Day Trading

1: Establish Your Foundation – Mindset and Personal Readiness

Before touching any trades, you need to build a strong “why” and understand your own limits. This prevents emotional decisions later.

  • You must have a clear “why” and a specific goal for trading. “Making money” alone isn’t a goal – it won’t sustain you when trading gets hard or scary, and you’ll likely lose everything.
  • Assess your appetite for losing money. This is crucial for long-term success, as trading involves inevitable losses.
  • The market is a mirror – it reflects your inner state, so get to know yourself first. What are your emotional triggers? Journal your emotions to identify them.
  • Identify your comfort zones and learn to trade within them to build a personal edge – there’s no holy grail strategy, only what works for you.
  • The market is a spiritual dojo: Who are you becoming? It doesn’t just test your strategy; it tests your character. Don’t beat the market – beat yourself.
  • Many traders “blow up” (lose everything) before becoming successful. The market will break you down, humble you, and force you to quit or transform. You may have to blow up your account to grow it into millions.

2: Build Self-Awareness Through Reading

Now that you have your why, dive into a key resource to deepen your understanding of your psychology as a trader.

  • Read the book “Trade the Trader” (linked in your original notes). Don’t rush it – do a couple of chapters a day or every few days.
  • Treat each chapter as homework: Take notes on paper or in a note-taking app like OneNote, writing your thoughts and reflections. This helps internalize how your mindset affects trading.

3: Curate Your Learning Sources

With self-awareness growing, focus on reliable education to avoid overwhelm. Ignore the noise early to build a solid base.

  • Follow the 3 specific YouTube channels mentioned in your notes and ignore anything else online – it’s just noise that will confuse you.
  • Remember, 90% of people who start “trading” quit in less than a year. The top reason? They fail to learn properly, thinking it’s easy, but it’s real work requiring adaptation. Watching 100 people gives 100 strategies; stick to these channels because they teach the most widely used technical analysis and strategies, even used by big institutions.
  • The anti-guru principle: Follow no one but yourself in the end. Become your own market wizard by following your process and trusting your growth.

4: Absorb Core Educational Content

Apply your curated sources by repeatedly studying foundational materials until they become second nature.

  • Watch the specific videos mentioned in your notes (below the list). Do this many, many times – probably until you can recite them. This builds familiarity with key concepts before applying them.

5: Understand the Market Landscape

Once educated on basics, get context on the broader environment to set realistic expectations about scale and time commitment.

  • The US trading market is roughly $68 trillion: 80% is controlled by institutions, and only 20% by retail investors like you and me. This means you’re playing in a big pond dominated by pros. It’s like riding a river, you are along for the ride. You must know when to get into the water and when to get out or else you will drown.
  • You don’t need to be greedy when you have access to a $68 Trillion ATM… and you can draw money whenever you need to, or want to.
  • There are 252 trading days in the US market per year. Subtract about 52 for Fridays missed due to Shabbat, plus another 16 days (4 weeks of 4 days each) for vacations or Chol Moed – leaving you with roughly 184 days. That’s only half a year, so efficiency matters.

6: Adopt a Winning Philosophy

With market context, shift your mindset from “making money” to sustainable winning. This philosophy underpins all trades.

