(Masterclass) How I’d Learn To Trade Crypto If I Had To Start Over

The exact step-by-step roadmap that I would take if I had to start all over again. And knowing what I know now, this is exactly what I would do if I wanted to get results as quick as possible. Hi guys, in this video I will be sharing with you the exact step-by-step roadmap that I would take if I had to learn crypto trading all over again. The exact roadmap that I'm about to share with you in this video is going to allow you to achieve consistent profitability as soon as possible without needing to waste your time on all the useless things that's only going to confuse you more. Basically, if you just do the things that I'm about to share with you in this video, you are going to win. And over the past 5 years that I've been trading full-time, I've definitely had to learn a lot of these lessons the hard way by blowing my account multiple times. So hopefully with this video, I will allow you to skip that process of going through all the pain that I went through and just get right to the good part. So if you're someone who has been already trading for a while but just struggle to consistently make this work, or just cannot figure out what's the missing piece, or if you're someone new coming into crypto and you want to get into this whole game but you have no idea where to start, this is going to be the exact roadmap that I would take knowing what I know now if I had to start all over again to get results as quickly as possible. And before we get into it, hello, my name is Xuan and I'm currently on a mission to create the world's best trading education by making trading easy for everyone. But without any further ado, let's jump right into the video. And the first thing that I do want to talk about is the idea that achieving success in trading is really simple, it's just not easy. There are only really 3 ingredients that you need in order to achieve consistent, long-lasting success, and that's Some kind of risk management, a system. You need an edge turned into a system, and then you need the psychology or the discipline to stick with this system day in, day out, month in, month out. And that's all you really need. And the worst thing that people tend to do when they first come into the markets is that they come in with a completely wrong mindset. I know that crypto is an exciting market, and every day you see somebody new on the internet making just life-changing gains. And yes, it is entirely possible for you, but if you come into the markets with zero experience or not enough experience, the cost of ignorance is a really expensive cost to pay in an industry like crypto. Now, the cost of ignorance is simply the price that you pay for not knowing the things that you should know. And in other industries, that cost is not huge. Like, for example, in business, if you don't know the protocols or you don't know what to look out for when you're hiring someone and you hire someone that's not a good fit for your business, like the effects— Sure. They're bad, but They're not game-breakingly bad, but in crypto it's completely different. One thing you need to understand about the financial markets in general is that it's a zero-sum game. Meaning whenever you do make money, you're not just making money out of thin air. When you make money, you're taking that money away from somebody else. Same thing, if you're losing money, somebody else is taking your money. And one thing not enough people think about is the fact that you are in the markets with some of the brightest minds in the world and people that have quite literally 1,000 to 10,000 times more capital than you, have 10 to 20, maybe 30, 40 years of experience doing this full-time. They have access to algorithms that literally cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, and they also have access to insider information. And basically what I'm trying to say is that the competition is tough here. It's very much a shark-eat-shark kind of world. And if you don't know what you're doing, it's the difference between not just not making money, but also losing all of your money and making somebody else's day great because they won a lot of money. So the worst thing that you can do when you jump into any financial market is trying to jump right into trading with live capital without knowing what you need to know. Now, after this video, you You'll know exactly everything, like step by step laid out for you that you need in order to achieve success. But I do want you to rewire your brain a little bit and switch your mindset when it comes to crypto. Because crypto trading or like just trading in general is one of these skills that once you master, it's like it's going to generate an ROI for the rest of time. Now in life, there are 2 different types of actions that I believe everyone can take. I'm going to use this chart to illustrate this for you. Don't worry, this looks kind of complicated, but I promise you it's not. There are things that, you know, once you do, you get like an immediate result. Like for example, if I eat ice cream, I'm going to satisfy my craving for ice cream and I'm going to feel really good for like the next 10 minutes where I get that sugar rush. I get the, oh, it's just tasty. I fire off all my dopamine receptors and it feels good for 10 minutes. But then over the next hour, you're going to proceed to feel really terrible because of that sugar rush, all that insulin in your body that just gives you like a sugar coma. And that's an example of an activity that has really high results. The moment you do it, but as time goes on, the results not only get lesser and lesser, but they tend to go negative as well. Some other good examples of this is choosing to watch Netflix instead of going to the gym. Like, sure, you feel really good in the short term, but this is not the type of stuff that you do if your goal is to build a good life. But then on the opposite side of the spectrum, you have things that you do that will not generate a result, like, in the immediate short term. In fact, you're probably not even gonna see any results for some period of time. But then as time goes by, you tap into the power of compounding and The results just stack on top of each other and eventually you hit a tipping point. And this is the type of skill that trading is, right? It's very long tail, meaning it takes a while before you see results because there are multiple building blocks that you need to first establish before you can hit the tipping point and just take off and go into like going to outer space. But most people are not able to wrap their minds around this. We're so conditioned to having TikTok or Instagram or YouTube or whatever and just having instant dopamine whenever we need it. Even when it comes to food, it's so easy to just eat a pack of chips, for example, and you're gonna feel really great. No prep, no Hustle. Like modern life right now and the life that we're used to is so short-tailed that it's hard to wrap our minds around the fact that we need to spend 1, 2, 3 months just building the building blocks of trading before we can see some results. Beautiful thing about this is that most people are