7 Things I Learned From Making $15 Million as a Day Trader

I've been trading for over 10 years, and in that time period, I made a little over $15 million from day trading. And in this video, I want to break down all the lessons and things I've learned throughout my journey. The first thing that I've learned is you don't have to trade every day. When I first started out trading, I woke up every single day looking to take trades in the market. And over the few years, I've learned that you have to focus on finding opportunities in the market. And the market is a place that does not give you an opportunity every single day. So that took some time for me to really develop. And once I was able to develop and understand that, I was able to approach each and every single trading day according to what the market presented. Now, the market will present different opportunities based on your game plan, based on your viewpoint of the market, and based on how you trade. So you have to identify the way you trade, what your strategies are, and then with that strategy or strategies, you need to approach the market with the ideology that, hey, the market may or may not present me an opportunity today, and if it doesn't, it's okay to stay cash. My problem was initially I was like, hey, I'm spending four hours in front of my computer, five hours in front of my computer, I have to put on a trade, I have to buy something, I have to sell something. And that would lead, you know, me to having terrible trades or me losing money and, and having trades that I had no business in taking. The next thing I learned is you must adapt to the market. So over the past 10 years, I've realized how the market has changed year over year and how the market has seasons, right? So the way the market is moving now, the way your trades are going now, may not happen in the next upcoming months. So a quick little story. There's times where I've been trading, and I would have great weeks, great days, and great months. Now, most of the times as traders, when we have big months, big weeks, and so on, we think that momentum will continue, those opportunities will continue to present themselves. But what happens in certain situations, or the market in general, is that the market shifts its direction or it pauses in the direction it's going in, your job as a trader is to understand that, recognize that, and make the proper transition. So if you are trading in, let's just say, a crazy market that is rallying, that is trending and having a strong uptrend, right? Some strategies, strategies may be working in that market. Some plays may be working in that market and the way you approach the market during that period may be beneficial. But now when the market transitions, you as a trader, you have to adapt and realize that if not. What I've seen happens is traders start blowing a lot of money having big drawdowns because they're not able to recognize this big transition in the market. And that just causes them to keep hammering down on the same strategy or same focus that they have on the market. So next time you're, you know, trading for a long period of time and you notice that a strategy is not working, take a step back and say, well, did the market conditions change? The strategy that I was using isn't not working at this current moment. Why is it not working? And try to understand the market from a macro point of view and realize that change will happen. And when, when it does happen, your job is to once again recognize and make that adjustment. Next, make sure you have realistic goals and you set yourself up for success. One thing that I notice a lot of traders do wrong, including myself, is we start setting money goals and we set unrealistic goals for ourselves in the market. This creates so much pressure in our trading that causes us to take terrible trades, that causes us to take FOMO trades, and that never leads to a good thing. So in my early days, one thing I did a lot once again was I would say I need to make 100,000 on my first year, I need to make $200,000 in my first year. I need to make this much, my account by this date has to be be at this value. And once again, all that did for me was it created false expectations and it created so much pressure. And trading is a place where we don't need to create outside pressure because that outside pressure just does not help. So the goals that I recommend you guys to have or the goals that I would do if I was to go back is I would set goals that are not money related. I would say, well, the first year my, my goal is to make sure I can improve my win percentage. My first year goal or my goals are to make sure I can improve my risk to reward ratio. I can focus on my R multiple, I can focus on things that I can control and some things to break it down on. What I think you should focus on are, you know, once again focusing on your risk, focusing on your game plans, focusing on identifying opportunities, right? Making those things small little goals and saying, my goal for the month is to make sure that I don't have a drawdown more than 10% or my goal for this month is to make sure my winning percentage stays at 60%. Or my goal for this month is to make sure that my R multiple is above a certain number. Right? If you're able to kind of build those goals and going deeper into goals could be, hey, my goal is to not take more than five trades a day or four trades a day, or my goal is to not lose more than $500 a day. Those goals are things that we as traders can manage. And if we manage those expectations well, we allow ourselves to have the highest possibility of success. But if we make our goals where this month I want to make $10,000 or $20,000, all you're doing is you're creating false expectations and you're creating such high pressure for yourself. And most of the time that just