Millionaire Trader Answers Questions About Trading - Umar Ashraf

I'm going to go over some of the questions you guys asked me on my Instagram story and some of the questions were crazy. I want to try to go through as many as I possibly can. If you guys stay through the video, you'll see how crazy some of the questions got if I get to them. If you guys have more questions, comment down below or, you know, whenever I do post something on my Instagram, I'll share my Instagram. Just ask me over there. All the things I'm going to focus on are trading related. Question number one. Did the feeling of winning change your perception on losing or was there no real change difference? So the perception of losing is always there. I think when you first start out as a trader, losing hurts you a lot more than I think it should, but it's also because you haven't really obtained any success. So in my early days of trading, when I would lose, when I would be wrong, it would hurt me a lot more than it does now. Now, the reason it doesn't hurt me as much financially or emotionally now is because once again, I've been trading for a really long time. It's been about 10 years now. During that period, I've gotten very accustomed to understanding that losses are a part of the game. No matter what you do, how good of a trader you are, you will come across losses. And the only thing we can do as traders, we can basically just control our losses as much as possible, right? We can limit them, manage them before we get into a trade, put our stops in place, take the according position, size, and that's really about it. Besides that, if you hit a few losses, understand why you hit those losses. But ultimately, to answer your question, over time it does change because you do achieve a level of success that makes it very comfortable to lose a couple of times. So if you have a hard time with losses now, give it time. Once you do come to that level of success, as I mentioned, it does get easier. Next question. Would you rank your intuition over your setup? How much does intuition play part of your trade or trading? Right. So really good question. Intuition, in my opinion, plays a big role. And there's times like I've taken trades and nothing has really actively shown a trade on the chart. But because I've been doing this for a long period of time, I have built a strong level of intuition with some trades. Not all the time. I'm not a magician where I wake up and I know the market's gonna go up or down. No, I'm seeing in some trades you see the tape, you see the action, You've seen it happen in the past. You're able to kind of connect it with what happened in the past. So right away I'm like, okay, well, I've seen this happen. I have a feeling that we have a strong possibility this may go up. Now, that doesn't mean my intuition automatically makes me go full account into the trade. It, it just means that when that does happen, I obviously approach the trade with the proper risk management and I execute on it. But once again, that takes years and years to develop. And trading with intuition is a real thing. There's books on it, there's studies on it. So I would rank my intuition as a key component of my trading. Next question. How do you pick your top stocks for the day? So over the years, my trading has changed a lot. You know, early on I would run scanners, I would look at names in play. Over the past two years or three years, my trading has been heavily focused on a few set of names. Like I would trade Spy, I would trade Tesla, I would trade Amazon, I would trade ES Futures. All right? And I would just try to keep it consistent in trading a few set of names instead of looking for names with Catalyst or looking for names that are moving on a pre market mover or whatever the case is. And I'm not saying that's the wrong way to trade or that's the right way to trade. It's just I have developed a way of trading that I am comfortable with. So now I don't wake up every day looking at new stocks or looking at what should the new stocks be that I'm going to trade today. I build a comfortability with a few set of stocks. I look at any sort of catalyst, I look at any sort of movements, any sort of, you know, understanding of where they are on the chart, what price action is showing me. And I try to formulate a game plan around that. Next question. How were you able to scale up your risk tolerance so much quicker than most other traders? So I don't know what so much quicker is. I mean, I've been trading once again for nine, 10 years, right? So it took a lot of time. I like to emphasize on that because I don't want to give you guys the notion of like, hey, I've been here for two years and one year and I made so much money. No, it's been 10 years about. So it wasn't quicker. But the way to scale up your risk is over the years when I started having success, quarter over quarter, year after year, you know, I started building more of a cushion, more of a comfortability because think about it, you have a year, you make 100,000, you have another year, you make 400,000, you have another yearS, you make 800,000, you have a year where