7 Lessons I Learned From Making $1,000,000+ Trading

I made a million dollars from trading in under 24 months. But none of it would have been possible if I didn't learn these seven valuable lessons. And no, this wasn't done by over leveraging or over trading. In fact, at one firm, I turned $2,000 into over $200,000. And if you don't believe me, here's the proof. Each of the lessons that I'm about to share, nobody talks about, at least not the way that I'm going to. And all these points rely on each other. So make sure you pay close attention and do everything exactly as I say. It'll save you thousands of dollars and years of was get right into it. Point number one, less emphasis on strategy, more on processes. Now if you want to talk about wasted time and energy, this is where most traders find themselves quitting. Every trader starts out the same. They open up a brokerage account, place a few trades, make or lose a little bit or maybe even a lot of money. Maybe they catch a bull run and think they're a genius until the bull run ends and they give back all the gains. So it might take a while before they realize they don't have an actual plan and everybody's timeline is different. But eventually everyone realizes they need a strategy. Nearly every trader will go through this phase of disc new systems and strategies. They find one, test it for a bit, it doesn't work for them, so they abandon it and try and find something new. And this was me for a solid six to seven years. And the biggest problem wasn't that these systems didn't have edge. I just never used them long enough to find out if they did. And I wish somebody told me this sooner. Something that works, even just 30% of the time is enough to build an edge around the real money's made with your processes. So a professional trader can take a losing system and find a way to make really great money. If their other processes are sharp. Things like trade management and risk management can add a huge edge to you're trading. Take for example two traders. Trader 1 enters a single position with a stop and a target and doesn't have any trade management process. Basically set and forget compared to trader two who enters the same position with the same stop and target. But when they're up 2r in profit, they add another position while managing that stop loss so they don't expose themselves to more risk if the targets hit. Trader 2 makes almost two times as much money as Trader 1 just because they have a process for adding in the trades that work in their favor. And this has nothing to do with strategy. If you want actual proof of this working, take for example my student Mike, who before trading with me, had a system already but was struggling to find real consistency in the markets. So we dialed in and focused on processes that added real edge. So better trade management, better risk management, and better discipline. And just in the past few months, he's withdrawn over $40,000 using the same strategy he started with. If you want to learn more about some of the processes that I use to help turn traders into absolute monsters, then use the link in the description and book a call with my team and we'll help you build a full game plan instead running in circles with your strategy. Focus on ironing out your processes and the money will follow. Point number two, risk management is your only ticket out. Blowing an account is like a rite of passage in trading. And I don't think I've ever met or heard of a successful trader who hasn't. There's a couple different ways that you're going to blow up your account from either over trading or over leveraging, maybe even a combination of both. Firstly, when it comes to over trading, if you don't have confidence in your setups, you're going to be trading emotionally. So whenever you see the market go up, you buy, and when you see it go down, you sell. And this happens all day long. And before you know it, it's the death by a thousand cuts. So you might be risking 1% per trade, but that doesn't mean anything if you're taking 50 trades in a day. And when it comes to over leveraging, you're just flat out greedy. You want to make more money than your account is capable of, so you put on a trade with too much size. And then when that trade doesn't do exactly what you want, you panic because you can't stomach that risk. When you boil both those issues down, you're simply just breaking important rules that are meant to keep you alive. And I hear people all the time say, I can't stop over trading or I can't stop overleveraging. Yeah, you can just stop doing it. You don't have an over trading or over leveraging problem. You have a discipline problem. And what I had to learn was if I don't obey my risk management, I don't have any other safety net that will save my account. You could have the best strategy in the world. With terrible risk management, you're not going to make a dime. And on the other hand, you could break every single rule in your trading system. But at least if you follow your risk management, you're going to live to fight another day. Risk management has to become non negotiable. So don't try and bend the rules for certain trades. And I built bad habits around risk and kept treating the markets like a lottery. So don't be like me when I was younger. Don't be like every other trader out there trying to hit it big and retire in one trade. That's exactly why I yell at my students all the time, who over trade and over leverage, because we all know how that really ends in ruin. If I see my students trading on bank holidays or re entering trades when it's already been invalidated, or sizing up when they shouldn't be, I'm going to rip them a new one because I don't want them to go through the same gut wrenching pain of making these same mistakes over and over. I take risk management extremely seriously because it's the last line of defense. It's the difference between you blowing up accounts or actually making money in the markets long term. When Izzo joined my program, the biggest thing he needed to work on was risk management. But since he started respecting his risk management and listening