  • You are not trading to make money – you’re trading to win. Some days you’ll lose; accept this upfront, or you’ll panic and lose even more.
  • “Not trading is still trading” might be the best thing a new trader can hear – sometimes the smartest move is to sit out and wait for the right setup.
  • Don’t focus on having a “green day” (profitable) every day. Instead, aim to lose the least and win the most. Some successful traders only win 40% of their trades but make way more overall because of strong risk management and strategies.
  • The best traders are cowards – real courage is letting go of losing trades quickly.
  • Losing is a skill: It’s inevitable, but prolonged losing is optional. Markets charge you to learn, and most drop out early. Maximize winners, minimize losers, and survive long enough to repeat. Ego hates loss, and childhood programming often equates failure with shame – overcome that.
  • Intuition is earned, not magic – it’s built from years of market exposure and emotional control. True intuition has no urgency.
  • Size kills confidence: Back-to-back wins can give dopamine hits, leading you to size up and then lose big. Respect position sizing and stay consistent. Bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered. Ask: How much pressure can I handle before self-sabotage?
  • Process over outcome: The best traders love execution, not just results – focus on following your rules.
  • Conviction must dance with surrender: Be confident in your trades, but without flexibility, it’s suicide. Pivot or die. The second you lose conviction, close the position.
  • Focus on the quality of the setup and trade management once in. It’s not about quantity of trades or duration – it’s about the quality of the ones you take. When your verifiable win rate improves, scale up. You can make more from a couple great trades than 10 mediocre ones: less stress, no chasing, and well-protected with quality setups and strict stop-losses.

7: Implement Risk Management and Journaling

Now apply the philosophy with tools for every trade. This ensures discipline and prevents emotional spirals.

  • Keep a trade journal for all positions. Every entry must include: an Entry price, Exit plan, and Stop loss. If you skip any and enter anyway, your mind will freeze when the trade moves – you’ll hold too long on winners (missing profits as it crashes) or losers (watching losses pile up without a stop).
  • If you start feeling anxiety on a position, it means you lack confidence and a strategy – you’re gambling, not trading. Exit and reflect in your journal.
  • Identify levels, price targets, and stop loss before entering – if you don’t have all of these, do not trade.
  • No position more than 5% of your portfolio (start at 2.5%). Set stop loss to -15%. Aim for profits of 10-20%. (this is a basic strategy to get your mind started thinking about how to protect and do proper risk management your own strategy that you follow for each position will be something you will learn and develop on your own, but this provides a good starting point).
  • Try to end the week 100% in cash.
  • If you’re panicking or emotional, step back and breathe. If you have to rush, STOP – better to not make money than to lose it.

8: Develop Practical Trading Focus

Finally, with all the above in place, narrow your scope to build expertise on a few assets.

  • Pick 2-4 stocks and focus only on them. Learn their “personality” – how they behave differently at various times.
  • Identify key levels and liquidity sweeps in these stocks. This is a common thread across all stocks, tying back to the technical analysis from your channels and videos.
  • You don’t chase women, so don’t chase trades – avoid jumping into moves that have already started without you; wait for proper setups.
  • Try to predict where a stock is going by following 1h/4h charts, use 15m for trend confirmation, and 1m/5m for precise entries.

9: Strategies

  • You are going to find there are many strategies out there. The reason I emphasize NOT watching and absorbing everything on social media is because each person is doing their own strategy, their own style. If you watch them all, you never learn one. This is why I emphasize the two traders below to follow Vincent and ADR. They both use a similar style of break and retest of key levels.
  • This strategy is probably the easiest one for a beginner to learn and get into the markets. It involves:
    • FIRST identifying what the key levels of a stock are and then
    • WAITING for price action to break that level, pull back to it and HOLD at that level,
    • THEN you enter the trade, set your stop loss to just below the key level to allow room for liquidity sweeps,
    • THEN wait for it to break out further and take profits.
    • This strategy is consistently the easiest to learn and impliment, but will test your patience and emotions to the fullest. This is why having rules, position sizing, risk management are ALL very important because all of this will keep your emotions in check as you are in the trade.

Strategic Plans

No matter what your strategy is, you need to have THREE key pieces of information figured out BEFORE you place a trade, NOT after. So many traders will start a trade, or maybe they are following someone else’s trade and have no clue what the answers are to these three questions, and this is the worst way to trade. It’s how you lose money and the worst part is that the handful of times you win a trade this way only helps to reinforce this bad behavior.

