay. And then execute it on it. We're going to teach you setups with edge.

You're going to learn from guys here who do really well.

But the way that they became really good, the reason why they do really well is they're learning each day, getting better each day. Their progress is compounding day after day after day. And if we just teach you strategies with edge, that's not going to get you to the point where you are the best trader you can be. These are the things that you need to do independently and individually to take that knowledge that we are teaching to you and become excellent, become an elite trader. And we're not here, we're not here to make $100,000 a year. We're not here for you to make $200,000 a year. We're here for you guys to make real money. And that's going to mean you guys really get after it. The best traders that I know different. They are different than the people that are underperforming. They are trying to excel every day at getting better at trading. They're doing these things even though they're making a ton of money. Even though a lot of people might think, why These guys who have all this money, who have made all this money, why are they doing things like recording their screens and watching it back? They are.

And maybe one of the reasons why they are so good is that they were the guys who were willing to do the work day after day, like watch back recorded video of their screens or like do mindfulness practice or get their sleep routine in check. Maybe that's why they're so good and still getting better.

What you do determines who you will become.

As a trader. Now it's your turn. Are you going to take the SME challenge and develop your daily trading routine? And if so, what are you going to add to our list of habits? In short, what do we leave out? Let us know by leaving a comment below. Right now.