Nice recovery. Commissions on 180,000 shares is around $900. At some point, it's better just to accept the red day and walk away. When you go live, choppy days will really test your emotions and sanity lol. Cheers.

Good luck tomorrow. I am rooting for you, man! 👍

Wow. You traded AMD over 20 times in 3 hours. Couple questions: You jumped from trading AMD from 2000 to 8000 shares. That's a big jump (and a huge position of $150,000!). Any reasons (sorry if it sounds like a stupid question)? Also, it looks like you set your stop loss very low like 0.2%. Maybe that was the cause of your overtrading... I tend to set my stop loss high like 1% or more and it allows me the room to wait for the table to turn (more often than not, it worked!). I am also a beginner (super green!) and just trying to understand your psychology. Cheers.

Hey guys, Nathaniel here. I just wanted to share a rule I came up with today, which I believe will help answer that age-old question: Should I sell now, or let it run more? Rule: As long as the current 5 minute candle does not in any way break the upper edge of the previous candle on a short, and the lower edge of the previous candle on a long, we hold on. As you can see on the attached pictures, this rule holds up pretty well on telling you when to hold on, and when to get out. You can see that the trend did indeed keep going until a 5 min candle breaks below or above the previous 5 min candle(depending on short or long). This is not foolproof, there will be trends that break this rule, but I think it is useful to be able to take advantage of a good 70% of the runs to their fullest potential. Which is better than 0%, that was the amount of trades I was letting run. Keep in mind that these examples are all from today's stocks-in-play alone, I didn't have to comb through hundreds of stocks to prove this.

