The Broker I Use to Day Trade with a $500 Account - Small Acct Challenge Ep 3

What's up everyone? Alright, welcome to episode three of my small account challenge. Now you know what that means. This is the episode where I'm gonna announce which broker I'm gonna use to day trade with. $500. Yep, 500 bucks. I'm gonna start over just like I did in January of 2017 when I started with $583 and turned it into over a million dollars of profit. Fully verified, fully audited. You guys can check that out below if you like. Now what I want to talk about today, of course, is the broker. And we're also going to talk about some of the side hustles that I did to help me raise my startup capital to start trading. And I hope some of that inspires you with some things that you guys can do to either cut your cost of living or increase the amount of money coming in so you can start your first trading account. Now, as I was coming out here, you guys could probably tell I'm on my traveling trading station right here. I've got my main laptop, my two monitors, and I'm in a hotel room. I'm in California. And as I was flying out here, I was taking some notes and I was thinking about this video, episode three, I made it last weekend. But as I was thinking about it, I realized there's something I want to do a little differently. So I realized that over the last few years, I've actually changed brokers several times. I've traded in, let's see, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 different brokerage accounts in the last couple years. And the reason I've changed is really based on which broker has the best offering, which one's got the best deal, the best platform. And I'm kind of agnostic when it comes to broker. I go with whichever one is best suited for my strategy. So for my announcement, I'm not gonna say it right now during the video, but what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put a link right down here below in the description and I want you guys to click on that link, jump over to our website. When you're on our website, you'll see the name of the broker that I'm going to use. And I've got a special video that you guys can watch which talks about how to trade within the PDT rule and how to trade around the PDT rule, the pattern day trader rule. So I want you guys to check out that link. And that means those of you watching this, a year from now, two years from now, five years from now, you will see the broker I currently recommend for trading with an account as small as 500 bucks that page because I will keep it updated. Now, as I was coming out here to California, I was also thinking about how fortunate I am as a day trader to be able to do this literally from anywhere in the world. This right here, this laptop with these two monitors, this is my atm, my portable cash machine comes with me everywhere I go. And so what I want you guys to do is in the comments below, comment with where you're trading from because I bet we're going to notice that we've got traders from all around the world watching this video. We are an international community of traders, which is really cool. And this language of trading, the markets, that's also a universal language. The patterns that I trade, the pullback setups, the volume profile, that's a language that is of the financial markets. And once you know it, you can apply it to any exchange. You can apply it to futures, forex, cryptocurrency, whatever you want. So as we get into this video, I'm going to talk about the reasons I chose the broker. I chose without naming names in the video and I'm also going to talk about the side hustles. So I hope you guys enjoy it and as always, questions, comments, leave them below. I personally respond to every comment posted and if you enjoy this video, give me the thumbs up and subscribe to the channel. Alright, so get into that video, enjoy it and you may see me interrupt you couple more times here from California. I want to kind of give you context to where I was at when I was first getting into the market. So when I was first getting into the market, I was living in Vermont. I had a farmhouse, it was about 200 years old and I had made the decision that I would rather make half as much money as I was making in New York City, but live in Vermont and live life on my own terms. So when I got into the market as a trader, the amount of money that I needed to make each month was already pretty low. Living in Vermont. But I decided to make it even lower. What I wanted to do was I wanted to set the bar really low so that it would be easy for me to be a successful trader. So in other words, one of the things that I was really focused on was cutting my costs of living. So you'll see I've got my chainsaw right here. And one of the things that I did when I was living in my farmhouse up in Vermont during the winter, I would close off half of the house. So I would shut it down for the whole winter and I wouldn't go in that part of the house. I would turn off the water, I would drain the pipes, and I would only be in the small part of the house. In the kitchen, I had a wood stove. Now, when I first moved into that house, the first winter I was there, cost me about $5,000 in oil to keep the house warm through the whole winter. A 200 year old house was not insulated very well. And so as I was going through that winter and starting to think about what I was going to do to make the house more sustainable, one of the first things I wanted to do was focus on energy efficiency, which, you know, on the surface when we're talking about trading and stuff like that, you might think it doesn't matter, but when you're thinking about cutting your cost of living, these are little steps that you can take that, that actually help reduce your bills each month. And so, you know, one of the things that I did at my house in Vermont and that I've done in this house here is making sure it's well insulated. Really well insulated means that I don't need as much home heating oil or as much firewood to keep the house warm. Now, one of the other things that I decided to do was I didn't have the $5,000 to pay for the oil. So I got to a point where I was like, all right, well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into the woods around my house and I'm going to cut down trees, I'm going to chop up the logs and I'm going to split them into firewood because I can do all of that myself. Now that was a side hustle that I did, you know, in the early days when I was getting started trading. That helped me. It bought me a little bit more time to get over the learning curve. Now, you know, for you guys, you really have a big advantage because the learning curve isn't nearly what it was for me. For me, I was reinventing the wheel. I was trying to figure out a trading strategy, not realizing that there were strategies out there that existed because people who had them didn't want to share them. Now I share my strategy with you guys because I genuinely want to see each one of you, as many of you as possible, learn to become successful, profitable traders and live life on your own terms. One of the things I started to do was chop up firewood, and that saved me about $5,000 that year. One of the other things that I did in my house up in Vermont and that I've also done in my house here is go through and I replaced about 60 light bulbs with the LED bulbs because those use about 10% of the electricity. Again, these were all small steps that I was able to take to reduce my cost of living. So a question that I would have for you is, would you take a