What I Wish I Knew Before I Started Day Trading

What’s up everyone. All right. Welcome to the next episode of Day Trading with 500 Bucks. Now, during this episode what I am going to do for you guys is I’m going to share with you the things that I wish I had known when I was getting started trading. The tips and tricks that would’ve saved me tens of thousands of dollars in unnecessary losses and sped up my learning curve by months, if not years.

One of the things that I’ll talk about during this episode is the fact that it took me nearly two years before I discovered a strategy that was consistently profitable. I had this false belief that in order to be a successful day trader, I needed to know a little bit of everything. I needed to be able to trade options. I needed to be able to trade large caps, small caps, penny stocks. I need to be able to go long and short, and that was a false belief.

That’s simply not true. When I started over in 2017 with $583 in my account, I set out to prove that you can become a millionaire with one strategy and I turned 583 bucks into over $1 million in just over two years, trading in momentum-based strategy. Now I’ll talk about the strategy a little bit during this episode. I’m mostly going to be talking about the things that I wish I had known when I was getting started. So those of you guys who are kind of scratching your head thinking, all right, I want to know more about this strategy. How does he find these stocks? Where is he getting in? Where does he get out? How does it work? What I’m going to do for you guys is I’m going to put a link right below in the description where you can register to my next live seminar.

I host live seminars from time to time. Everyone who attends will get a copy of my book, How to Day Trade. This is sort of a supplement to, it’s almost like a guide to the strategy. And what I’ll do during the seminars, I’ll break down for you the five criteria that I used to evaluate whether or not a stock fits within my strategy. I’ll walk you through when I get in and when I get out in order to minimize risk and maximize profit potential, especially for the small account. And I’ll break down a bunch of examples of setups, stocks and patterns that met my criteria and worked and some that didn’t work. My accuracy is right around 70% so out of a hundred trades I’ll have 70 winners, 30 losers, and I break down a handful of both the winners and the losers so you can really get a sense of what works and when it doesn’t work.

So again, those of you guys that want to learn more about my strategy, check out that link below, register to my next live seminar. And now let’s get into this episode of breaking down the things that I wish I had known when I was getting started trading. And this is a special episode because you’re going to come with me on a trip to California. So pack your bags. Let’s go.

What’s up everyone? All right, well I don’t know about you guys, but lately I feel like there are not enough hours in the day to get everything done that I need to get done and I’ve been kind of operating on this level of high stress and just burning the candle at both ends. And so that means for this video we’re going to have to do it on the go, but that’s okay because what we’re going to talk about today is a little bit of the life of being a trader and a few of the things that I wish I had known about trading before I got started.

We’re going to talk about the ups, we’re going to talk about the downs and I think you guys are going to get a better sense of what it’s like to be a day trader. It’s an amazing job, but my job is actually a lot more than just being a trader. My job is being a trader, being a coach, being a boss, father, husband, and all of that. There’s a lot of work, but you know, probably not that much different from what a lot of you guys are doing too. So let’s get into this episode. Well, it’s about nine o’clock and I was in my office for about, well about 13 hours today. Now my watch lists started at about 9:00 AM so bell rang at 9:30 I was really only focusing on trading for two hours from about 9 till 11 but then the rest of my day was meetings, following up on emails, doing all this stuff behind the scenes so that you guys, who are my students, get to have an awesome experience meeting with my tech guys, my developers meeting with my support staff.

I try to kind of front-load my work. So I have lots of meetings early in the week on Mondays and Tuesdays and then Wednesdays, get stuff done, Thursdays, get stuff done, and then if I’m lucky Fridays I might get to leave a little bit early. It’s not been the case recently, but this is my typical routine. So finishing the day here, 9:00 pulling in the driveway, only a couple lights on in the house, put the car in the garage, go inside, grab a quick bite to eat and got the Christmas lights out right here. We’ve got a couple more over here. That was one of my weekend projects. Getting those guys set up. So going to grab a bite to eat, jump back on the laptop, finish up some YouTube comments and then try to get to bed before midnight. Hey girl, girl. Hello. Oh girl, you happy to see daddy?