not able to be that patient. And for some people watching this video, the moment I mentioned that it's going to take time to achieve meaningful results with trading, they might have already clicked off. And that's a good thing to be honest, because trading's not gonna work out for them if they don't have the patience to build this skill up before just seeing it pay off for the rest of time. Because let's face it, as long as the financial markets are around, they're going to be around unless the world ends and like every company in the world goes bankrupt. Like the financial markets are going to exist. And trading is a skill that might take you 3 months to learn, but will pay off for the next 30 years. If you don't see that as a good investment and a good use of your time and effort, then honestly, perhaps trading isn't for you. And the reality of the matter is that because we are so hardwired to just get instant results or like just instant gratification, most people are going to quit, right? Most people who start trading are going to quit. And that's the numbers. I believe like 80% of traders quit after 2 years or something, either because they lose all of their money or they just lose interest. It could also be 90%. And the good thing about this industry being so hard is that those who actually stick around, take the time and patience to build, to lay those building blocks in place and set a good foundation, they're going to reap immense rewards because there is quite literally very little competition. Basically, 90% of the losers in the market will feed the top 10% who are consistently profitable. And that's where I want you to fixate your attention on. Good things come to those who wait, especially in an industry like trading. Now it's time to get into the good part, which is the exact step-by-step roadmap that I would take if I had to start all over again. And knowing what I know now, this is exactly what I would do if I wanted to get results as quick as possible without skipping any of the important steps. And most importantly, without wasting my time on the things that don't work. Because let's face it, if you've been trading for a while, you know that a lot of the things that you find on YouTube sounds really good and the person talking about the stuff sounds really smart. But then when you try to apply it onto the chart, it almost feels like it just confuses you and it makes you lose money. So we're gonna cover none of that. I'm going to give you just the stuff that works, and if you follow it, like, you're gonna make it. Let's just put it that way. Now, remember what I said earlier, that the only 3 ingredients you really need to achieve your trading success is risk management, some kind of system that is proven to be consistently profitable over time, and you need some kind of psychological mastery to be able to stick around with that system without bouncing from system to system, which is where a lot of people tend to lose. So it makes sense then that the first step to this whole process is step 1, you need to have some kind of system, right? And it's really tough, especially if you're a beginner or even if you just don't know know what you're doing to come up with a system on your own. So your first step is to copy a system that's already proven to be profitable. And at this point, I have made quite a few videos on the exact trading system that I use, like step by step. But if you don't enjoy my system, just find a system online, like on YouTube, right? It could be the RSI, MACD, it could be smart money, it could be, I don't know, it could be using heat maps, it could be using like support resistance patterns. It can be anything. Like the fact of the matter is there's no such thing as like one system being better than the other. It's just, is it profitable or is it not? Right? I know personally a couple of traders in my life that trade exclusively the RSI and MACD, and they're 7-figure traders. I know another trader who doesn't even use technical analysis, and he just does fundamental analysis, and he's worth about 8 figures at the age of 23. So any system works as long as it's a right fit for you. And I believe that's the part that you should focus on. This is something that I've had to learn the hard way for sure. Like, as I was developing as a trader, I would see all of these other influencers and traders on Twitter, and I would see Like, whoa, you know, they're doing really good numbers and that must mean like, oh, maybe there's something special about their system that they're doing compared to all the other trading strategies that allows them to be that profitable. And so I would try to learn it and I would try to apply it. Like it worked in the beginning, but it was never sustainable. And that's because I was adding their system on top of the stuff that I've already learned from another trading strategy. And then the moment it was like, for example, I mentioned earlier that it would work at the start and then it would sort of fall off, right? And then I would think, oh, it's because this guy's system doesn't work. And I would see another guy on Twitter and doing really good numbers, and I would hop onto his system, right? I would buy his course, I would buy his group or whatever, and try to learn the way he does things. And eventually what I ended up with was a lot of knowledge about technical analysis, various different trading systems, the ability to read a heatmap, to use indicators, to read price action, whatever you name it. Like, I've done that, I've learned it. So I ended up with a lot of information, but not a lot of profit, because the fact of the matter is that the grass is not greener on the other side. Every system Works differently for everybody because we are all unique. We are all born with different genetics and hence we have different personality traits. We have different strengths, weaknesses. A trading strategy that relies on the 5-minute timeframe might be great for somebody who really loves just fast-moving action and like quick impulses. Or it might work for somebody who just doesn't have a lot of time to trade, but they have maybe an hour a day consistently that they can dedicate to this. And like trades taken on the 5-minute tend to get closed out pretty quick. It works for them, right? Based on their unique situation and based on their unique personality traits. But That same system, if you apply it to somebody else that doesn't have those same tendencies, well, they're going to feel like, oh, it's too fast. It's happening too quickly. I can't make the decision quickly enough. Or like they're going to struggle. It's just like how somebody used to say, and I cannot remember the name right now, but it was basically along the lines of if you measure a fish's ability to run a 100-meter sprint or something, or like if you measure the ability of a fish to climb a tree, then you're going to think that fish is really stupid. It's the same thing here. A fish thrives when it's in the water and a monkey thrives when it's climbing a tree. And you just need to find the right strategy for you. So just hop online. It doesn't have to be mine, but just hop online and find a system that speaks