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April 6 No trading today got less than 6 hours of sleep, which from my past performance means a negative day or I choose to watch the market and spend some time with the family. I opted for the second choice.

Monday 04/06/2020 I had a well-being score of 7/10 this morning. I took 1 live trade with CCL. My watchlist: AMD, MGM, DAL, ZM, CCL, and BA. I usually don’t look for PM trades until 15 minutes before the open. But CCL was trading in a tight range with a sharp 8.85 reistance level and a more convoluted support level about 8.78. There was a reasonable size ask at 8.88 which would help the price break the 8.85 level. I took a long and then made a hot key mistake with setting my stop and took a loss. But I immediately re-entered. I was a bit stressed about taking a trade so early so I decided to set my stop and walk away for a few minutes. When I returned CCL had popped and started to head back down. I sold half my shares immediately. At that point I am done for the day. I spent the next few minutes trying to squeeze out a little more profit. I took a couple of SIM trades at the open, but nothing to speak of. What did I do good today? Good use of L2. I knew myself well enough that I should walk away from the screen, since I was jumpy and when I saw there was a well defined stop. What I am grateful from today? CCL pop was very lucky I am quite aware of that.

Day 61 - April 3, 2020 17 Tickets 3 Symbols Red Day Watchlist: Poor preparation, didn't have my levels mapped out for the plays that I wanted.... TWTR(1) - Long - 1 min - VWAP Bounce and Go TWTR dropped and bounced nicely from previous day level, came up and tested pre market levels. Took it long as it held VWAP and looked to move higher. Tight stop just below VWAP and previous candle. Quickly retraced on the 1 min, and took me out. Improvement: Need to do better research and finding levels. 23.55 was a major levels (previous day high, and acted as support the day prior. Missed the opportunity first minute (although trading first 5 min is not in my game plan) SPY (1) - Short - 1min - Failed Pop (247.61) Was waiting for spy to come back into 50MA, and took it off the rejection, stop just above previous candle. Took partials at 1.25R, took another one off as I didn’t like the 5min volume increasing and final got stopped out. Good: I like the patience waiting for this as I had the urge to take it previous failed pop. Although not a big winner - followed my plan. Improvement: Should have realized there was a change in character, volume came in larger then on previous pops. SPY - Short - 1min - Failed pop Took SPY as it broke through consolidation range and popped back up, thinking we would reject MAs and continue to LOD. Tight stop above previous candle high. TWTR (2) - Long - 1min and 5 min - Technical Breakout (Ascending Triangle) TWTR setting up for a breakout from its range, with volume coming in. Making higher highs and pushing right up against range resistance, took it on the breakout thinking we would retest VWAP. Didn’t leave myself much time as I was chasing into the close. Improvement: Could be cutting this a little quicker as it didn’t work out - expecting a momentum break that works right away. Also could have bought on the dip into MA's rather than waiting for the break which faked me out. Not a great R/R and time was against me.. CCL - Long - 1min and 5 min - Technical Breakout (Range) ( -1 No defined profit target - otherwise you shouldbt be taking this trade..poor R/R) CCL was making a range at 8.6 and 8.45, ended up taking it as it broke the range and held. Covered half just under breakeven as I didn’t like price action and realized I was chasing again…other half was taken out at stop loss below MA's. Improvement: Shouldn’t be in this play - chasing the high right at the close, into resistance.. SPY - Short / Long Flip - 1min - Over trading + Revenge Trading ( -2 Position sizing and no defined target/risk) This one I am not happy about at all…watching SPY making lower highs 3 times but didn’t enter…ended up making a huge spike and I entered thinking we would reject and continue with lower highs (not in game plan) and got stopped out right away…made its way up to VBWAP and looked like holding so I took it as it made a new high on 1 min after consolidation. Stopped out right below VWAP Improvement: Over trading / Revenge Trading. Was hoping on both of them. Realized they weren't good plays so I took smaller size and didn’t use my risk hotkey. Noticing I am making very poor plays into the end of the day, need to be stepping away. Trade Review Same thing over and over, slowly being able t control my trading at the open - but after watching charts throughout the day seems like my mental ability to control myself drops and I jump in with a few terrible plays. CCL and TWTR both chasing the highs into the close, SPY flipped position on plays that aren't in my setups? Really have to re-focus and work on the setups that make sense to me and that are working. Past week or so I have been deviating from my plan and it has shown. Trading results and confidence both took a beating. Daily Report Card 1. Only Take trades using risk calculated hotkey = 5/7 2. Placing trades with defined risk, and profit targets (No adjusting) = 4/7