So I didn’t get to bed as early as I wanted to last night and this morning I woke up and we’ve got some snow outside so I’m going to trade from the house today, which is, which is okay. I don’t really mind doing that. I’ve got my traveling trading station ready to go. So I’ve got my laptop and my two USB monitors so I can jump on there. I got to do my watch list real quick start trading and then I’m going to be out of here. Hard-stop today is a 10:30 so I’ve got one hour to trade and see how much I can make. We’ll see how we can do. All right, well that’s it. It’s a just a couple minutes before 11:00 AM I’m finishing the morning up $2,407 trading a stock that’s currently up over 180% crazy. We’re seeing some pretty awesome momentum. So I just did my recap for the chat room for YouTube and now I’ve got switched gears and go on to the rest of the things I got to get done today.

So you know, that’s pretty much the dream to be able to make $2,400, $2,500 in an hour. Living in Vermont where I was when I was first getting started trading, that was, that was enough to cover me for an entire month of living expenses. I mean, literally, I really didn’t need that much to get by $100 a day. So to have a day where I hit 2,500 bucks would have been a dream and I was doing pretty much, I mean I would have done pretty much anything in those days to be consistently profitable. To give you guys some context, where I was at was I was basically broke. I had moved up to Vermont and I was trying to live a little bit of a simpler life, cut up my cost of living quite a lot. But I was living off of credit cards and you know I had a roof over my head and I was buying groceries but all of those expenses were going on to a credit card and I was accumulating debt.

I had five credit cards. They were maxed out, ended up with six total credit cards and about $30,000 of debt, which is a pretty scary thing. And I knew I was going to have this apex point where my cost of living with, paying credit card, basically living off credit cards and the minimum amounts due on the credit cards was going to cross to the point where I wasn’t able to keep doing that. And my hope was that my success as a trader would begin to pick up before the credit card balances ran out. And that’s what I was just kind of racing against. What I wish I had known then what I now know now is that that added pressure was only making the learning curve more difficult because I got into this place of kind of scrambling to try to find something that was working.

It made me much quicker to jump away from a strategy that was sort of working to something that something else. And then just kind of jumping back and forth and I was just making things worse. So one of the things I would tell myself going back is stick with one strategy. So how do you find that one strategy? That’s a good fit for you, that you really resonate with, that you like, that you understand and that you can trust is actually profitable.

Unfortunately, that’s the hard part. Most of the successful traders out there, they’re not sharing their strategy. They’re afraid if they share it, they’ll stop working and most of the educators out there. Those classes are being taught by people who aren’t actually the profitable trainers. So how do you get started? How’d you find that one strategy that’s a good fit for you? If I could go back 10 years, the advice that I would give myself would be to get an internship working at a hedge fund, maybe a bank or something like that. But you know what, I tried that, and guess what, I didn’t get any calls back.

So I ended up starting from square one and spending 18 months developing my own strategy. But even on the red days, I became more and more motivated and excited to make it happen because I realized how quickly money could be made if I was on the other side of that trade. So once I finally developed a strategy that was consistently profitable, I decided do something that no one else was doing. I decided to really put my money where my mouth is, which is when I started over, I started with $583 in my account and traded this one strategy that I had discovered and I turned that $583 into $1 million and then had all of those broker statements audited by an independent auditor or a CPA firm down in New York city called Citrin Cooperman.

That proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that these gains are real, that the strategy works. 183,000% return. Think about that for a second, almost a 200,000% return on my money, which was wild. I mean absolutely insane. So unlike a lot of traders out there who are successful, I decided not to keep this strategy for myself, but to share it with my students. And I’ve realized that it hasn’t made the strategy any less effective. I’ve continued to be profitable and what it’s really done is it’s given beginner traders an opportunity to learn something that is a proven way to generate profits in the market.