does not work out. The only thing that really matters in the market is risk, the risk that you put out, right? So every trade that we take as traders, one thing we can control is how much we are willing to risk if the we are wrong. So before you take on any trade, one thing that should be done is, hey, if this trade invalidates my idea, invalidates my thesis that says that I am wrong, what is the price point that I should take my exit on that will say I'm wrong? And what should that look like in a dollar value? Now, everyone will be in a different position. For some people, it could be $300. For some people, it could be $3,000. Depending on your account size, depending on the stage you're at, you need to understand that once again, risk is very crucial in this journey. And that is one thing that you should control and you can control. So before you approach any single trade, guys, make sure you have a defined area of risk. Meaning, hey, if I am wrong, I will lose $300, right? And you need to accept that loss before you take the trade. One thing I did wrong in my early days is a lot of times I would say, well, I'm going to buy this stock or I'm going to take this trade. If this trade goes in my favor, I'm going to make $2,000, completely invalidating the risk component, right? Because it's like, you take a trade and you're like, I'm not going to be wrong, right? So you just go in and you enter the trade. You put on size without even factoring the risk. Because, hey, I'm taking this trade. I know I'm going to be right. And when those trades go against you, and they will, if that risk Is not managed well, you will have a really, really, really difficult time taking drawdowns or accepting drawdowns or just having a healthy piano curve in your trading. So make sure you factor in risk, make sure you accept risk, and make sure you manage risk. The next thing I learned is that one of the main key things that every trader should be doing is they should be tracking and analyzing their trades. Meaning every single trader should journal their trades. Now, when I started trading my first two years, I never journaled, I never measured, I never did anything. I would wake up, I would put on a trade, I would not know anything about what I traded, what my r multiple is, what my win percentage is, what my average win to loss ratio is. I had no idea. I was just waking up putting on trades hoping to be red or green, and I was calling it a day. That's what I did my first year to year two. Now during, you know, year two is when I really started taking trading seriously or I told myself I am right. And one of my key important factors that helped me elevate my game was, was to track my performance. So I started tracking my data. I started looking at, you know, my winning percentage. I started looking at my average win to loss ratio. How much do I make per trade and how much do I lose? Portrait. What is the size that I trade well with? What is the size of trade, you know, bad with? I started looking at my playbooks, my strategies, what strategies are effective, what strategies are not effective. So when I started measuring and tracking these things, what it allowed me to do, it allowed me to see where am I excelling in in my trading journey and where am I behind it. So I was able to cut off like the heavy baggage in my trading. I was able to put in more focus on the areas that I was good in, the areas that I did need to put more size in the strategies that were working when they were working. And I was able to leverage that the right way. Now the only way I was able to do that was by tracking and journaling my trades, right? If you guys want to track, go check out Tradezilla. If you guys want to look for an online automated journal. If not, you guys can also use like a journal or whatever, a notepad just to do it if you, if you want to go that route. But I would highly recommend to journal. I would highly recommend to analyze your pre market game plans, your aftermarket game plans, how you view the market, what you actually did. Because those things are very, very important to allowing yourself to have the highest Possibility of success. The next thing I learned is if you really want to have good strategies, you need to have an outlined example of your strategies, which could also be known as setups or playbooks. So having a playbook in the market is very, very crucial. So over the years, I've developed multiple playbooks. Now, my playbooks would look something like me having an entry criteria, me having an exit criteria, me having a market condition. So if I have a playbook for, let's say, an opening range breakout. Now my question for that playbook would be, when does this strategy or when does this playbook become in effect? Now, I've noticed some of my playbooks become in effect when the market is reacting in a certain way. So to break down my opening range breakout strategy, right, my entry criteria for or market conditions would be the market would have to maybe gap up. Now, if the market has gapped up from yesterday's low or yesterday's closing session, most of the time I'm now in a trading criteria zone. Then my second entry criteria would be seeing volume above average, us breaking above my huge supply zone, or my huge level that I have established with extreme amount of strength or buying pressure. If I can identify those things and put it together now I have a certain setup, certain playbook that is effective for me to trade. So if you do have strategies, my first question to you guys right now, if you're like, hey, I have a strategy, I would say, I would ask you, what is your strategy, right? What's it called? What's your entry criteria? Like, what. What causes you to take this trade or identify this trade? What is the market conditions that this criteria needs to be under? If it needs to be