This is an example of using KyleK29's hotkeys to execute a long position with maximum 1% equity risk. Kyle has examples in his spreadsheet, but there's some additional details I came across while studying the hotkeys so thought I'd share them with the BBT community. This is part DAS Trader hotkey tutorial and part KyleK29 hotkey tutorial. Description of KyleK29's Hotkeys If you're not familiar with @KyleK29's hotkeys, the purpose of the hotkey is to limit the number of shares purchased so that you don't lose more than a predefined amount of your capital should the stock price move against you. The process of using the hotkey is to first double-click on the chart to define the Stop Loss price, then activate the hotkey using your keyboard. The hotkey will then automatically calculate the number of shares you can trade so that your losses are limited in case you get stopped out. For example, assume you have $10,000 equity ($40,000 total buying power on 4:1 margin) and don't want to risk more than 1% equity ($100) should you get stopped out. When viewing the chart for a particular stock you decide an appropriate Stop Loss would be $0.50 lower than current price, so that's where you double-click. Let's assume the stock price is $100/share, so you COULD afford 400 shares. But if you bought 400 shares, and you got stopped out, that would be a $200 loss (400 * 0.50 = $200). That's more than the 1% ($100) you wanted to limit your losses to. So the purpose of the hotkey is automatically decrease the number of shares to $100/0.50 = 200 shares. Now if we had instead placed our stop loss at .10 below the price, then it'd take 1000 shares to reach our max loss of $100. This is more than we can afford so the hotkey would set the numbers of shares to max afforded 400 shares. This means this hotkey needs to calculate two different share amounts: 1) The maximum number of shares we can afford with our buying power. 2) The maximum number of shares we can buy and not lose more than 1% of our equity, assuming the price moves all the way to the Stop Loss. If DAS Trader hotkey engine had a min() function, then we could easily find the smaller of the two shares sizes and execute our trade. Unfortunately DAS Trader does not have a min() function; however, Kyle cleverly found a workaround for this. The following formula is how to find the minimum of two values, as implemented in Kyle's hotkeys: So Kyle's hotkeys calculate Max Shares Affordable and Max Shares to Fit Risk, finds the min of the two, and purchases that number of shares. In addition to the clever formula, Kyle's hotkeys also utilize clever usage of the montage fields to store/read values during the calculations. In another post on these forums, Kyle describes the montage fields that were available to him: SSHARE --> Display Box (next to share), this is an unsigned INT, read/write SHARE --> Share Box, this is an INT, read/write PRICE --> Price Box, this is a FLOAT, read/write DEFSHARE --> Default Shares (not displayed, but accessible), this is an INT, read/write TRAILPRICE --> Trailing Price, FLOAT, but only available if STOP is selected and stop type = Trailing, read/write STOPPRICE --> Trigger Price, FLOAT, only available if STOP is selected and "trigger price" box is writeable, read/write CAPSHARE --> String, write only PREF --> String, write only. Not much to work with, and some consolations had to be made (e.g. in one case Kyle uses an INT field to store a float which loses precision, but, hey, you work with what you have). But all-in-all it's no small miracle