All right? Another morning. So it’s about 6:00 AM right now in California. So I’m going to do my watch list and start trading as soon as the bell rings at 6:30 local time, 9:30 Eastern time. So you guys out here on the West coast, you get the opportunity to trade for two hours before potentially you have to go to a nine to five job, which is pretty cool. So, all right, I’m going to jump into it and see what stocks I can find this morning. All right, so it’s 10:30 finished my one hour of trading made 1000 bucks and that’s it. Done for the day. One of the things to always kind of remember is that the more times you trade every single day, the more you risk giving back profit.

So every day when you trade, you’re doing one of two things. You’re either leaving money on the table, in other words, not making as much as you could, or giving back profit to the market. I always feel better leaving the day knowing that maybe I left some money on the table, but I walked away with money in my pocket. So that’s what I’m doing again today.

So the next piece of advice that I wish I knew 10 years ago when I was getting started, the importance of trading in a simulator before trading with real money. But that’s not what I did when I got started. When I got started, I jumped in with real money and guess what happened? I lost money and I justify trading real money and not using a simulator by telling myself that, well, I couldn’t afford to spend time trading in the simulator. I needed to make money today to pay my bills by the end of this month. And so that desperation that I needed to make money to pay my bills was what I used to justify trading with real money. And so then what ended up happening, the first few trades, I lost money and now I’m in the red and I’m thinking, all right, well you know, I should probably step back and slow down. But now I’m kind of hooked because I feel like I’ve lost money. I need to make back that money. And the only way I can make that back is by trading with real money.

And I think one of the things that was really hard for me was having a few early winners that maybe were just pure luck, but there were some big winners. So I got the taste of success and I felt like I was so close. Even though in reality I was actually really far away. Looking back, if I could have started by trading in a simulator, that emotional cycle and that emotional spiral would have never happened. Remembering that emotional spiral that ended up resulting in me jumping from strategy to strategy from small caps to large caps, penny stocks to options and just being all over the place. I wouldn’t have felt that need to grasp for straws. And if you can almost picture this sliding down embankment and just grasping for anything you can to hold yourself as you get closer and closer to this darkness, which for me was the reality that that apex point was coming. Where I wasn’t going to be able to keep living off of credit cards and where I was going to have to get a regular job.

Now the job that I was looking at, I was looking at getting a three to 11 jobs so that, I don’t know, like I said, it’s like third shift or whatever. The second shift, I don’t know. I’ve never actually worked that time, but that’s what I was looking at is, okay, well if I got a three to 11 job, I could work afternoon into the evening and then I could still trade in the morning. But if I had just given myself that couple months to train in the simulator, I could have started my experience trading on such a positive note. And instead it’s like I started the race by tripping at a starting gate and then I spent the whole race the whole first 18 months scrambling to try to catch up and dig myself out of this hole. It was totally, totally unnecessary.

So once again, it’s just about my bedtime. So tomorrow we’re going to talk about some of the stress related to learning how to trade and some of the stress that I still deal with today as a professional trader.

All right, so another day, $708 before 8:00 AM local time that’s San Francisco right over there. Cool thing we’re trading on the West coast here is that, yeah, it’s not a lot of fun to get up at 5:30 in the morning, but the market opens at 6:30 local time. I trade till 7:30 by 8:00 AM I’ve already made my money. 700 bucks today. You know, it’s kind of awesome if you’re someone that still works in nine to five job, because you could actually do this in the morning before you go to work. Today we’re going to talk about some of the reasons that trading was stressful for me.

One of the reasons that trading was really stressful for me was because my life circumstances when I was starting trading, were stressful. I was broke, I was living on credit card debt and that essentially would have made anything stressful. Anything that was related to starting a new business or something where it was iffy whether or not I would be successful. Obviously if I just started a regular job working, not that I wanted to go back to working in the gas station like I did out of college, but even if I was working at a gas station that would have just been money coming in. But with trading it was stressful because I genuinely didn’t know if I was going to be one of the ones that figured it out or if I’d be one of the ones who is telling their friends 10 years from now.