to you, that's ideally proven to be profitable. Copy it. Make sure you copy these 4 things. And this is all you need really when you're dealing with a system. The first is some kind of entry criteria. Basically just something to tell you when price action or just a set of rules that tells you that, okay, this chart right now is good to start considering for a potential trade. And then you need your entry steps. So ideally there should be some step-by-step instruction on how to enter once those rules have been met. And then you want to have some kind of exit criteria, meaning what are the criteria, what are the set of rules that tells you that, okay, potentially it's time to think about closing out this trade or taking profit. And you wanna have your exit step. Honestly, this is all you need. This is all there is to a system. Like a lot of people try to overcomplicate this, but this is all there is. And if whatever system that you find online has this, then you're gonna be good. So that's step number 1, which is just copy a system. And by the way, if you are interested in my system, it's here on YouTube. For free, then I'm gonna link it somewhere down in the description box below. But I highly encourage you to stick around for the rest of this video first because you need to have a roadmap before you can start traveling. Otherwise, you're just gonna go nowhere fast. Now, once you have that system, a lot of people tend to make the mistake of jumping right into the market and trading right away. But that is, as I mentioned already, a horrible mistake to make because only question that I would ask to yourself is how are you comfortable and able to risk your hard-earned money on a strategy that you haven't even tested it out yourself and it's just someone from the internet says that it's good and you watch a 15-minute video about it and then you just jump right in. Like, doesn't really quite make sense, does it? Especially when you're in this shark-eat-shark market where everybody else has been doing this for so long or they just could be really smart. The thing you need before you start like actually trading the system is you need data. You need data to know if, you know, this system is profitable over time. You need data to know if you enjoy using the system or if it's right for you. And you also need data to just give you some, you know, information about this trading strategy. For example, how long does it take on average For a winning trade to play out? How long does it take on average for a losing trade to play out? What is the average risk to reward for this system? What is the average win rate for this system? Like sure, you can take the YouTuber's word or wherever you learn the system from, like at their word. But chances are, unless you test this out for yourself, like again, every system placed in the hands of every single trader, some are gonna use the system incredibly well, some are not. It's just how humans work. And if you don't test it out for yourself, you're not gonna find that out. And the reason why you need to have information on this data is that, for example, if every winning trade only gives you back 1R and you have like a 50% win rate, guess what? You're gonna be a break-even trader, right? It's not gonna be profitable. Or maybe you might realize that, hey, if every winning trade is going to take like 15 hours to play out whilst every losing trade is gonna take like 30 hours to play out, are you comfortable with waiting that long for those trades to play out? And this is where you move into, well, technically this was supposed to be step 2, but I'm just gonna write it here. This is step 3 is you need to backtest. And the reason why we're starting with backtesting is that it allows you to essentially condense down something that would take otherwise like 5, Or 10 years and you're able to condense it down into just a few hours. And ideally you want to be doing your backtesting on FX Replay. I promise you, I am not sponsored by them. This is just something that I can truly stand behind and this is something that I use and recommend to all of my students. This thing here just makes backtesting really fun, especially if you have backtested on TradingView. You will understand just how much of a pain in the neck that it feels to backtest. Like it almost feels like a chore. And here's a pro tip, by the way, if you want to make it easy for yourself to achieve success, like remove the friction. away from the things that you need to do to achieve that success. If your goal is to get healthy, for example, you would ideally sign up to the gym that's within walking distance to your house. Ideally, it should be nice, enjoyable to go to. Maybe you wanna go there with some friends. You wanna set up some habits, for example, putting your gym clothes under your bed when the moment you wake up so that just the friction from going to the gym is as low as possible. That's how you're gonna be able to achieve results. In reality, like a big part of success is not about willpower. It's not about motivation. It's not about discipline, right? It's just curating your environment To make it easy for you to do the things that you need to do. And in terms of trading, the things that you need to do to be successful is backtesting. You need to forward test, which is essentially practice, right? You need to practice, you need to trade, and you need to have some kind of reflection so that you know what you're doing bad, how can you improve, what you're doing good, which is stuff that I'll get into later. There's immense benefit in making backtesting easy because this is one of the highest ROI tasks that you can do as a trader because it allows you to get in practice that would otherwise take years, but you can condense it down into hours. Again, again, not sponsored by them. But I do have a discount code that I will leave in the description box below. This is by far and away the best backtesting tool that I've used over the years. It's just something I can stand behind. So anyways, the main reason why I'm recommending this outside of the fact that it makes it really fun to backtest is that it actually gives you data that you can, like, you don't have to tabulate the data yourself, right? It just straight up tells you, right? I'm up $7K on a $100K account and it took a period of 20 days to get 7%. And I know this is not the best. But this was just me backtesting a strategy that I thought potentially could do well. Like these are not bad numbers, but definitely not amazing compared to the strategy that I'm using right now. But anyways, it even tells you, for example, on average, how much profit do you make on average on every winning trade compared to the amount of risk that you're taking on? Meaning for every $100 that I'm risking on every trade here, I'm making $270 back. And ideally, right, ideally I could have gotten 4.61 based on the trades that I took that perhaps I could have, that perhaps I'd taken profit too early on. Right? You're starting to see how, just how valuable having this data is. And it even tells me what type of trader I am because on average, on every trade, I'm aiming for like a 6.5 risk to reward ratio. It's just