(nmarnson, Just finished writing this post, and realized it sounds negative. I promise I am not trying to be negative at all, and am only trying to give insight from my personal experience and the experience of almost every day trader I have known, talked with, watched on youtube or read about in books. I am not trying to disparage your idea at all and LOVE that you are becoming a day trader, and are so motivated to go against the grain and find something that works for you. I hope this can be an ongoing discussion where we can all learn from, including myself. Hope you reply :) My uncle has golfed his whole life, and when I was younger, I would often visit him. He would be in the backyard practicing his swing, calling me over, and telling me he "found the secret" to a perfect golf swing. After a couple times it turned into a running joke that he always "found the secret" to the perfect swing, but in reality he never did. . . Because there is no Secret to a perfect . . . anything. Nmarnson, when I was a new trader a few years back, I focused so much on reversals with strong candle reversal patterns that had really tight stops of $.01-.$03 which coincided with the actual bottom/top of a reversal candle setup. Basically if it broke and didnt reverse I would get out for the small .01-.03 cent loss, and if it reversed as my back testing had indicated I would take huge profits with risk/reward like 20/1 and thus I could make so many losing trades to find a huge winner. I had spreadsheets and notepads full of numbers. I looked at charts for hours upon hours days upon days and went back through candles of all different time frames analyzing everything I could. I was sure I found the "secret to day trading" . . . Reversals with tight stops and let the winners ride up to heaven for continuous profits!!! I never posted on a forum like this to share my idea so I never got feedback. My feedback was in the form of disappointment/frustration of $1,000's lost So lets go over your points So if you have 1,000 shares and stop loss of $.12 you are risking $120. And in your later example you are assuming you are able to exit at exactly your entry price for a break even trade and only have to pay commission of (I assume) $3.00 for entry and $3.00 for exit for a total of $6.00 1. Commission, so if you are paying a flat rate of $3.00 commission that is fantastic for 1,000 shares. For those of us on IB we get $1.00 trade on 100 shares, but anything over that we pay extra depending on the structure we choose. So no one gets $1.00 trades on 1,000 shares unless you are on some cheap/junk broker like robinhood. In reality on 1,000 shares IB we pay around $5.00 or so for each trade. Commission doesnt include the fees you have to pay. The fees are fairly small on 1,000 shares but since you are being exact, you need to include the fees on top of commission. 2. Spread, with a strategy such as yours, you will have to pick stocks with a very tight spread of $.01-$.03 that doesnt change much. This is very limiting. Especially if you want to pick stocks that are in play for that day. On a 1,000 shares, for each penny the spread is you will be down $10. many stocks have spreads of around $.05-.15 and thus you will be instantly down $50-$150, which throws off the plan immediately. So you will be forced to pick stocks with extremely tight spreads. 3. Now here is the real danger. If you are looking to make entries at breakout points, especially if you are seeing buying or selling pressure going in the direction that you want to jump in with, there can be big gaps up in your favor, or INSTANT gaps that go against you. . . . You have to accept that gaps go BOTH ways. Lets just say you are buying at an apex point for a long of a stock that is about to break $40. You see a green buyer at $40.01 so you hit your hotkey for 1,000 shares on the ask for the break of 40 and get filled at $40.04 because the spread changed the instant you hit your hotkey and price was moving up. So now you got filled at $40.04. But this was a fakeout, and you bought at the highpoint of this potential apex, and there was some huge hidden seller (which there often can be at a Whole Dollar apex point). Since you are a slow human compared to an algo computer, you are way behind on reading the time and sales And thus the stock drops $.10 instantly before you can get out. You try to get out asap, but because the gap down and increased spread you get filled at $39.93. And thus what you thought was a commission break/even trade, was actually a commission + fee + -.11/share trade so around -$113 loss or so. This is not even an extreme case. This happens all the time on stocks that are in play at apex points. 4. You also note that it might take only 2-3 entries MAX before a trade goes in you favor. I dont have an argument here other than to say you will learn through experience this simply isnt true. Someone like Andrew makes it look so easy. But for the majority of us, we get faked out all the time. The charts will be setup to make the average trader see something where the exact opposite is going to occur. Total fakeout. 5. I think if you ask any successful trader they will tell you trading is over 50% psychology and possibly more like 80% psychology. So we all know to "plan our trade and trade our plan", but in reality this will never happen. Even the greats like Andrew calls himself out all the time saying "what a garbage trade, Rookie Mistake, I cant believe I did that". Not even he is immune to going of his plan. When I was first starting out this didnt make any sense to me and I honestly didnt buy into it. I just thought I would trade the charts and my trading plan and nothing else mattered. Then every Day Traders enemy came to greet me, FOMO, revenge trading, Hulk Trading (RobertH), Averaging Down Losses, HotKey mistakes, desperation trading, letting losers ride and taking profits before your plan dictates, Deer-in-The-Headlight and many more . . . None of these trades are part of anyones plan, yet EVERYONE does them. I admit it is crazy. No one plans to fall victim to these, yet EVERYONE does. Please let me know your thoughts on all this and where you agree/disagree as I would love to continue to hear your opinion.

Hi Carlos, I just finished the audible book today. It is just amazing. The rank of this book on amazon is not that high but in my opinion, this book is even better than "Trading in the zone". "Trading in the zone" is written by one successful trader, but this book is like by written by ten successful traders. And if you pay attention, you will discover that they have so much in common. They are serious about trading and they have passion about trading. They see trading as a great method to have a more freedom lifestyle and they were willing to take the risks before they consistently profitable. The most important messages in this book for me as a new trader are: 1. Trade defensive. Which means you should always avoid letting your losing trade take you down. Set up a stop lose and keep the money in your pocket. With the capital, you can always get back in, but if you lose the capital, you are out of the game. 2. Don't say "trade with the money you can lose!". This is very mind blowing for me although it's just one chapter in the book about this, and there are people in the book have the opposite opinion. It did change my mind. Now I believe "This is the seed money for our family, not the money you can just lose." I should pay attention and try my best to keep it and make more out of it. 3. If you have passion in trading, 6 hours a day is okay. 4. The ones who take trade more serious have more potential to success. Thanks for sharing your book list with us. If possible, please share more with us. I will definitely read them all. Yuanzhi B

Great examples! Andrew's book and courses discuss this concept of new 5-min high or 5-min low. It's a very good indication of a stock continuing a trend (higher highs, higher lows or lower highs, lower lows).