My name is Jared, but I go by Hobo Trader in the chat. I took on the name because 3.5 months ago my girlfriend and I left Austin, TX and hit the road in a van we built out. I have been trading all along the way with more success than I had in my apartment. After my trade station video I received a bunch of questions about how trading on the road has gone, my setup, and how I do it. I figured I would answer a couple of the most common questions and any additional questions you all may have about trading from the road. My van: We built out a 2013 Nissan NV 2500 HD. There is a lot to talk about here but the main thing regarding trading is electricity. The electric setup, which enables me to keep my laptop and other devices charged plus power the signal booster, includes 4-100 amp hour AGM batteries and 2-100 watt solar panels, with all necessary equipment like charge controller etc. My Setup: My setup is very simple--a laptop, mouse, headphones, a T-mobile hotspot and a cell signal booster. The cell signal booster is very important. I use one called AnyCall. Another popular option is WeBoost. I spend most of my time in beautiful, but remote areas meaning the signal is often weak or nonexistent. A signal booster cannot help with a nonexistent signal, but it can turn a weak or unreliable signal into a stronger, stable one. I would not trade without it, unless you plan on doing all your trading from the road in larger cities. If I suspect where I am headed will not have signal I watch the signal and try to remember the last place I had it so I can commute to that place in the morning if I wish to trade. Internet: There are a lot of options, most of which are really expensive. The best solution for me has been using my girlfriend's T-mobile cell phone as a hotspot. T-mobile has pretty good coverage in the US in the cities and decent coverage in the more rural areas. Verizon has the best service in rural/remote areas but it is also much costlier and when they throttle your connection they slow it down much more than T-mobile. I do not trade on a days I don't feel I can get a solid, consistent signal. I have found the consistency of the signal is much more important than the speed. I have traded with no issues on speeds as low as 2 mbps. My only issues come from connections that time in and out, not matter how fast they are when they are connected. Here is my preferred internet situation: Ping: 75 or less Speed: 5 mbps+ (although I have traded without issue on speeds as low as 2 mbps). With full bars LTE on T-mobile I routinely get 50+ mbps. Service: 3+ bars LTE after turning on my signal booster. The signal booster can usually turn one unstable bar of LTE into full coverage without any fluctuation. On rare occasion it can turn 3G to LTE service. The most important factor regarding internet is consistency of the connection. I would rather have 2 bars LTE meeting the other performance requirements than full bars LTE that occassionally drops to 1 bar or times out completely. Start slow and with small size during remote trading until you get an intuition regarding what constitutes trade-able connection. Fail-safes: On three occasions I have had the internet time out during a trade. Only one of them was a substantial loss (1x max daily loss) by the time I got the connection back. After all of these incidents I put in new measures. The first of which was increasing my service/internet requirements before trading. I speed test the connection before trading every day. I use my girlfriend's phone as a T-mobile hotspot, but I myself have Sprint. Sprint rarely has better reception than T-mobile, but it is nice to have the variety. If the T-mobile hotspot fails and I cannot get it to reconnect, my first fail-safe is to go to my phone and use the DAS mobile app to exit the position if I have service. Having multiple options helps greatly. The biggest fail-safe I have introduced is the use of hard stops. I use market stop orders at my breakeven point for a profitable trade on remaining shares. This is something I used on occasion before the big loss, but made it a rule after. If I have already partialled out most of my position and only have a very small share size I don't always use them, but until I am down to 40% or less I always have an up-to-date market stop order to make sure in the event of a connection disruption I will get out at breakeven. Additionally, if the position doesn't move in my favor immediately but doesn't hit my stop out quickly, I will put in a market stop order for my stop out point to make sure the loss is only as big as I was willing to risk. Performance: I am trading better than ever in the van, which was puzzling to me at first. At my apartment I had three screens and incredibly fast, consistent internet. I have concluded my increased success on the road is due to a few things: lower stress, better sleep, fewer tickers, and better journaling and reflection. Less stress: Before hitting the road I would wake up, trade, spend the next 3 hours building out the van, then go bartend until late, rinse and repeat. I always had a lot on my mind. Now on the road I have significantly less stress. This has had a huge impact. Better, deeper sleep: Because my days were pretty full I was getting home late and waking up early. For most of the 2.5 years I have been trading I consistently operated on less than 6 hours of sleep. Usually 5.5 hours or less. Everyone knows sleep is important, but I underestimated its importance. Since hitting the road I consistently get 7.5+ hours, often getting more than 8 hours. I never realized how foggy-brained I had been all this time on less sleep. The fogginess made it much harder to maintain appropriate discipline and manage my emotions. I believe better sleep is the single biggest reason for my success. I cannot stress this enough. Fewer tickers: In my apartment I had three screens and usually watched 6 tickers. I had all six tickers' 5 min charts pulled up, SPY, all sorts of stuff going on. On the laptop I only watch 4 tickers and can only fit a 1 min, 5 min, and daily chart for one of the stocks on my screen. That has caused me to skim the 4 tickers for what I am looking for pattern and volume-wise, pick the best one, and then completely focus on only that one ticker. This has given me a much better understanding of the price action and personality of the ticker in focus, which has led to much better entries and quicker cutting of loses because it is more clear when the tug-of-war between bulls and bears takes a turn against me. Before I think I tried to watch too many things at once and it led to poor decision making. Additionally, I found I got FOMO when I had a position but could see another ticker making a better move and it would change my trade management. I believe fewer tickers and therefore greater focus on the one with my criteria is the second biggest reason for the increased success. More reflection/journaling: Because of my busy schedule trying to complete the van and working evenings, on bad days it was hard to muster the energy and emotional currency to journal my failures. I always made time on green days, but red ones I used the excuse I needed a break or some time to get my energy back to take on the rest of the day. Since being in the van, I have a lot more time and that has led to much deeper reflection and journaling. Now I journal extensively and post trade recaps to my youtube channel every day. I have gained a much deeper understanding of my trading in the past 3.5 months than I did from the 2 years before. You cannot have success as a daytrader without thoroughly journaling and reflecting on your trades. You cannot find your edge or know who you are as a trader without deep inspection of your trading patterns. I hope this is helpful to some people who are interested in trading while traveling! I answered most of the common questions I have gotten since the trade station video, but feel free to ask away if you have an unanswered question. Safe trading!