that I have to take profit a little bit earlier and sometimes I even go as high as 18.6, which is high, but this is the reality of what I'm getting. And it even tells me how many trades that I could have had profit or just set my stops to break even, but it didn't and I got stopped out. And it even tells me, for example, what's my best win, my average win, right? So it's 1.65% of the account. What's the average duration that it takes when trade to win and the average duration that it takes for me to know that my trade is a loss. Tells me how— what's my maximum loss streak. Tells me on average I do tend to lose about 4 trades in a row. Like, this happens pretty commonly. It tells me like what's my worst loss, average loss. Tells me like just all this information is amazing to know. It even tells me like, okay, which days. It even breaks it down based on the hour that I'm trading on. For example, you can see that a lot of my profits do— I do get quite a few winners between the hours of like 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM and as well as 8:00 PM. And it even tells me how profitable am I based on the day of the week. For example, Tuesday seems like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday are amazing for me, but Monday and Fridays not so much. So that tells me that I don't trade on Mondays and Fridays, right? Just look for the particular setup that I'm backtesting with this system on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and I'm probably gonna make a lot more money without taking on so many losses. And most importantly, I'm probably not going to be going through so much like headache and feeling like, ah, you know, trading is hard and, you know, I'm so inconsistent and stuff like that. So yeah, it even breaks it down based on your, you know, sessions, for example. So again, huge advantages. On trading on FX Replay. It truly is something that's beneficial and hence why I'm recommending it. So what you want to do after that is to get on FX Replay, right, and do at least 100 backtests while being very strict with the rules that you set using the system, right? In the system you have entry criteria, steps, exit, exit steps. You want to follow those rules strictly and you want to accomplish 100 backtests using that system and getting that data to know if it's profitable or not. Do you enjoy it and is it right for you? Right? And the best part about this whole process is that while you're backtesting, not only are you collecting data, but you're also getting almost like trading practice. Just like how if I were to teach you how to do a crossover in basketball right now, like if that's all you know about basketball, I'm not gonna throw you into a full-on game and expect you to perform well, right? If anything, you're just gonna be like a headless chicken running around in the headlight, or like you're just gonna be a deer in the headlights. But this is something that backtesting is able to prevent. It's as if I'm teaching you how to do a crossover and I'm teaching you how to shoot a basketball, and then you take the time to actually put in 100 reps. Shooting a basketball first before you go into a real game. You would likely do a lot better that way, right? This is backtesting. And when I explain it like that, you can just see how stupid it is that some people, when they learn a strategy online, they spend 15 minutes watching a video, boom, jump straight into live money and they wonder why they're losing money. So once you accomplish these 100 backtests, you will have enough data to know if this is right for you and if this is something that you want to proceed with. This is something that if you're doing just 100 backtests, tests, it's gonna take you like 3, 4 hours and probably not too much more than that. Let's just say that there are a lot worse ways that you can spend 3 to 4 hours. And if 3 to 4 hours is gonna get you this kind of like super valuable data, then I'd say it's worth it. But you make that call for yourself. Now, once you complete this step here, then we move on to step number 4, which is you want to start getting in some actual practice. You want to start forward testing and getting some chart practice, which I I will explain in a bit. So the reason why you do this is because in backtesting mode, it's so easy to just press the skip button and like you can just skip ahead of time. Like, you know, on paper that the average winning trade, for example, takes 8.5 hours. But unless you actually like have taken a trade live and have to wait 8.5 hours for that to play out, then you're not gonna truly know just how it feels like to be trading the system. And this is just step 2 of that whole practicing process that I talked about. Again, you're not gonna jump right into a basketball game if all you know How to do is to do a crossover, and how to do is to shoot the basketball. Some people do. I've definitely seen it, but it's not going to give you the best results. What you want to do instead, logically speaking, is you want to learn a few more skills, such as maybe you want to know how to pass a ball. Maybe just dribble the ball. And if you can dribble, if you can shoot, and if you can pass at a basic level, then yeah, you're ready to get into the game. And that's how it is for trading as well. Backtesting is just the dribbling part right now. We're going to learn how to pass. Now we're going to learn how to shoot. And once you complete the trifecta. Factor, you can jump into a game, and that's forward testing and chart practice. So all forward testing really is, is you just want to turn on your TradingView. Forward testing is just a fancy name for saying paper trading. If you've done paper trading before, then feel free to skip ahead one minute. But if you've never done paper trading before, all you have to do is turn on your TradingView, come to the bottom here, maximize this panel, click on paper trading, connect it, and all of a sudden you're going to see, like for example, let's go onto a paper trading platform that has this, the Solana. Okay, so as long as you see this top, like corner here. As long as you see solid colors on the chart, it means that you are ready to paper trade. And to do that is super simple, right? Let's say based on whatever system you've got, let's say that price is currently in a good spot to trade right now and you want to take a trade based on here. You want to place your stop loss here and then boom, right? And automatically like this long and short position tool will tell you exactly how much like position size you need. So for example, in order to risk— double-click on this— like let's say my account size is $10,000 and I want to risk 1% on each trade, I need 140 Solana to be in this Position, so I just click on this. Or rather, I should change this number to 140, and then I will click buy, and boom! Right? I have 140 Solana worth of position size. And if I want to set a stop loss, for example, I'll just click this stop loss. Let's say here that's 165.559. So 165.559, and boom! Right? If this trade were to get stopped out, I would lose $110. And let's say I want to take profit here, right? So that's 169.8, 169.8, and boom! Right? If I win this trade, I'm gonna make $500. So modify. And boom, this is how you take a paper trade. Now this is fake money, right? This is play money. But what this does is it allows you an opportunity to study each candle as it plays out. For example, like you will see what you will often realize when you start forward testing is just how often the market doesn't just go straight to your TP. You'll come to learn that the hard way. Like you will come to learn that the market doesn't move to your TP right away, right? And this is something I think like, especially when you come into crypto, you do expect the markets to just do like a 20x in the same day. 