what Kyle pulled off given what DAS Trader makes available to hotkey authors. Example Hotkey Walk-through Now I'll go into a detailed breakdown of one of the hotkeys generated by v2.1 of Kyle's hotkey spreadsheet. There's also a suggestion included below for an alternate command as I think the current command may have a bug. The settings for this example are: The stock we're trading is AMD at Last Price of 44.47 with Bid=44.46 and Ask=44.47. And we kick-off our trade by double-clicking on the AMD chart at 44.35 (Stop Loss), followed by hitting the appropriate key combination on our keyboard to execute the hotkey script. We then get the hotkey from the E15 cell on the "Hot Keys" tab of Kyle's spreadsheet. The full hotkey script is: DefShare=BP*0.49;Share=DefShare*0.25*Price*0.01;Price=Ask-Price+0.01;SShare=Share/Price;Share=DefShare-SShare;DefShare=DefShare+SShare;SShare=Share;Sshare=DefShare-SShare;Share=0.5*SShare;TogSShare;ROUTE=LIMIT;Price= Ask+0.05;TIF=DAY+;BUY=Send;DefShare=400; Below is a detailed walk-through of each command in the script. DefShare=BP*0.49; "Max Shares Affordable" Returns Number of shares. Kind of strange since the units on the right-hand side of the equation are dollars isn't it? Welcome to the world of DAS Trader hotkey scripting. This is because behind the scenes this command is really "DefShares=BP*.49/Price". So you end up with a unitless value equal to the number of shares afforded. "Price" is last price in Time & Sales. See explanation of this in DAS Trader hotkey setup window: In this example, DefShare = $20,000 * .49 / $44.47 = 220 shares. This is our "Max Shares Affordable". Note it'd be preferable to use Ask instead of Last Price, since Ask is where we buy. However, you'd need to set Price=Ask first, which would then wipe out the Stop Loss price that got defined when we double-clicked on the chart. So we have to calculate Max Shares Affordable using Last Price instead of Ask, which I'm sure you'll agree is acceptable. Share=DefShare *0.25 *Price *0.01; Alternate formula: Share = BP *.25 *Price *.01; Returns $ Risk. Again, the units are confusing and it's difficult to see if you're actually calculating shares or a dollar amount. Once we "show all of our work", we'll see it's a dollar amount, even though the left-hand side of the equation says "Share". DAS Trader hotkeys don't have things like user-defined variables, so we're limited to just a few fields in the montage to read/write values from. These fields serve as our variables and for "$ Risk" we're going to store it in Share. (Since Share is an INT only field, our dollar risk will be rounded. e.g. $24.50 -> "24" in Share field) Share=DefShare*0.25*Price*0.01 = (BP*.49/Price) *.25 *Price *.01 = BP * .49 * .25 * .01 = $24.50 However, a 1% risk of a $5k account should actually be $50. This is also what the spreadsheet shows: Alternate formula: Share = BP * .25 * Price * .01; = $50 (1% of $5,000 equity account) I use the alternate formula in my hotkey script so going forward in this example, "$ Risk" / "Share" is $50 and not $24.50 (which would show as "24" in montage since Share is a INT field, not float). Price=Ask-Price+0.01; Price on right hand side is the Price we define by double-clicking in the chart window to define the Stop Loss price. Price on the left hand side is therefore the Stop Distance, the distance between where we buy (Ask) and where we want to stop out (where we double-clicked). .01 is the "minimum stop buffer" we defined in settings so that's added on there as well. Let's assume I double-clicked