2020-8-17 (LIVE/SIM) The plan was to go live today with a small Risk Factor 1R = $20. A couple of silly errors, some HotKey errors and a few times I meant to trade Live I had my SIM account on (????) TRADE 1 $JD (LIVE) +0.25R First Live trade. Went short for a small move on $JD. Small profit and out at break even. TRADE 2 $NVDA (SIM) 15 Min ORB +1.19R (How did the montage slip into SIM?) Anyway, Long at the 9:46 mark. A few partials then out at break even. TRADE 3 $NVDA (LIVE) Reversal -0.26R Probably should have taken a quick break. Shorted the stock then out, quickly regretted it. TRADE 4 $GOLD (LIVE) ABCD -1.05R Went long on $GOLD based on the 1 Min & 2 Min charts. Should have waited for the 5 ? Turned back on me -1.05R. TRADE 5 $JD (LIVE) ABCD -0.77R First, HotKey errors... TRADE 6 $NVDA (SIM) ABCD/Continuation +0.44R SIM ? Nice ABCD pattern on the with a nice support at the 9ema on the 5 minute. Obviously a lot of patience would have paid off nicely. Afterthoughts: +1.36R SIM -1.58 LIVE FIRST: Take out hotkeys that do not apply with immediate strategy. You can not underestimate the difference in psychology when you are in live. Glad I walked away from the computer when I did. Need to double/triple check the montage is in SIM/LIVE. As of this point going to continue the plan to trade Live for the first 90 minutes then SIM for the rest of the day.

I just spent a month away from home on a mobile setup and had a similar experience. I was trading better away from home and it was probably for the reasons you outlined above. Time for me to size down and get the consistency back. Thanks for the analysis of trading on the move!

Check out this link Richard. It contains all of Mike's journaling and trading plan templates. I've never really done a deep dive into them. But obviously, Mike knows what's up! https://bearbulltraders.com/lessons/creating-a-trading-business-plan-mike/ Happy Trading! Eugene H

Attend Aimans Trade Review that he hosts daily in the chat room or webinar room. If you are having a bad day trading by 12 am EST then he can help you understand better on where you went wrong. Finding what works for you is one of the hardest parts about trading. Last week I had a couple red days in a row but I minimalized the red by just watching and reading the market the rest of the day. I set a daily routine that I try to follow and when I do I have been seeing better results which allowed me to finish green last week which is a milestone for me.

That worked, thanks!

What up bbt! I'm in the process of creating an account with IB, so right now my DAS has two accounts on file, when I click to take a trade my future IB account with 0$ balance gets loaded in the level 2 instead of my SIM account (which I prefer right now) is there a way to change this?