The reason this is a bad behavior is because if you go into a trade that someone else calls and you don’t have an exit strategy, a stop loss, and the trade instead of running into the green for you, goes the opposite direction, when do you get out? When do you stop out? If you are on a train and its going in the wrong direction, you get off at the next stop, you don’t stay on and keep going in the wrong direction! The longer you stay on the train the more time you lose, in this case, the more money you lose.

The psychology behind this is because once we are in the middle of a trade our brains freezes and we go into “hope mode”. We hope it goes well. In the military, you train and train for all scenarios, so that way, if you are ever in that situation, your training kicks in and takes over and saves your life. Call it muscle memory. Have an entry, exit, and stop loss is your training. So, when you are in the thick of it, in a trade, you will stick to your training and your rules; hopefully.

This is why it’s critical to know what your ENTRY, EXIT, and STOP LOSS is for EVERY trade, so that you do not freeze, you do not lose more money. Having a trade that you expected to last a few hours, or a couple days should never turn into “ok I will just hold it for months to see what happens”. More times than not, it will keep going down.

Let’s go over some basics of these three critical pieces of information and remember this applies to ALL trades you make, without exception, and know that these variables will be different with every stock and with every strategy.

Entries

An entry is where in the price action you will start your position. All trades are called a position, whether you get a long, short, call, or put. These are your four types of positions. This is where you establish your trade begins. I’m not going to go into greater detail because any more detail would require evaluating different strategies and that is beyond the focus of a basics overview.

Exits

An exit is where you want to get out of your position, this is the profitable side of an exit, where as a stop loss is the opposite side of an exit. An exit is dependent on the strategy as well but what is important to know here is that one of the most common practices is to take profits as you go. Meaning, you determine what your strategy is, what a potential profit level will be and then you sell HALF or a THIRD of your position as it is running to take profit. As you take profit you INCREASE your stop loss to the take profit level you just exited at and allow the position time to keep running. Again, this is all determined by your strategy.

I’m going to diverge and go into strategies a bit because I can already hear people saying, “but they always run higher”. Penny stocks are known for running at premarket like clockwork, small caps after about 0700, large caps after 0930. The charts and some time spent looking back in time can show this. If any of this sounds like Greek to you, don’t worry, it will come with time and experience. Pick a strategy and learn it and while learning it ignore everything else because if you try to learn multiple strategies at once, it will confuse your mind, and you won’t get even one strategy down.

Stop Losses

Losses happen. A LOT.

The people that become successful traders and make the most money may surprise you that they only have win rates of 30-40%. The reason they get rich is because of two things.

  1. They know how to accept a loss; exiting with a negative position and if you do not identify what your exit is before you go into a trade then as soon as it goes wrong, you will freeze up and keep losing, hoping it turns around.
  2. When a trade is running into the green, they don’t just take profits all at once, they stagger out and even set stop losses as its running up so if it does come back down quickly, they still have great gains.

The beginner trader will made the two opposite errors.

  1. Hold onto a dying trade and keep losing more and end up holding it for weeks or months in the HOPES it goes back up and
  2. They will take profits immediately after seeing green instead of taking profits as they go.

The only thing you need to learn first, and fast, accepting losses before they get worse by having a plan for each trade, having rules that you do not break.

Subscribe to these

Books

  • Trade The Trader (Download Kindle app and buy this book virtually) – https://a.co/d/9VkKCku (Digital copy is about $19, hardcopy around $400…)

Videos to watch

  1. Basics: 12 Mindsets – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM0g15ifYU4
  2. Basics: Candlesticks – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=990oOC-bHxA
  3. Basics: Support and Resistance – https://youtu.be/TewWz7wSPLA
  4. Basics: Gap Trading Strategy – https://youtu.be/qkChxbuUqvU
  5. Basics: Chart Paterns – https://youtu.be/DV0CokdUMRE
  6. Fundamentals: 3 Simple Trading Steps – https://youtu.be/J9PJB7ZyBes
  7. Fundamentals: The ONLY Liquidity Sweeps Video You’ll Ever Need – https://youtu.be/_Fkofoggjv4
  8. Fundamentals: The Sunday Routine of a 7 Figure Options Trader! – https://youtu.be/X34rbQElMvQ
  9. Strategy: Break and Retest – https://youtu.be/SMSqQTBxjc0
  10. Strategy: How I Let Trades Run For Over 100% Returns (Live Trade) – https://youtu.be/eyzMmtGC4FQ
https://youtube.com/@wysetrade

Basic Rules. Never Break Them.