in the chart at 44.35 to define the Stop Distance; Price = Ask-Price+0.01 = 44.47 - 44.35 + .01 = 0.13 SShare=Share/Price; SShare is the number of shares "shown" to the exchange, but we're using it to store "max shares to fit risk". So we take our $ Risk ($50) and divide that by "Price" aka "Stop Distance": $50 / 0.13 = 384 shares So to summarize what we've done so far: Calculated Max Shares Afforded (220) using Last Price in Time & Sales and our buying power of $20,000*.49 and stored this is DefShare Calculated max equity risk ($50) and stored this in Share Calculated Stop Distance (0.13) and stored this in Price Calculated Max Shares to Fit Risk (384) and stored this is SShare So for this example we are limited by Buying Power (220 shares) rather than $ Risk (384 shares). So we expect the hotkey to trade 220 shares. Share=DefShare-SShare; Now we get into finding the minimum of "Shares Afforded" and "Shares to Fit Risk": Calculate A - B of min{a,b} = 0.5( A + B - | A - B | ) and store it in "Share". We don't need Share any more to store $ Risk. A = Max Shares Afforded (DefShare) B = Max Shares to Fit Risk (SShare) A - B = 220 - 384 = -164 (shows in montage window as "164-") DefShare=DefShare+SShare; Calculate A + B of min{a,b} = 0.5( A + B - | A - B | ) and store in DefShare. 220 + 384 = 604. SShare=Share; This is our way of doing Absolute Value of A - B since SShare only holds positive integers. SShare=DefShare-SShare; Now we're calculating everything in parentheses: min{a,b} = 0.5( A + B - | A - B | ) Share=0.5*SShare; Then we multiply by 0.5 and store in Share: You might think that the last two lines could be combined as "Share=0.5*DefShare - 0.5*SShare", but that does not work for some reason and I get a value of "49446" in the Share box. So better to stick with what Kyle has done. TogSShare; This just deletes the number of shares in the "Show Share" box. We don't intend to show a different number of shares to the exchange than we're actually trading. We just needed that field for our arithmetic, and now we're done with it. ROUTE=LIMIT; Price= Ask+0.05; TIF=DAY+; BUY=Send; The normal stuff. *** A note regarding ROUTE for CMEG users (like myself). *** When you join CMEG, you get an email saying you need to use SMRTL route to get the discounted BBT commission and ECN fee structure. CMEG also tells you this appears as "LIMIT, MARKET, and STOP" in DAS Trader platform. You may be tempted to use SMRTL or SMRTM in your hotkey, but that is not what you should do. I even had a chat with DAS Trader support and they also said I should use SMRTL/SMRTM in my hotkeys. However, those are not in the montage Route drop-down menu. In other words, if for some reason you had "MERQL" selected in the Route drop-down, then ran the hotkey with "Route=SMRTL" in the hotkey script, the Route field is not going to change to "SMRTL" since it's not available in the drop-down. The route will stay as "MERQL" and that's the route DAS Trader will use for the trade. So use "ROUTE=LIMIT" (or MARKET or STOP). In the Trade Log window you'll see the intended "SMAT" route as the one being used. DefShare=400; Change DefShare back to our default amount. This doesn't impact the trade and is more of a housekeeping command. After the hotkey is executed, the montage looks like this: And now we are long 220 shares of AMD. And if the price moves to 44.35, we can (manually) close our position and not lose more than $50. It should also be noted that Kyle's spreadsheet can add Stop Loss orders too, but I haven't looked at those in detail yet.