'Cause you know, that's sort of the kind of numbers that people tend to show you online. But in reality, there's a lot of these like up and down movements. There are periods where price is doing absolutely nothing for 3 hours where price is just moving like 0.3%. And when you do practice in this way, you'll have the opportunity to study each candle, to study how on the way to your TP, it's not just a smooth journey, right? There's ups and downs. And even on the way to your stop loss, right? How does that happen? What are some warning signs that you can see before you get stopped out? that you can pick up on and not make the same mistake again, right? Maybe you can get out a bit early if you see the warning signs so that you're not risking 1%. Maybe you just lose 0.5%. So this is the importance of doing forward testing, and you wanna do this for at least a period of about 2 weeks. Now, before you start telling me like, oh, 2 weeks is such a long time, you know, I wanna get straight to making money right away. Trust me, if you don't do this and you jump right into a live game without learning the basic skills, the only thing that you're gonna be doing is embarrassing yourselves and losing your money. Remember what I talked about This is something, there are long tail actions and there are short tail actions. If everything that you do in your life is just long tail actions, it's gonna be really hard and close to impossible for you to lose in life. I think in trading, this is stuff that's going to be long tail actions. But the beautiful thing about this is that the results that you will get once you start hitting that tipping point or that critical mass is gonna be huge, right? Exponential. It's pretty much straight up. So take some time to do this. Like, don't feel like this is useless. And like, I promise you, you will see really good results. And then now we move on to chart practice. So what exactly Exactly, exactly. So you're gonna take some forward tests. And by the way, just a quick little pro tip when it comes to forward testing, especially when you're first starting this out, take more than you think that you need to take. For example, in real life, maybe you're someone that only takes one trade a week. Forward testing, take like 5 a week, right? Because right now you're at the stage where you need just experience, right? You need practice and you need a quick feedback loop. You just wanna put in as many reps as possible because this is the time where failing has no consequences, right? It's just paper money. But something that failing allows you to do is to acquire a lot of experience fast. And so you wanna fail a lot and you wanna fail really fast. This is the point where you have the liberty to do so without putting anything at stake. Then we move on to chart practice and you kind of wanna do this at the same time that you're doing forward testing, which is just come onto any chart. Like for example, if you see something on Twitter, you see someone talking about SAND, for example, oh, SAND is good. All right, don't just take their word for it. Try using your system and applying an analysis based on the rules of your system. For example, oh, okay, this liquidity just got taken out. There is some kind of liquidity Maybe down here, maybe let's say I'm looking for a retracement down to here because this is a, you know, 0.618 retracement, for example. Then I might expect price to come down here first before moving up here, right? Just drawing out some lines on the chart and building what I like to call building a narrative, which is essentially just a fancy way of saying building a story. Like, how can you tell a story with what information that you have on the chart? For example, okay, liquidity sweep here, retracement here, boom, there, right? Just marking this out on the chart and this is all that you need to do, right? No need to take a trade, no need to take any forward tests, whatever, just mark this out and then put it somewhere on your Apple Notes or something and set a reminder to come back to this next week. And ideally you wanna be doing this on either the 1-hourly chart or— 1-hourly is personally what I would do, but if your strategy is something that has a higher timeframe, feel free to do it on the 4-hour. Ideally you don't wanna do it on too high of a timeframe because it does take quite a while to play out when you are dealing with timeframes that big. For example, on a 1-hourly chart, most moves tend to reach completion within a week, but on the 4-hourly chart, you're looking at potentially 2, 3, maybe 4 weeks before moves tend to play out. So ideally, Ideally, you wanna stick to around a 1 hour because that's sort of the sweet spot of a week before you have to check back in. But anything below the 1 hour works well as well. You just have to, you know, come back more often. So once you do this, just set a reminder to come back to this a week later. And you really do not wanna skip this step. I know it feels like, I know it feels like a lot of friction and like, ah, you know, I've already done all this work. Like why would I still have to set a reminder? Trust me, if you don't do it, like again, it's just like what I've mentioned before. You wanna make it easy for you to do the things that will drive you forward with success. And in trading, that involves a lot of practice. And if you don't set that reminder, then all of this work that you've done here will be completely useless because chances are you're going to forget about this. Life happens, you get busy, you forget the fact that you need to come back to this chart to see if your analysis was right, and boom, right? You just wasted all this effort, right? So take that extra 10 seconds, set a reminder, check back in next week and see if you were right. And if you weren't, then try to figure out why you weren't right. Try to figure out the reasons behind why that is. And if you are Well, figure out what exactly led to you being right so that you can replicate this in the future. And once you do this for like 2 weeks, man, the amount of improvement that you will see, you will just start feeling so much more confident in yourself, your ability as a trader, even as a complete beginner. And it's going to really change the game for you once we move on to live money, which is step 5. It's time to get into some live money. Once you've done this for a period of about 2 weeks, it's time to get into what I like to call scaling capital trading. So, and essentially what this means is that you want to start your trading