  1. Everything you do is through God’s will. You win through Him. You lose through Him.
  2. I will have no more than 4 positions at a time.
  3. 4% of portfolio size to start a position; 8% if I must average down.
  4. Stop Loss: Right below key level or 25% of your position’s size.
  5. Entry: Key levels
  6. Take profit: half at first level above. The rest as it runs…
  7. Don’t panic

Daily Routine

  • No one ever became successful on trading the markets by chasing every piece of action they saw or heard of…Have a list of 4 stocks and the market indices that you follow. NQ/ES/QQQ/SPY: The action on these four will assist or destroy the momentum of what other stocks do.

Vocabulary

Order Book & Execution

  • Ask: The lowest price a seller is willing to accept for an asset.
  • Bid: The highest price a buyer is willing to pay for an asset.
  • Spread: Difference between bid and ask prices.
  • Liquidity: Ease of buying/selling without price impact.
  • Slippage: Difference between expected and executed price.

Market Sentiment & Direction

  • Bullish: Market sentiment expecting prices to rise.
  • Bearish: Market sentiment expecting prices to fall.
  • FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out – buying on hype.
  • FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt – spreading negative info.

Positions & Trades

  • Long: Buying an asset expecting price increase.
  • Short: Selling borrowed asset expecting price decrease.
  • Entry: Price/level where trade is opened.
  • Exit: Price/level where trade is closed.
  • Position Size: Amount of asset in a trade based on risk.
  • HODL: Hold On for Dear Life (crypto term for long-term holding).

Price Levels & Zones

  • Support: Price level where demand prevents further drop (demand zone).
  • Resistance: Price level where supply prevents further rise (supply zone).
  • Breakout: Price moving beyond support/resistance with volume.
  • Pullback: Temporary reversal against the trend before continuation.
  • Trendline: Line connecting highs or lows to show direction.
  • ATH: All-Time High price.
  • ATL: All-Time Low price.

Chart Patterns & Candles

  • Candlestick: Chart bar showing open, high, low, close (OHLC).
  • Doji: Candlestick with open ≈ close, signaling indecision.
  • Hammer: Bullish reversal candle with long lower wick.
  • Shooting Star: Bearish reversal candle with long upper wick.

Indicators & Tools

  • Moving Average (MA): Average price over periods to smooth trends (e.g., SMA, EMA).
  • Fibonacci Retracement: Tool using ratios (38.2%, 61.8%) to find support/resistance.
  • RSI (Relative Strength Index): Momentum oscillator (0-100) for overbought/oversold.
  • MACD: Indicator showing trend changes via moving average crossovers.
  • Volume: Number of shares/contracts traded in a period.
  • Volatility: Degree of price fluctuation over time.

Risk & Money Management

  • Leverage: Using borrowed funds to amplify position size.
  • Margin: Collateral required to open leveraged position.
  • Stop Loss: Order to close position at a set loss level.
  • Take Profit: Order to close position at a set gain level.
  • Risk-Reward Ratio: Potential profit vs. potential loss (e.g., 1:2).
    -; Drawdown: Peak-to-trough decline in account value.

Trading Styles & Pitfalls

  • Scalping: High-frequency trades for small profits.
  • Swing Trading: Holding positions days to weeks on swings.
  • Position Trading: Long-term holds based on fundamentals/trends.
  • Whipsaw: False signal causing loss in choppy market.

Tip ahead: Master one category per week → apply on demo charts → journal results.