“Yeah. I tried to do this thing day trading and I just lost a ton of money and am just embarrassed,” right? The stress for me as I was getting started was really tied into the difference between my expectation of what would happen and what was actually happening. My expectation was that I would start making $10 a day, small money, and then go up to 15, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and that I would just continue to increase as I got better. When I started losing money, the difference between my expectation where I was at was growing and that was creating more stress. And I think that, for me, is kind of the stressor. It’s the difference between my current reality and where I want to be, wherever that happens to be, maybe dependent on what I’m talking about. But as a beginner trader, I think that was the big stressor.

It was, I want to be making $100 a day. That’s $500 a week, that’s $2,500 a month. That is enough to pay my bills living in Vermont. And so when I was coming up short, I just kept feeling more and more frustrated. One of the things that I’ve said a million times, but I’ll say it again now, is that there’s a blessing and a curse of being a day trader.

The curse is that you can spend 18 months struggling to make even $10 a day. And that sounds like crazy. $10 a day is nothing. You’re not asking you to drive a Lamborghini or flying a private jet, $10 a day. I mean that’s $250 a month. Like that’s a very low expectation. You’re not being greedy. So why would it take 18 months to consistently make 10 bucks a day? It would take 18 months because you won’t consistently make $10 a day until you have a consistent strategy.

It comes back to strategy and until you have the discipline to follow your rules and to stick with just one strategy, because it’s so easy when you feel that emotional impulse to jump to something else, or to break a rule and trade something you’re not supposed to trade to do it because it alleviates that emotional instinct and that emotional instinct is coming from, okay, I need to grasp for something else.

Just sticking with this one thing isn’t giving me the immediate result that I wanted. So then on the other side, the blessing of the market is that once you’re consistently making $10 a day, the only difference between making $10 a day and $20 a day consistently is increasing your share size. If you’re making $10 a day for the last year and a half, trading with a thousand shares, well if I just do the numbers and I was trading with 2,000 shares, you would have made twice as much. Then if you go to 4,000 you’d make twice as much. You go to 8,000 you’d make twice as much and then you start seeing diminishing returns as you increase to 16,000 or 30,000 or something like that. And that’s due to liquidity and slippage in the market, but anywhere from a hundred shares to eight or 10,000 you’re going to be pretty linear, pretty flat trajectory moving up in profitability.

The big stress for me when I was getting started was just that question of is this going to work for me? And a lot of that added pressure was because of my life circumstances. So for you guys who are able to get started right now, who can do some of the side hustles that I’ve talked about. Driving Uber, and I’ve had a couple of students since I posted that video who are like, “Yeah Ross, I drive Uber on Saturday and Sunday and make an extra 200 bucks.” That helps me pay my bills and stuff like that. I would have totally done that if I could have done that 10 years ago. Absolutely. Driving Uber because I want to do stuff that I’m in charge that I decide when I want to work. I don’t want to go in on someone else’s schedule. I go in on my own. Driving Uber, you’re on your own schedule.

Lyft or Uber Eats or any of those types of jobs. You’re on your own schedule. You know if you’re doing freelance work, that starts to get into a little bit more commitment, a little more responsibility. You can do freelance on Upwork, hire writers, you can, you’re interested in stock market. There’s people that are looking for writers who can write about, you know, stock market news and events. I mean we have writers at Warrior Trading that do that type of stuff. So like you know, there’s all these things that you guys can do now to kind of help supplement. If you have all of those things going to the point where you’re, let’s say breaking even in terms of how much it costs, your cost of living and how much money is coming in. Then anything you make as a trader, it’s icing on the cake.

And now the expectation is not that you need to make 200 a day to live, to survive. It’s that if you make even 50 bucks a day, it’s awesome. Now with that pressure off and that stress gone, that cycle, that spiral of feeling more stress and I’ve lost money, now I need to make it back. When you cut that, suddenly this weight is just lifted off your shoulders and you can focus on trading based on great quality setups. And you might say, I don’t trade every day because I trade this very specific setup and if I don’t see it every day, there’s no reason to take risk. Anything I make is icing on the cake and there’s really no reason to get bent out of shape if I have a couple slow days or a slow week or even a slow month. So I think things you can do to really make more into trade easier and more fun is by being diversified in the income that you have so that you’re not 100% dependent on trade.