off with less money than you would usually do. Like ideally you want to get to a point where you're risking $1,000 per trade. Well, you don't want to just jump right into risking $1,000 per trade as a complete beginner. That's like being getting thrown into a full-on NBA Finals game as a complete beginner at basketball. Like you want to slowly, you know, start off maybe in some park playing with some kids, completely destroying them. And once you know that you can confidently destroy kids, then maybe you move on to something, you know, a little bit higher in terms of competition and then you slowly progress from there, right? You don't just want to instantly jump to the top level. That's a really bad idea. And the reason why we This boils down a lot to our psychology when it comes to money. For most people living in society, chances are you probably worked hard for the money that you make. And chances are it took some time for you to make that money as well, right? Some meaningful amount of time. Now there's nothing wrong with that. Like if you're an honest, hardworking man, like nothing wrong with that. But here's the thing, when you have this kind of association with your money, it becomes really hard for you to risk a proper amount of money without feeling some kind of emotional attachment to Your money because you worked hard for this and you have like, to you this money has some kind of meaning, right? Maybe if you lost $500 you'd be like, oh, that's like my rent or something. But the market doesn't care about that. To the market it's just numbers on the screen. And until you can get to a point where you can comfortably risk a certain amount of money whilst having it feel like just numbers on a screen, then you're not truly ready for like the big boy numbers or the big leagues. Because chances are as a beginner you're probably gonna make a lot of mistakes. Even after going through that whole backtesting practice phase, you're still gonna make some mistakes because you just haven't done this enough. And would you rather be making a lot of these mistakes, risking a full amount of capital or lesser? Chances are probably lesser. And one thing to note is that as a beginner, you will fail, right? Or even as just someone who's trying to figure this out, you will fail a lot in the beginning. In fact, you will fail a lot throughout your entire trading career. Losing is just as much a part of the game as winning is. And until you can get comfortable, until you get comfortable with the idea that you're gonna lose half the trades that you take forever, and you gotta get comfortable with losing because if you don't lose, then you can never stand a chance at winning. Until you can do that comfortably, you're You're not at the level where you can consistently risk a proper amount of money yet. The thing is, some people think that, oh, just because they forward tested or something, oh, just because they've back tested enough, forward tested enough, that they feel like they're ready for live money. But in reality, again, due to the psychological factor that I talked about, about how you have some associations with the money that you have. Now you might say that you don't, but chances are deep down in your body, like in your subconscious psyche, it has like, it feels some kind of way towards that money. And So what you will come to realize, and especially for the intermediate traders that are watching this video, once you go from forward testing to live money, it feels like a completely different ballgame, right? If you have like a 60% win rate on forward testing, your first month doing live money trading, you're probably gonna have 30, right? It's just a fact of the matter. It has to do a lot with the psychology. It's just you're not comfortable with live money on the line, right? That's all it is, which is why you wanna start small. So you're gonna start off with maybe 1/5 or 1/4 of the size that you eventually wanna get to, which is the part that I'm gonna get to right now. Before you start off on this journey, I want you to come up with some kind of number that you eventually wanna make with trading. 'Cause if you don't have a goal, it's really hard to create a roadmap to get to that goal. It's kind of like running, for example. When you run like, oh, I'm just gonna go jogging, right? When you just run without any sort of destination or any sort of distance target that you wanna hit, or like just some kind of time limit you wanna hit it in, it's really easy to just like, your brain is always gonna be telling you like, oh, you know, you're tired, you're not feeling good, your legs It's hard. It's very easy to fall prey to that if you don't have a goal. But if let's say you have an end destination, even though you feel like giving up, the fact that you've already set that goal and the fact that you can see like with every step that you take, you're getting closer and closer to that goal, it really keeps you on track. And fact of the matter is you need a goal, right? And that could look like $5K a month, could be $10K a month, could be $20K a month, whatever it is, whatever amount that you eventually want to get to. And don't even think about the fact that, oh, you know, this number is way too big. I can't achieve it with my current capital size. There are a lot of ways for you to get capital as a trader, as long as you know what you're doing. So don't worry about a whole capital size thing, but just have a goal. So let's say the goal is to get to $10K per month with 15 trades per month. And let's say your average risk to reward is like 3 to 1, right? You get 3R per trade. And let's say for on average, right, you have a like a 45% win rate, for example, or let's say 50%, right? Just to make it easy, you're winning about 7.5 trades every month. And just to also make this easy, let's just make this 8, like 16 trades so that you are winning 8 trades a month and you're You're losing 8 trades a month. So on average, if you win, that's 3R. So if you win 8 times, that's +24. And if you lose 8 times, that's -8 because you should only be risking 1R per trade. So that's -8R. So your net is +16, right? That's your net. And now you gotta calculate, okay, if the goal is to get to $10K per month, how much do you need to be risking on each trade to be able to achieve this number with this amount of risk? And to do that, it's gonna be roughly $600, right? Because 600 times 16 is 9,600 and 9,600 is close enough to $10K. Right? So this is the eventual number that you need to get to if you have a 50% win rate, if you have a 3R risk to reward on average every trade, and if you take 16 trades a month, right? This number's gonna go up and down depending on the level of experience that you've got. For the most part, you do eventually need to risk between $500 to $600 if your goal is to get to $10K a month consistently. Now you might wonder, hey, Xuan, that's a really big number, right? I'm not ready for that. Exactly. This is why you wanna slowly scale up. Like if you don't know what is the end goal, it's really hard to like just, you know, start laddering or just building that psychological like tolerance to bigger numbers. So the way you wanna start