you cross a million. Now you being wrong for a month or two or taking a 40, 50k losing month or quarter is kind of digestible because you've made so much money from the markets right early on. It's not digestible because if you lose 20,000 a quarter or 20,000amonth and you, and you've never made money from the market, you're essentially negative. But imagine you've made 200,000 from the market and you have one month, you lose 20k. It sucks. But your net net delta is still positive on the overall markets, right? So as my trading has progressed, right, as I've gotten more comfortable, as I've made more money, my risk tolerance in position, sizing has slowly increased with that. So it was a combination of time, combination of me achieving success and making money and, and a combination of me being comfortable in, you know, as I got more and more success, me increasing that tolerance risk. But it did take years. It wasn't, it's not an overnight thing or it's not a monthly thing. Hey, I would like to know what books would you suggest to someone starting the journey? So I like this question a lot because you. There's a lot of books talking about different ways to trade. I'm not really a fan of books that talk about ways to trade unless you focus on one way of trading. Cause one mistake that I made in my trading journey is I would pick a few books and old books would talk about different ways to trade and I wouldn't have a clear direction. Books that I found really helpful are psychology books. Right? Psychology books. To understand your trading psychology, to understand how we think has helped me out tremendously. Mindfulness trading. C. Trading in the zone. Another one. There's a lot of psychology books basically that I think are good, that I think people should look into more than building strategies and edges, in my opinion. Next question. Is it possible to make a million dollars from $10,000 within a year?

It's possible, but the possibility of it is very, very, very, very small. Like you have to expose yourself to a lot of risk. So to answer the question, yes, I think it's possible. Do I think that's the goal you should have? No. Why? Because to achieve that, you have to be able to hit big trades. And put on massive risk, and it's just not sustainable. I think if you start off with $10,000, don't focus on, I need to make a million, I need to make 2 million, I need to even make a hundred thousand. If you start off with 10,000, my first goal for the year is to stay, break even, not even to make money. But in that year, I want to learn as much as possible, get as good as possible. Understand? When should I enter, when should I exit? Like, all of these things that compile into being a successful trader. And once you get there, at that point is where you should maybe start thinking about setting percentage goals or target goals. But first year, two years, don't set any money goals. It's doable. You'll hear people talking about it. But there's like a point, 0001%. Have you ever felt like quitting? And if so, what did you tell yourself to get out of the slump? Oh, man. So as a trader, if you haven't tried to quit trading at least 55,000 times, you're not a real trader. That's. That's what I say all the time. Like, every trader I've met always talks about this, right? They're like, yeah, I wanted to quit. I wanted to quit. Especially in your early days. I obviously, once you achieve a level of success, at a certain point it changes. But in your early days, every trader hits that roadblock. I've hit that roadblock so many times where I was like, I don't think trading's for me. I lose money. I don't think it's for me. You'll have a week of making a good amount of money. And after you make a good amount of money, you go through a trading slump and you're like, I think I got lucky. I think the past two months I've gotten lucky. This, I used to do this until even year six, like, I remember, I think it was 2019 or 2018. I had a. I had a good two months and I went through, like, a really weird slump. I don't remember the exact date, but I started questioning my trading abilities. I was like, am I even good at trading? Have I gotten lucky all this time? Because you know, when you go through that one bad week or one bad month, you question everything. So it's normal. It, it happens, embrace it, feel it. But you need to learn how to shrug it off and move forward, right? Because, like, my thing is when, when you go through these bad periods or slumps, understand what went wrong, what could you do? Like what could you have done to avoid that? Sometimes you're, you're, you're looking at the market from a different angle or a wrong perspective, your size is off, your setups don't make sense. Like so many different things could be wrong, which is hard for me to tell you. But you want to try to find out what that problem is, what is putting you in a slump. And then you want to work your way back into it by trading with lower size, smaller size, and just focusing on one to two setups and slowly building that confidence back into the trading world. How meditation helps in trading and how to control stress