So you might think since becoming a profitable trader, that now I have no stress in my life and the trading is totally stress-free and totally easy. If you thought that you’d be wrong. I still have stress as a trader, but the stress has changed and the stress that I have now really resides around, it all continues to reside around expectations. I’ve moved up my expectations. I’m no longer satisfied with having a day where I make a hundred bucks, my daily goal is 2000 and if I’m not consistently hitting 2000 a day, that means I’m not going to be tracking for a $500,000 year and I’m the type of person that I like to set a goal for myself, an expectation that if I come up short, I’m going to be a little disappointed in myself. I think that a lot of traders are like that and I don’t want this to sound tone deaf because I understand that you should never feel bad if you’re making only 400 grand and not 500. That’s a very silly thing to be sad about in the grand scheme of things.

And it’s absolutely true. But I think that anyone that’s in a performance-based type of career, whether it’s sports or something like trading that is so based on your performance from a week-to-week, month-to-month, and certainly year-to-year measurement. I think that we naturally are just constantly benchmarking ourselves against how we did in a previous period of time and how we’re doing now. And if you’re an athlete and you start dipping down in your stats, that’s not a good thing. It’s not really a good thing as a trader either. So I think that the stress that I have now resides around that and I want to give you a really interesting example of two different months with completely different levels of stress.

It was August, historically, one of my worst months of the year, and October, historically one of my best months of the year. So here’s the funny thing. In August, I was, the last few Augusts have been terrible for me. And so I basically was like, I was considering not even trading for the month of August. And then I was like, “Nah, I can’t do that.” I’ve got to trade. So I said, “Hey, you know what? If I make even $10,000 it’s going to be an awesome month. I’ll be totally happy with that. It’s better than nothing.” And so I set the bar at 10,000 bucks, which is way below my monthly goal, a typical month. But for the month of August, set it at $10,000 and you know what happened? I ended up making $40,000 and I was thrilled. I mean I was like $40,000 in August, $42,000 this is incredible. So I set such a low expectation that even 10,000 I was happy.

20,000 I was like, this is awesome. 30,000, 40,000 best August in my career. And is it because I set the expectation low? I don’t know, but it made me think, and then in October, typically one of my best months of the year, I was hoping for 40 grand. That was my expectation that I would make $40,000 and you know what ended up happening? Well, the first few days of the month I started in the red, I started getting all frustrated and then when I started to pick up and go into the green, I started to really swing for the fences. In five days I made $45,000 I hit my monthly goal, but I thought to myself, this is the beginning of the hot season. This is when things are really starting to pick up. I should put the pedal to the metal. And so I did. I started to, and you know what happened?

I ended up losing everything I had made in that five-day hot streak and finishing the month down $20,000. I set an expectation that I was going to have a huge month. I started swinging for home runs and I got some really big strikeouts and it all comes back to expectations. So as you can probably imagine, October was a pretty stressful month. I had some big ups, which were awesome, but then I had some really big downs which were disappointing and at the end of the month I came, came up way shy of my monthly goal. Whereas the month of August was awesome. No stress, just far exceeding what I expected. How can I, on the one hand, set an expectation for myself and set a goal and allow it to be a motivator, while at the same time, not allowing that fixation on hitting that number become a negative influence on my trading and on my attitude.

It’s something that I’ve actually struggled with for my entire career as a beginner trader, I was struggling with it because I needed to make that amount of money each month to pay my bills. And now as a trader who’s been doing it for a while, it’s hard for me to separate my feeling of needing to continue to have better and better monthly returns. I’m just kind of continuing to chase that I need to keep improving. And if you’re not improving then you’re either going up or going down and going sideways doesn’t feel to me like a really reasonable thing as a trader. I think one of the pieces of advice that I’m just starting to adopt that I wish I had known sooner and had been able to really embrace sooner is that I shouldn’t look at my P&L every single day.