to similar advice that I'm providing to you right now, he was able to make $18,000 in the past two months. So remember, with Risk Management, your frequency and sizing have to be on point. If they are, you can make every mistake in the book and still find a way to make money. But if they're not, you're gonna blow up very, very quickly. And that's why it's your only ticket out. This has to become non negotiable. Point number three, patience pays. Now this probably takes the longest and wouldn't it make sense? You need to have patience to learn patience. If you come to the markets and you're extremely impatient, I've got bad news for you. You're not going to have a good time. And speaking from experience, I was an extremely impatient, impulsive person. And why this is such a huge problem for traders is because one, you need to have patience to wait for the right setups, and two, you need to have patience to wait for those setups to play out. We can't control what the markets do when we enter a trade. Sometimes they run straight to our target, sometimes they run straight to our stop loss, and other times they chop around, maybe get close to our target and then retra. But if you're impatient and exit your trades on any adverse price Action, you effectively destroy your long term profitability. The point of having proper risk reward and letting your winners run is that they need to be able to pay for the losers. And you're going to have losers. There's a huge misconception when it comes to trading full time that you need to be doing something all the time. But the reality is 90% of the time, we're actually doing nothing. We're not trading every minute and we're certainly not managing our trades that much either. And oftentimes the best thing to do is to sit back, relax, and let the market do what it's going to do. I only came to that realization after reviewing a lot of my trades. I would have a trade idea, set my stop and target, but all the short term price action kept getting me to exit, flip sides, reenter, whatever, and if I had just stuck to my original trade idea, I would have made effortless money. Now, in order for you to learn patience in the markets, you need to practice it and drill it into your strategy. Inside my program, I create challenges, which is what I'm challenging you all to do as well. If you want to improve, you need to take action. So here's a challenge. Plan your next 25 trades that have the potential of 3R partial 50% at 2R and move the stop to break even and leave the rest to run to full target. This can be greater than 3R if you want it to be. It doesn't have to be though. And you're not to do anything until the Trade reaches at least 2R. That means no adjusting stops, no exiting prematurely. And if you find yourself squirming and getting anxious before Your trade is at 2R, that just means you have a lot of work to do when learning patience. But this drill is supposed to help you with that discipline. Alright, point number four, overconfidence is an account killer. How many of you guys have experienced this? You string together a few wins, think you've cracked the code, and then you size up huge on your next trade, only to take a massive loss and wipe out days, weeks, or even months of hard work in one bad trade or a series of bad trades. The problem with trading is that the highs are really high and the lows are really low. It can be an emotional roller coaster at times. And this is where I think females actually have an advantage in the markets. As men, we have this alpha personality and we hate being wrong. So we have a tendency to revenge trade and size up because we need to prove to the market and everyone we know that we're right. But the the market is never wrong. And if you're trading improperly, making decisions based on ego rather than logic, it's going to take the food right out of your mouth. There's actually an argument that people who are too smart don't make good traders because people with too much intelligence are always trying to find logic and reason in things. But sometimes there's no logic to the markets. This might cause them to place bets that are a sure thing and discount the fact that there's a reality in which they could be wrong. And I'm sure you've all heard the saying markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain soft. And there's so much truth behind that. Think about the big short. If you haven't seen it, it's about the 2008 housing market crash. And leading up to it, there were a bunch of firms that were predicting the collapse and bet big on it. But for many months the market kept trending higher and higher and some had margin and fund requirements so large that it put the firms at risk of closing. That's a case where the market was irrationally moving against what all the data suggested. It actually worked out in their favor because they had deep pockets. But this overconfidence almost ruined them. The way I combat that is by practicing strict position sizing. Think of this like setting your own table limits in the markets. The house doesn't set a limit, so it's up to you. So here's a practical exercise that I make my students do for the next 25 trades. Force yourself to trade the same risk regardless of the stop loss size. Maybe it's $100 and if the stop is too wide and you can't get within that specific risk and you can't take the trade. This is supposed to enforce discipline when it comes to position sizing, so that when you're overconfident, you're not going overboard and over leveraging. Point number five, take breaks. Often this is something I really, really, really wish somebody told me earlier in my career. When you're learning how to trade or if you've just gone full time, sometimes it feels like if you're not studying back testing or trading the live markets, that you just aren't making progress. But I'm going to be one of the first ones to say that that's a one way ticket to burning out. Think about it like this. There's 250 trading days in a year, excluding holidays. There is no professional sport in the world that has athletes play back to back to back to back games for that