and emotions. So meditation has been huge for me. Like meditation, like two things that have been a key turning point in my trading is journaling and meditation. Like, like the biggest improvements. Like these are two things that have improved my, you know, trading a lot. Journaling we'll talk about in another video. But in terms of meditation, meditation has helped me in various different ways. And you guys can look it up. There's like scientific study behind this. Meditation will help you understand yourself. Meditation will help you learn more about how you think more about how you process more about how your emotions pop up. It'll help you focus more. It'll help with anxiety, it'll help with depression. It's so many different things. It'll help with. And once again, if you look it up, you'll see what I'm talking about. There's a lot of apps, a lot of programs that'll walk you through meditation, but it's just kind of a power of being in the moment, power of focus. And in the trading world, because everything is so mental, the better you get at it, right? The better you can focus, the better you can kind of feel your thoughts coming in. The better you'll be able to execute on a day to day real life example, right? So meditation is key. If, if you haven't started, I would highly recommend you guys to start meditation like tomorrow, like right away. Not tomorrow, right after, like right now, like after the video. Go download an app, download something and start meditation. And, and 30 days later, I promise you, 30 days later you come back and, and you will see you will be a completely different person. Like it'll be transformative. Every trade I make seems to go against me. Should I do the opposite of what I think is right?

So I hit this wall multiple times. I hit this wall now, right? I'll have days where I go short stock goes up or my movement goes up, I go along, it goes down and I'M like, should I just do the opposite? And I never. You know what the crazy part is? I've tried doing the opposite of what I originally wanted to do. So if I'm trying to go long, I'm like, you know what? Because I'm trying to go long for the day, let me go short. And it's such a crazy thing. As traders, we start seeing a lot of our trades that start happening like that. And I don't know. I don't know why that is. Right. The few moments that I did see what it was, I realized I was just very biased. Like, I was biased on the day I was. I was missing key components. I was just randomly picking a side based on something that, you know, solidified my judgment or my thesis or whatever you want to call it. But no, don't do that. It's just. It sounds good on paper if you go back to the old trades, but if you try it on new trades, it's not gonna work. Trust me. I've tried it on a win streak. How do I prevent myself from making irrational choices to keep win streak?

So this is something that I also have been through multiple times. I've had periods where I have three weeks or four weeks or one month or two months where I'm green. Any trade I touch, I'm just doing so well most of the time. In my early days, what would happen is I would have two, three weeks of consistent green. My ego goes up, my confidence goes up, and that follows with bigger position size. Once the bigger position size is. Is matched with a bigger ego, more confidence. After those three weeks of making money, day after day, I would typically just knock it all out in two or three trades. Now you're like, how'd you knock it out in two or three trades? No risk management. Like I said, I get very biased because I had big size on the trades and that confidence kicked in. So what I started doing right after a couple of years after I started realizing this is I started taking less size after big wins. So now if I have a big trade on the open and I make good money, my next trade is less size or the same size. I don't increase size after a big win or a big loss. Like, that is a rule. Like, if I do good on the first trade or bad, I do not immediately increase or decrease size. Right. Depending on the trade. Right. I'll look at the trade, but I'll make sure if I am going to route, it'll be the. Like, I'll keep it similar or lower Instead of saying, I'm gonna go and double my size because I made money, or I'm gonna lower my size because I lost money, or I'm gonna increase my size because I lost so much, like, whatever the case is, right? So I'm able to, in the moment, I'm able to pick up on that. So for me now, it's like, the advice I would maybe give you is, if you're on a win streak, be more conscious of all your trades because sometimes it's very easy to become biased because your confidence goes up, your ego goes up. And don't allow your size to increase. No matter how good you feel. Keep your size consistent as long as possible. Keep it consistent, keep it consistent. And if you want to increase your size on a particular trade, double check. Because you're like, the moment you want to increase size, the way what happens is mentally your mind is like, this trade is great. It's got to go up. Most of the time that comes from you making a lot of money