under any. And where would you exit? Like, what is your exit criteria? Because having an exit in the market or having an exit in any trade is always, always crucial. Because you can't enter a trade, right? And not know where you're going to exit, right? Going back to, like the risk component, you need to always make sure that, hey, I have an area where if I'm wrong, I'm going to exit. So that's why having the exit criteria in your game plan, having it in your playbook, just allows you to be very fluid in your trading and just kind of have like a visualized game plan, right? Hey, this is what the strategies are. This is what my playbook is. This is what I'm going to take to trade. This, see when I'm going to exit. And that just allows you to have something on, you know, hard paper and that's what you want to do. And like I said, I wish I did these things early on. If not, you know, I would have done better way early on. But obviously it took me some time. I went through trials and, and issues and failures and so on in my first two, three years to kind of really narrow these aspects of trading down, right? The last thing I learned, which I think is extremely important, and I'm pretty sure you guys have also ran into these problems, is that trading is about 90% emotional, right? There's so much psychology involved in trading. I can't stress this enough. And one thing I hear people talk about all the time is I want to eliminate my emotions. And my thing is, you can't eliminate your emotions. Like, we as humans, we cannot eliminate emotions. We can't destroy our emotions. But what we can do is we can manage our emotions, get better at understanding ourselves, get. Get better at understanding how we respond to certain things in the market. So this ties back a little bit with journaling, right? So my question to you guys, and I want you to process this for a quick second, right? Is how do you respond when you're in a trade that hits your stop loss? Do you exit at that point, or do you panic and get scared and get nervous or whatever the case is, or do you actually follow it? How do you feel internally, right? How do you feel when a trade actually goes in your favor? Do you get excited? Do you get happy? Do you start looking at that trade and you do start saying, well, now I need to take this trade, I need to take the profit, I need to see green. Like, how do you respond during these moments? How do you respond when you have three back to back losing trades or winning trades? You get so excited where now your next trade start getting impacted, right? That's where I learned that there's so many different, different ways that we all respond to emotions. And you know, for the first two years of my trading and so on, I tried to, like, I tried every way to be robotic. Hey, how do I become robotic? How do I remove emotions? And it's like over, over. Over the few years, I was like, wait, you can't, like, I can't remove emotions. It's impossible. So how do I manage them? How do I deal with them? And for me to manage them, it was like once again, understanding them, going into journaling, learning about how I react, learning about how I respond. And then I started creating something in my head. And this is one, one saying that's helped me out a lot with Every single trade. And it's like one of my favorite sayings as a trader is always think about your next 100 trades. You can have a big trading day tomorrow, a big trading, a bad trading day tomorrow, whatever trading day or trade it is, think about your next 100 trades, right? So imagine tomorrow, you have a big loss or you have a big win. Don't get too excited or too sad about it. Because if you think about the long term trades and you think about the next 100 trades, you start realizing how small that one little win is or losses. But if you keep those losses manageable, you keep those losses manageable, those gains like manageable as well. Like, you know, you don't go crazy with risk and so on over those hundred years, you start seeing real success in every trade you do take. Doesn't really impact your psychology, doesn't impact your emotions. If I go on tomorrow and I take a trade and I lose money, cool, I lost money. Now why? Because I'm going to think about my next 100 trades and that kind of puts my mind at ease and it allows me to not allow that trade to impact my next day or my next trade. Same thing. When I have a big winning trade, I'm like, all right, I had a big winning trade, I can lose it all in the next 99 trades. So I can't get ahead of myself and I need to narrow that down. So those are some of the things that I've Learned in my 10 years and plus of experience. Like I said, I had a lot and a lot of highs and lows in my trading career. I know a lot of people are saying, well this guy, you know, it has made $15 million in this period. And guys, most of the money I made came in like my last five years, right? The first five years equated to maybe 10 or 20% of my whole trading profits. And you know, out of those 10 years, one year I had a seven and a half million dollar year. So just one year made up over 50% of my trading profits, right? So that's just to show you that this is a long term game. And you know, if you guys don't find momentum or don't find success, year one, year two, year three and you stay alive and you keep consistent at it and you kind of work on the skill sets the right way. Like, I don't mean you just wake up and put on trades and go crazy. I mean you actually take trading serious. Your success, your knowledge, your, you know, wisdom in trading, everything will start compounding and year after year, you will see success. So with that being said, thank you so much for watching. If you guys enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up and, you know, subscribe and I'll see you guys next time. Thank you.