And this is actually the first time that I’ve stopped doing it in really my entire career. It’s not that I don’t look at how much I’ve made on the day, but I don’t look at my account balance because when I would have green days, I’m like, all right, my account’s going up from whatever, 2000 to three to four to five to six to seven and then that day you have a big loss and you log in. You’re like my accounts only at 4,500 yesterday I was at seven grand. You just feel this sense of loss. And of course, you know you had the loss, but when you log in and you see that number there, it just amplifies it. And then for me, I’m always chasing to get back to that 7,500 and that’s not trading the market, that’s trading your P&L, that’s trading a number.

That’s something totally independent from what’s happening in the market. Now the market may give you opportunities to get right back to seven or it may end up that you took a loss at the beginning of what is going to be a cold streak and you’re just going to have to be patient. And if you try to force it, you’re just going to lose more money. The piece of advice that I would give myself and to any of you would be to stop looking at your account balance every single morning. So every day when you log in, of course you want to know, you start the day at zero and you want to hit your daily goal. But to not be so fixated on where, how it affects your account balance and also where you stand on the month. Because something that I’ve been doing for pretty much my whole career is very actively tracking to the penny how much I’ve made each week or each month because I’m thinking about have I made enough to cover my bills?

And of course that stemmed from the circumstances I was in when I started, and it was a habit that I’ve just maintained. I’ve generally thought that maintaining that data has been valuable, but I think it’s more valuable to do it on a monthly basis at the end of the month looking back than to do it at the end of each day because what it created for me, I feel is sort of this tunnel vision on very short term goals of weekly goals and monthly goals. And the reality is sometimes you’re going to have a slow week, you’re going to have a slow month, and that’s okay. Long term being a successful trader is learning to cope with some of these stressors, like the difference between your expectation for the month and what actually happens.

And again, it’s not to say that it’s not good to set expectations and it’s not to say that it’s not good to know, historically, August is not a good month and I should be more conservative than in a month where the market is typically stronger, but the same time to be able to come in each day, both with the expectation and also with the ability to simply accept the market for what it is today.

That’s a real challenge for me. Even still. One of the other things that I wish I had started doing sooner was to develop a really strong pre-training routine that I do every single day. So my routine of, I wake up at this time and I do my watch list and I have a cup of coffee and I have a whatever, something for breakfast. The piece in there that I would really encourage you to add would be at the minimum, a one-minute meditation. And you might think that’s crazy. You don’t need to do that. But when you’re in the moment of watching a stock squeezing up and you’re thinking, I’m just going to jump in and give in to FOMO, you need that presence of mind to hold you back. Because if you don’t have that naturally, and most of us don’t, we’ll just impulsively jump into a trade and you know what ends up happening. You take a bad trade, poor risk management, and you take an unnecessary loss. It’s not worth it.

Let’s get real. Meditation doesn’t have to look like that. Meditation can be as simple as taking a breath before you start trading and saying, “Thank you for this opportunity to be able to work from home, to potentially make a full-time income right here, trading on my laptop. I’m going to respect the power of the market. I’m going to take A quality trades and I’m not going to allow emotional impulses to influence my trading today.” Just like trading, meditation requires discipline. It’s a muscle. The more you strengthen it, the better you get at it. To be a successful trader long-term, you need to have the discipline to follow rules of your strategy. Take it from me. A habitual rule-breaker, it will save you thousands of dollars if you can learn this early on.

The next piece of advice that I wish I knew when I was getting started is to call your broker and set up a max loss on your account. So if you’re down more than a certain amount on any given day, you’re done. You can’t keep trading. And also to set a max share size on your account so you predetermined what that is and you can’t take more than that number of shares. That just helps prevent a day where emotions may get the better of you. And if you didn’t have those max loss and max share sizes put into place, you would go rogue, get aggressive and do something you might regret.

So the last piece of advice that I wish I could give to myself and that I hope helps you guys, is that trading is a marathon. It’s not a sprint. It really isn’t. It’s not about trying to make a $10,000 by the end of next week so you can pay this bill. When you start with that mindset, you inherently become more emotionally impulsive. You learn bad habits. It’s almost like running a marathon enthusiastically in the wrong direction. You’re not doing yourself any favors. You’re running in the wrong direction. And so when you think of it as a marathon and that you need to pace yourself, and that means being okay with the fact that you may not make $10,000 at the end of your first week or whatever the case is. And that’s all right. You’re really building a strong foundation for long-term success. So during this episode we talked about a lot of different things.