or you losing a lot of money. And you are trying to take a trade to make that back. So if you do hit that slump or hit that period, just take a take, take a step back. In my opinion, just take a quick step back, reevaluate the trades and just keep the size consistent. Best YouTube channel for starting trading. I like to say eventually mine, because I'm posting a lot of content. Just side note, guys, thank you for watching. Thank you for supporting. I appreciate it. I'm trying to post a lot more content. I'm like, my goal for this year is to post as much as free, valuable content I can for you guys. So if there's topics you want me to talk about, things you want me to break down, like strategy, setups, whatever it is, just please comment down below. We're trying to really ramp up a lot of informative content. And with that being said, I just want to say thank you for your support. And I am aiming to be the best place for day traders to come to learn and have one place, one hub. So thank you for your support, everyone. The biggest struggles of you starting out trading and how you overcame them. When I started out, I had a lot of struggles, right? It wasn't just one struggle. You're working a job, you're, you know, under capitalized. You don't know what to do, you don't know what to trade. And even if something works for a week or two weeks, then it stops working. So you're like, was it really working? So in the beginning Stages, you have a lot of different problems and struggles. Right. My biggest struggle early on was knowing what I wanted to trade. Right. I was all over the place. My other struggle was I was very, very kind of unsure of a strategy. Like I didn't really have a strategy, if that makes sense. Right. I thought I did. And every strategy I chased was kind of like a simple strategy. Like if it breaks this level, going, if it breaks that level, short, whatever, like a lot of simple stuff. And over the years I've learned that's not a strategy, that's not an edge. Reading the market the way you're taught originally from content, I guess, is not the right way. You need to learn from someone that has the experience, that has the backing, that has essentially shown it. In my opinion. One thing I did wrong early on is I picked too many different channels to learn from. And I'm not gonna say here, hey, come watch my channel, learn from my channel, which obviously would be great. Let's say you're watching my videos and now you watch someone else's videos and someone else's videos. Everyone has a different way of trading. Some are right, some are wrong. Right. But everyone has their own way. And what I did is I would try to try this person's way once, then this person's way and then this person, and they would just. I just never allowed myself to have that real consistency with one way I looked at the market or one approach I had. Right. It was just multiple different approaches that never meshed well together. So that was a big struggle. And like I said, I just wasn't profitable. I wasn't able to make money. But those were some of the reasons why I had the struggle, obviously. Last question. Do you recommend going full time trader or also focusing on other sources of income? So if you want to go full time, make sure you have six months to a year of savings put aside. If you want to go full time, make sure you have been consistent for one year. When I say consistent, I mean consistently profitable for at least one year. Like you had one year where you've made money. You understand what your setups are, you understand what your game plan is. You understand how to approach the market. You understand how you respond when you have a losing day, how you respond when you have a winning day, like all of these things. And if you have all of that packed, quit your full time job, great, go ahead if that's what you want to do. But if you don't have that, I would say don't quit. Because if you do quit, you're just gonna make your life a lot harder. You don't need that added pressure from day trading added to you just because you want to quit your job and you're in a rush. Take things solely, give it a year, give it two years, let it come to you. And you'd be really, really surprised on how much you can achieve in two, three years. And post two, three months. And a lot of people, there's a quote about it, a lot of people, I think it's overestimate what they can do in three, three months and underestimate what they can do in three years. Right? So just give yourself the time in the markets, guys. If you give yourself the time, I promise within due time everything will start clicking together. Thank you so much for watching, guys. If you guys have more questions, please comment down below. Let me know what questions you have. I want to try to do these once a month to answer, you know, all your questions or anything you guys are struggling with. Because my main goal on this channel, as I mentioned before, is I want to provide as much as value as possible to the trading community in general. With that being said, please give this a like and a thumbs up and I will see you guys on the next video.