Traders here are two hotkeys for SSR in CMEG. Kyle hotkey with stop order placed. DefShare=BP*0.97;Price=Price-Ask;SShare=50/Price;Share=DefShare-SShare;DefShare=DefShare+SShare;SShare=Share;Sshare=DefShare-SShare;Share=0.5*SShare;TogSShare;ROUTE=SMRTL;Price=Ask;TIF=DAY;SELL=Send;DefShare=200; 2. Plain SSR Short ROUTE=SMRTL;Share=100;Price=ASK;TIF=DAY;SELL=Send

thank you @Mike B this hotkey works perfect..

April 3rd - Not a bad day to sit out the open. I came back to the computer a half an hour into the trading and saw how choppy it was. I ended up getting into $MU as the Market started to roll over. For some reason today was the day $MU did not want to completely sell off. I got a partial and then had a hotkey error and exited my whole position while inputting my limit order for the profit target. My second trade was on $JD when the market started to bottom out. I took it long got a partial and then decided to manage the trade differently than my plan called for. I was reward for the bad behavior as I would have gotten stopped out at b/e before it made the run up. Overall a good day to finish a rough week.

Friday 04/03/2020 I had a well-being score of 7/10 this morning. I took 2 live trades with APA and AMD. My watchlist: AMD, APA, DAL, TWTR, CCL, and BA. I liked APA in the PM and was respected a 5.40 price level. When a large ask appeared above that price I went long with half share size. My stop was VWAP. The price slowly moved up nearing the open and the plan was to add to my position when it broke above 5.46 daily level. But it popped to quickly to add at the open. I was able to take two partials before S/O at B/E. AMD opened with so-so volume and an indecision candle. The second min candle was a nice hammer. So with SPY moving higher I went long at the break of PDC. $45 target with 200MA-1min as my stop. The price was wild and unpredictable and I took two partials to reduce risk. The price finally popped a little and I got one good partial in before S/O at B/E. What did I do good today? Stopped trading when it seemed the market was too wild this morning. What I am grateful from today? Luckily to be green today. It was very wild price action, I could have easily been red today.

Here is my setup for now. Once I have moved up a couple risk levels I will be adding another 24" monitor on the top as a reward for sticking to my plan. I plan on moving into a new room hopefully within a year but I need to sell out of our online business so I have room. Oh and by the way, My phone is an old crappy LG V20 so a new Iphone is what has been on my list for some time now. LOL Thank you for the opportunity not only for the phone but for opening my eyes up to trading. I follow daily and watch all the videos offered and I know BBT has been the only reason I have succeeded thus far. As of now I watch the PM Show everyday while gathering my own list from what I have learned from Carlos and Norm. I do have a few trading buddy's that I talk to live while trading everyday (that is what the headphones are for) and we try to keep each other in line and this I feel is another reason I am continuing to grow. Trade Safe and Stay Green Glenn

Hi everyone, Want to share my thoughts on creating a trading system. We all have goals. I think it is great. The problem is that we focus on goals without having a clear plan how to get to them. Goals are just directions. I think it is very important to focus on creating a trading system with clear steps and directions. Focus on improving that system and improving your identity as a trader. I would love to share my system, and I hope it will be helpful for some of you. Let me say a few words about myself. I started to trade a few years ago. Like many of us joined Sykes and traded penny stocks. Then I tried five more big and famous chat rooms. I was on a rollercoaster. One of my friends mentioned to check Andrew's room back in January. After watching a few videos I decided to join them. Got a life membership, and now I am here making money, but whats most important I am growing with this community. So let go back to my system... Here is a step by step what I do on a daily basis. 1. Business plan - with out a plan you just a swimmer in the ocean. It's scary and crazy. Be a captain of your own ship. But you gotta build that ship first! 2. Preparation checklist - no matter if you are a scalper or a swing trader, you can not trade a stock without knowing a float, RVOL, reading a catalyst, knowing ATR and more. 3. Having a playbook - have your setups with data collected on them. I am constantly adding charts of stocks in play to my playbook journal. Track your setups. 4. Risk management - is a KING or QUEEN not sure, always trade based of a risk. 5. Trade management - in order to know how to scale in and scale out you need to collect data. Are you good at one and done, or getting out by 10%. 4. Daily report card - track your performance. Trading is a performance job. You gotta know your mistakes, weakness and strengths. 5. Journaling - #1 thing for improvement and tracking all data. Reflect and review. Repeat day in and day out. So on every topic you have to create a detailed system, and put everything together in a way that it will be easy for your brain to navigate. You brain does not like complicated things and always trying to find an easy way. Make it easy and fun. Create good habits since the day one. Building yourself as a trader will help you to improve your personal life and the other way around. I suggest to read "Atomic Habits" by James Clear on this topic. This is a long journey, and I suggest you to take it seriously. Be a professional. Ask your self a question, "What would a professional trader do?" There is only one way to success, compound of a hard and smart work. Thanks!