stretch of time. They have off seasons, they have days off. They use that time to study previous games, recover and train. If they didn't, they would play horribly, be injured all the time, and probably end up missing a whole lot of games because they're just flat out tired. Trading is a little bit different. So instead of it taking a physical toll, it takes a mental one. But it's very hard to gauge where your mental capital is. It's so easy to show up to the charts and continue trading on low mental capital because all you have to do is click a button. Compare that with trying to show up to the gym and train when you can't even walk. You can identify it quickly and know that you need a rest day. But oftentimes we recognize it too late with trading and we end up playing tired. And guess what happens? Our accounts get injured. And the problem is you haven't allowed yourself to reset and get back into flow with your systems and processes before assuming more risk. Listen, the markets are going to be here tomorrow and the next day and the next. They were here long before we were ever born, and they'll be here long after we die. There will always be another opportunity. So remind yourself that taking breaks is part of the job if you want to be at peak performance. Take my student Fernando, for example. He withdrew $10,000 in September and $8,000 in October. But then he blew up his funded accounts in November. So he decided to take a small break, realign with himself, and then he got funded easily again December. So if you feel like you're not in sync with the markets or your routine, try and catch it quickly and take a break from the markets before you do too much damage to your accounts. Point number six, Know yourself. In my opinion, trading is more like a personality test rather than a test of skill. If you're greedy or fearful, the markets will expose that. If you have anger problems, the markets will expose that. If you're impatient, the markets will exp expose that. This is part of trading that some people just never master because it requires you to be honest with yourself, which a lot of people just aren't comfortable doing in the markets. If you aren't willing to change parts of your personality, the ones that really hold back your trading performance, you'll likely never find true success. Now, I'm not saying you need to completely change your personality in order to be a good trader, but you do need to be aware of your shortcomings and how they're going to hold back your trading. And sometimes when you're deeply flawed, it does require you to change. Knowing yourself is an actual edge in the markets. It allows you to avoid many of the big mistakes because you can catch yourself before it gets out of control. But if you don't know yourself, that's something the market can help you with, which is why journaling is so important. If you're struggling with trading right now, getting to know yourself is one way to fast track your improvement. So start by taking notes of all your behaviors and habits. There are certain habits and triggers that will have an impact on your decision making. And really, at the end of the day, that's all trading is. Making good, logical decisions. So if you have a certain trigger that causes you to over trade or over leverage or break your rules, at least you can become aware of it. So the next time it happens, you can avoid doing too much damage. Also, it's good to have an accountability partner because it keeps you honest. At times, it's easy to get lost in the markets and forget who we are and why we're doing this. But when you're sharing the things that you're struggling with, it reinforces the idea that you do have flaws and you are working on them actively. Too many traders get caught up in the day to day of markets and put this unnecessary pressure on themselves to perform. They treat every single trading session like it's make or break. And you need to realize that a single trade or a single day is not going to have a massive impact on your trading success long term. What matters is that you stay consistent to the process. So Instead of thinking one trade from now, why don't you think about 10 or 20 trades from now? One trade is just a single data point and a long equity curve. And when you review your journal for the year, you won't even remember those days where you went on tilt. There'll be this small blip on the radar. So here's a mindset shift that helped me tremendously when I was on the verge of quitting. Give yourself a much longer time horizon for your trading goals. Back in 2019, I sat down and said, enough is enough. I either take this seriously or I'm going to quit trading forever. I'm going to become a full time trader in five years. Years. I actually ended up achieving that goal in under three. And having the bigger picture always in my mind allowed me to relax in my trades, be comfortable with the risks I was taking, and it actually made trading fun again. So the next time you're sitting at your desk and it feels like the world's falling apart. Just close the terminal and think about your long term goal and how you're gonna get there. I guarantee that overtrading and breaking all your rules is not part of the plan. So make sure you're always aligned with your long term plan and everything else will will fall into place naturally. So these were the seven biggest lessons that I learned on my journey to making a million dollars from trading. I know we covered a lot, but the reality is there's a huge learning curve when it comes to the markets. If you're interested to find out how you can shorten that learning curve by joining my apprenticeship program where I trade live three times a week. Answer all your questions and you get direct access to me. Then check out the link in the description and book a free call with my team. On the call, we'll create a full game plan for you so you can pinpoint exactly what's holding you back and set you on course to finally becoming a profit profitable trader. Just like my students, Fit Mike and Fernando, who are now getting consistent payouts. Until next time, this is Kyle signing off.