this off is, let's say the way you do this is to pick a number where it would be meaningful. Like if you were to lose that, it would be like kind of meaningful, but at the same time you're like kind of all right about the fact that you were to have lost that amount of money if that trade were to go against you. So let's say that number is $100 right now, right? You're kind of comfortable, but you're kind of not. And as long as you're even just slightly uncomfortable with that number, it means that you're not fully like, you haven't accept— you haven't fully accepted the fact that that is money that you might lose. And so whatever that number is, just Divide it by like 4 or 5 or something. And that's the amount of risk that you wanna take on when you first start out. If you're already intermediate and if you've been doing this for some time, then yeah, sure, maybe do 1/3 or even half of that because you already have some experience. But if you're a beginner, start small, 1/4, 1/5. And then here's what you wanna do. You're gonna start trading live. If you've already done this step, this step, this step, and this step for the appropriate amounts of time and you actually do it seriously, then you are right now at a point where you can, like you've proven that you can follow the system and that the system is profitable, which means that as long as you follow this set of rules that that you set for yourself, you're going to make it, right? Now you just need to get comfortable with risking bigger and bigger amounts of money. And so if at this stage, after going through all of those steps, you're still feeling like paralysis by analysis or like you can do the analysis but you can't quite take the trade, it means that you still don't have confidence in yourself. And the easiest way to overcome that barrier of jumping from practice mode to live money is to risk an amount where it wouldn't feel bad if you were to have lost it, right? Slowly as you take some trades, you're gonna see like it's right there, like it's undeniable. Proof that, okay, you know what you're doing. And that helps a lot to overcome that paralysis by analysis. And if you're— and if you start going into live money and you start deviating from your system and you start doing random things that are not part of your system and you start losing, well, it's also a good idea that you're not losing much on every trade. So start out by taking live trades and you're going to every 2 weeks bump the amount of risk that you're taking on by about 20 to 25%. For example, if week number 1, you start out at $10 a trade. Now the second time you do this, you might go up to, you know, $15 a trade. The third cycle that you do this, you might go up to, for example, $25 a trade. Next time you do it, $35. Next time you do it, $50, right? It's not like hard numbers, but you just wanna make sure that every 2 weeks you are raising the amount of risk that you take on because you wanna slowly build up this tolerance, right? It doesn't happen overnight. The sooner you start this, the faster you will be able to reach that end goal. So you're gonna do this for like at least a couple months just to have undeniable proof that you are profitable. And once you achieve that, then it's time to talk about something very important, right? What if you are good but don't have capital? Earlier on I mentioned that it's super easy to acquire capital to trade. And you can do this super easily by using prop firms. So these are trading firms out there that will give you capital if you take a test and you prove that you know what you're doing as a trader and that you are profitable. They fund you for $50K, $100K, $200K, $400K, whatever. And you will have zero problem passing that test if you've done the past 5 steps. And now all of a sudden you've been learning, you've been doing trading for like the last 6 months, you've been setting all of those building blocks in place and boom, on the 3rd month you acquire, you pass the test and you acquire $200K, right? US dollars in terms of capital. And usually what they do is they give you a profit share. So you usually keep 80% of the profits and maybe they keep 20%, right? Most of them right now are operating like to begin at 85 to 15% split. So let's say you pass that test, you get $200K and you have one good month where you make like 5% or 10% and boom, right? That's easily between $10K to $20K. 80% of that profit goes to you. You have just made your first $6K to potentially $14K month. And this is on top of the trading that you are already doing and profits that you're already bringing in, which at this point, depending on the amount of capital you have, could be multiple hundreds to multiple thousands. You pair this on with the fact that you have prop firm capital now, and boom, right? Every month you're bringing in $15K, $20K, $25K. And you're like, you don't have to get married to the prop firms, by the way. Like, there's no contract that says that, oh, once you get in, you can't quit. That once you get in, oh, if you lose the account or whatever, like, you have to pay for it. There's none of that. They take on all the risk. You just have to prove to them that, you know, And once you have that, like with the amount of money that you're bringing in every month, this brings me basically onto step 7, right? Which is investing your profits. You can either invest them into your own account, into your own account so that you can build up your personal trading account and not have to rely on the prop firm. Like what if they one day ban you or one day something happens to the prop firm? Like you never know, right? Anything can happen and boom, right? You've just lost your main income source. Well, you can, for example, if you bring in $20K a month, you can put in $5K into that, into your own personal account, or you can put it into crypto, right? Or just any investment, right? And boom. Right? You're well on your way to not only bringing in a very comfortable monthly income, but you're also well on your way to just building life-changing wealth. That all started because you put in those 3 months into learning how to trade properly, the right way, following this roadmap. And then the final step, this is something that will not only significantly improve the progress you're making, like it just cuts down the amount of time that you actually spend doing the hard work and it just allows you to achieve results really quickly. And it's something that you can do as early as the backtesting stage. And ideally you do it throughout this entire process here, and that's going to be journaling. Now, before you start writing this off, one thing that I can tell you is that at this point in my career, for the last 3 years that I've been running The Art Of Crypto, I've coached about 1,000 students at this point. And by far away, the thing that I recommend to people that are plateauing or just beginners in general, this is the one thing that if this person does it, like they are going, like I have no shadow of a doubt that they will achieve success and they're gonna achieve it really quick. And that's journaling. It sounds really simple on paper, like, well, you know, like how is this