pay cut in order to live life 100% on your own terms? Because I was. Not everyone is, but I absolutely was. Part of that was because I was miserable in my 9 to 5 job. I hated it. It's just, it wasn't for me every single day I dreaded going into work. And for me it wasn't even 9 to 5, it was 9 to 7 every single day. 9 to 7, 10 hour long day, that wasn't a lot of fun. And so I decided, yeah, I'd actually be totally okay making less money, but living a life that I look forward to every single day, where every single day feels like the first day of summer. That's the life that I want to live. And making a little less money, that's okay. But it meant that I had to do a few of these side hustles in order to, you know, kind of make up the difference that I wasn't quite getting in my first few months and ultimately my first like year and a half as a trader. Well, me again, just wanted to pop in here and ask you guys to comment below with what side hustles you guys are doing right now and also what you guys are doing to cut your cost of living, to save a little extra money so you can make it through the learning curve and get to the other side, which is being a profitable trader, making money and living the life of your dreams. Alright, comment below. Now let's get back into the shop. So for my students, I always set a modest goal of if you can make even just $100 a day, it's proof of concept. You're proving that you have what it takes to be a profitable trader. And the reality is the only difference between 100 a day and 200 or 300 or 400 is increasing your share size. Now let's talk about the broker. All right, and we've already talked about in one of my other videos, some of the other side hustles that you guys can do today that weren't even available to me when I was getting started, like driving Uber, driving Lyft and stuff like that. So you got a lot of ways that you guys can raise money. So now you've got the money raised and you've cut back your cost of living by, you know, maybe chopping up a little bit of firewood, turning the thermostat down a little bit, replacing some of those incandescent bulbs with LED bulbs. When I was starting, I used an Ameritrade account and E Trade account and guess what? Both of them now have zero commissions, which is amazing. Over the last, well, I've spent about 10% of my profits over the last three years on commission and I've made about $1.2 million. So that's $120,000 that I've paid in commissions. And now brokers are going commission free. So you know, realistically for some traders, the commission that $120,000 over the last two years, that could have been the difference between being successful and failing or being only breakeven. But those brokers, they all have a problem. And you know what it is? It's the PDT rule. The PDT rule. I mean it is the most frustrating thing. It came into effect February 27, 2001 and the rule stated that if you wanted to day trade, and I'm going to use this paintbrush as my talking stick, if you wanted to day trade, you needed to maintain a minimum account balance of $25,000. $25,000. So when I started trading, well, when I first started, I only put about $5,000 in my e Trade account. And then right away I got flagged as being a day trader. And they said that I couldn't take any more trades until I put up enough money for a $25,000 minimum. I think that's when I switched to Ameritrade and I was like, alright, well, I'll go trade in Ameritrade. I've been flagged at E Trade so close my account switch to Ameritrade. Ameritrade had the same rule. So I got flagged there and I didn't really understand it. And then I went back to E Trade and I decided to liquidate a lot of money that I had in savings in order to fund this first account. Here's the problem. Even if you have the $25,000, you don't want to be trading with that kind of money. That's like giving a, you know, a 15 year old a Ferrari as their first car. You just, it's gonna get wrecked. There's a really good chance it's too fast, too much power. $25,000 is a lot of money. You start trading with that amount of money, you can make some big mistakes, sure, you can have some big wins, but you always have to think about the downside risk. No one ever complains about the big wins, but it's, can you handle the downside risk? And so I didn't even know that there are brokers out there that didn't enforce the PDT rule, but there are. And I want you to click the link right below in the description to see which broker I'm recommending right now for small accounts. Now, I have the broker that I'm going to choose for this small account challenge. However, when I did my last small account challenge in 2017, I traded with a broker that I no longer trade with, and I would no longer recommend to my students. So I don't want to say the name of a broker and then have six months later, you know, I recommend a totally different broker for whatever reason. So I want you to click the link below, and you'll see the broker I've chosen. And the good thing about having a small account with just 500, that even if I could put $25,000 into an account which would defeat the purpose of a small count challenge, I would still rather start with a small amount. Because if I make a mistake, it's not going to hurt as badly. I can quickly recover from it. I won't get myself into a really big hole. One last one that I just remembered that for me, actually was a really great way to raise some extra money. This. I was mowing lawns. At one point, I had five lawns that I was mowing. So I was going around the neighborhood mowing lawns for the neighbors, usually the older neighbors that couldn't do it themselves. And, you know, for me, that was another one of those side hustles that gave me, you know, 20 bucks here, 20 bucks there, 20 bucks there. So, you know, paying for groceries, paying for gas, all that stuff was covered. And that just meant less money that I was gonna have to put on a credit card, which in those days, I was just paying my monthly minimum on the card. I really wasn't able to. To keep myself down to a zero balance. So anything that I could do as part of the side hustle to reduce my cost of living to make a little extra money on the side, that all filled the gap between what I needed to make just to live and what I needed to make from my trading. Setting the bar low, it means that you're buying yourself more time. And one of the things that, you know, you know is I sort of almost always feel, especially with trading, is that the more time you give it, the higher your likelihood that you will succeed. If you say that I need to make money within the first three days, that's a high standard. If I need to make money within the first three months, okay, that's easier. If I need to make money within the first nine months, that's even easier. I need to make money within the first year. Now it's getting easier and easier to be successful because the more time you have in your office, in your chair, wherever it is, watching charts, watching these stocks move, the better you understand how the market works. All right? So as always, I'll respond to every question, any comment that you guys put down below. So I encourage you to put the questions and comments down there. Give me the thumbs up for the video. Subscribe to the channel and I will see you for the next episode. Coming soon. Want to learn more about trading? Check out some of the links in my description and if you have questions, ask them in the comments. I personally respond to every question posted on my channel. And don't forget to subscribe.