We’ve talked about the importance of finding that one strategy that’s a good fit for you, that one strategy that really resonates right now. For me, my approach was to trade about 15 different strategies for 18 months and lose money. And then when I was basically at rock bottom, I was newly divorced with $30,000 of credit card debt and nothing to show for the last nearly two years of trying to learn how to trade. I said, what’s been working over the last 18 months? Has anything been working? And of course, it’s not like I was losing money every day. I would make money, lose money, make money, lose money. And so I poured through all of my metrics and my stats and I realized that I actually was a profitable trader. If I only traded one strategy, I had about 14 or 15 different strategies I was trading.

But if I only traded the small-cap stocks moving up more than 30% guess what? I would have been profitable over those last 18 months. So that for me was the beginning of finding that one strategy that I would just hold on to and really try to hone in on. We talked about the importance of diversifying your income. This is easier said than done. You guys aren’t all going to be in a place where you can diversify your income, but you guys have a lot more options than I had when I was getting started. Uber, Lyft, hire writers, Upwork, all of these, opportunities to potentially earn a little money on the side while you’re learning how to trade.

We talked about the importance on the one hand of setting an expectation. You’ve got to set expectations, but on the other hand, you don’t want to let those expectations cloud your judgment, and so being able to meditate, being able to take a breath, to stay focused and to be thankful every single day for just the opportunity to give this a try as a career. It’s not going to work for everyone, but to be able to be thankful for the opportunity that you have and really try to give it your best shot. To be focused each day on taking A quality setup. If you can do that, you’ve got the marathon mindset. If you’re willing to spend a month or maybe two months trading in a simulator, you’ve got the marathon mindset. You’re training before you go live. That’s exactly what you want to do. That creates a strong foundation for long-term success.

It’s jumping into the market with real money trading an unproven strategy or trading a strategy. You’re just learning, but just about guarantees that you will lose money. And of course, if you’re doing that while at the same time dealing with the pressure of knowing you need to make a certain amount of money by the end of next week or the end of next month, you’re digging yourself a hole from the very beginning. And that’s just not the way to start. Then I talked about the importance of setting a max loss with your broker, calling up your broker and saying, Hey, put this max loss on my account because I don’t want to ever take a loss more than, $1,000 or whatever it is, and I don’t want to ever take share size of more than 2000 shares or whatever it is. Because if I do, there’s a really good chance I could end up making a big mistake.

So, it’s about time for me to start working on my next episode. So that means I’ve got to let you guys go, but it doesn’t mean the learning stops here. If you want to keep learning about the one strategy that I used to turn $583 into over a million bucks in just about two years, put that link right there in the description to register for my next live seminar. Whether you’re watching this a week from now, a month from now or even a year from now. I host seminars on a pretty regular basis, so there’s a good chance you won’t have to wait too long for the next event and you’ll get a copy of my bestselling book title, How to Day Trade. This is sort of a guide that goes hand in hand with a strategy and make sure you bring questions to the event because we will do Q and A at the end of the seminar and I will stay until every question has been answered.

Now if you have questions on today’s episode, leave them down below in the comments. I personally respond to every comment posted on my channel. I take great pride in that and I love hearing your feedback on some of the things that we’re talking about as part of this small account challenge. All right, so if you’ve watched up until now, I hope you’ve given the video the thumbs up and subscribe to the channel. That way you’ll get an alert when I upload the next episode.

All right, so next episode is coming soon and we’re going to keep going on this journey of day trading with a $500 account. All right, see you guys for the next episode. Hey, have you seen my most popular video on YouTube? It’s got over 5 million views. You can check it out right here and check out one of my other videos on YouTube right here. I hope you guys enjoy and as always, if you have questions, leave them down below in the comment section. I personally respond to every comment that’s posted.

Disclosure: Zacks.com contains statements and statistics that have been obtained from sources believed to be reliable but are not guaranteed as to accuracy or completeness. References to any specific ...

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