person Well, let me tell you, journaling helps a lot with self-introspection, right? Journaling is basically just reflection, meaning you're writing down, okay, why did I take this trade? Is there anything that I could have improved on this trade? How did I feel when the trade was happening? Should I do this again? Should I not do this again? And stuff like that, right? It's reflection. And one of the most important skills when it comes to trading success is actually the ability to be self-aware, right? If you're not aware of some of the mistakes that you're making, well, it's— guess what? It's gonna be really hard to fix these problems because you don't even know that you're making these problems in the first place. And this is where journaling Journaling comes in. It allows you to get a much clearer idea or like a much clearer picture of exactly what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong on the trades that you do take. But the fact that you're doing this at a later date means that you're no longer caught up with the intensity of everything that's happening in the moment. And this, I believe, is where a lot of the ROI of journaling comes into play. Imagine for a moment that instead of just like, oh, you know, hard work is going to get you results, as you're backtest— as you're going through those 100, 200 backtests, let's say 25 backtests in, you start journaling and like you realize like, oh, you know, This is something that I've been messing up with my backtests. And instantly, right, the next 75 backtests are gonna go so much smoother because you realize this at the beginning before like it got worse or before you wasted a ton of time doing hard work, but getting like really low efficiency in terms of the work that you're putting in. And this is something that journaling allows you to do. And this is especially important to do when you start getting into live capital trading because trading is such an emotionally intensive thing that you tend to feel really strongly When you're trading, right? Either you feel anxiety, nervousness, whatever it is, like you feel you have a lot of emotions. And one thing you have to realize is that as humans every day, we have like an emotional bank or like an emotional battery that we have. And every time we go through something adverse, let's say you start losing trades as a beginner, you're not gonna feel too good about it. Especially when you go through negative emotions, that emotional battery drains really quick. And once that emotional battery drains, it's gonna make it really hard for you to make quality, sound, rational trading decisions. Just think back to a day for a moment that you had a really intense argument your spouse that didn't get resolved on the spot, right? Meaning like, it's sort of like you're both still feeling really terrible about it. There's still some things that you haven't said or whatever, but you have to move on with your day, right? Maybe you have to go to work or something. How hard is it for you to not only get into work but to stay focused on the work? Chances are it's going to be really difficult because of the negative emotions, right, that you're going through. And the same thing will happen when you start trading because it's just such a psychology-driven, you know, So one of the most important things that you can do as a trader that will help you maintain your performance over months, years, decades, is you need to regularly reset yourself mentally to fill up that emotional battery again. And when you don't like refill that battery too long and you let it sit at like really low, not only is everything in your life going to suffer, including your energy, your sleep, your mood, your diet, your appetite, your whatever, right? It's just gonna create so much stress in your body and stress just makes everything worse. Not only is that to happen, but you will eventually reach the point where you burn out. And as a trader or as a person, like, I don't wish that on you. One of the easiest fixes to that is just to regularly reset yourself mentally. That could involve going on jogs, doing things that you like, exercise, working out, playing games, being in nature, whatever. Like, do that. But at the same time, make sure you're journaling because there's something magical about having pen and paper and just writing your feelings down that just takes those emotions from here And just into that paper and boom, all of a sudden you have a weight, huge weight that's lifted off your shoulders. That's one way that you can journal. But especially once you start getting into the live capital trading, once you start actually taking live trades, one of the other softwares that I can highly recommend is this one called TradeZilla. Now I am also not sponsored by them. It's just a tool like FX Replay that just makes everything so much better that it doesn't make sense for me not to recommend this. Now I am in the process of getting a discount code with them. If I do get it, I'll link it down in the description box below. But if I don't, like this This is just really worth it. Like, I don't really care if you use my link or not, just consider using this once you start getting to the live trading portion. So this is essentially what FX Replay does for backtesting, but this one does for your live trading. It basically automatically journals all of your trades for you. It tells you what you can improve on, what your— like, what bad habits that you're regularly repeating, what good habits are you regularly repeating, what's your best setups, what's your worst setups, what can you improve on during the trade itself. And just, it just gives you so much data that you can use to improve your trading. If you're live trading, like, if you're watching this and you're already live trading and you're not using TradeZilla, what, what are you doing? Get it and you'll thank yourself later. And by the way, everything that I've mentioned in this video is the exact roadmap that I take my students through in my program. If you're someone that believes that trading can give you the freedom that you deserve to allow you to spend your time however you'd like, but you cannot for the life of you figure out how to make this work consistently, then feel free to click the first link in the description box below. Don't worry, it's not some $997 course that has a lot of basic information. It's just a website showing you how my service could potentially help you overcome your problems. You don't have to click. In fact, I don't really mind if you click or not. But if this is relevant to you and you would just like some help fast-tracking this whole learning curve of trading and to be able to achieve results faster while skipping through all the obstacles, then feel free to click it in your own time, right? It's always gonna be there. But otherwise, if you found value from this video, drop a like. It does truly make my day. And subscribe if you wanna see more content just like this. And drop a comment down below if you wanna see me make a video on a topic you'd like covered. But anyways, thank you so much for spending your time with me today, and I'm wishing you a blessed day. Cheers.