Hi Chris, if you right click somewhere near that drop-down list in your montage then click "Order Template" , you should get a popup window with some config of the default settings in the montage. if you play with the settings and make sure to apply it to all the exchange markets it should work. Also try to save it into a Desktop file configuration. Hope that works with you. Cheers

Hi everyone! My name is Ville and I live in Helsinki, Finland. I am 27 years old and have a Master´s degree in Structural Engineering (2018, area of expertise multi-storey timber buildings) First time I realized that such a career as day trader exists was on Christmas holiday 2018 that I saw a youtube video about it made by Nordnet Finland. Few weeks later I bought Andrew's book to be read during flight to Thailand. Then during the next year (yes it took the whole year to get courage 😄) I read Andrew's book a couple of times making notes and planning. At the end of year 2019 I bought a monthly subscription to Bear Bull Traders and started trading with DAS SIM. I think I am in such a wonderful situation that NY market opens 16.30 pm local time thus I have plenty of time to go work before that (we have flexible working hours too) Since I still have full-time job I can only trade few hours in a day, 2-3 days in a week to keep my social life, so it has now taken almost 8 months of SIM trading. At least I think I haven´t tried to get rich fast? 😄 I am planning to go live soon and have gathered some savings for that during the years. However I´m having a baby boy (my first child) in 4 weeks so I am not sure if my live trading will reschedule to later due those sleepless nights and extra expense 😄 Also my wife in going to continue her studies so I feel a bit of pressure to keep our family income steady. Sorry my post is a quite long one! See you in Chatroom and on other Forum topics! Sorry also that I waited so long, but we Finns are slowly warming people 😄 Br, Ville

@Mike B, do you by chance have an updated version of the Total Trader you'd be willing to share?

Having talked to many traders, and in my own experience, taking a "trader circuit breaker" helps to interrupt bad habits. Sometimes traders are trapped in a vicious feedback loop of bad trading => bad results $ => bad mindset => bad trading and stopping trading helps to halt that pernicious loop. But you really need to take a step back, no trading even in sim. Is a detox therapy from trading. Then some clarity comes and you will see clearly what you were doing wrong. So take some days completely off trading, then use your time watching other traders recaps, watch / re-watch some success webinars, review your rules and your journals. Then come back to sim and follow up your discipline, make a daily checklist of your rules and follow up your rules compliance every single day. You will want to define a period of acceptable rules compliance and discipline, that could be a week, some weeks, a month, etc. before coming back to trade your account. Just be mindful that old bad habits don't disappear from overnight. The same is with good habits, it takes some time to get rid of bad habits and it takes some time to build good habits. Your goal here is to use your rules to govern your trading behaviours and practice those rules and behaviours until they become an automatic response, a second nature. Then, after your reach your goal of rules compliance for the period of time defined by you, go back to trade your account, starting small, and define rules to increase your risk/trade or share size. And don't believe those telling you that sim doesn't work. We build bad and good habits in sim and we need to come back to sim to get rid of the bad habits built in sim. If you are not able to be disciplined with your rules in sim you won't be disciplined trading your account.

Sooo many thoughts go through my mind after reading your post. I agree with much of what both Bailey and Paul have said. I have to say that the opening bell has definitely become more of a distraction for me than a help. I agree with Paul that having two (sometimes more) moderators speaking is an issue. For those who are in the room to watch Andrew trade and learn from it (NOT FOLLOW IT), it is an unnecessary distraction for anyone else to compete for airtime. I say this in the most constructive way possible. BBT has been great for me in many ways. The biggest is being able to talk with fellow traders who are serious, and in many cases, very talented. These are people that you are not going to meet in places like StockTwits. As the community has grown, the chat has become less focused, but this is something that is natural, and trying to over-moderate it would end up hurting the newer traders. One of my biggest suggestions for BBT has been making it easy for members to communicate outside of the chatroom. I understand that there is this forum, but I don't think it is the best for back and forth communication. Being able to communicate with others, whether it is trading hours or any other time, is critical for new traders and experienced ones alike. I understand this is a major challenge, because it is difficult, if not impossible, to moderate. For myself, I have chosen some of the brightest and most active people I could find to invite to a small focus group in Slack. Some accepted, some didn't; and that's fine. But, this small group has been life altering for me. And, to a certain extent, has taken me away from the chatroom. I believe that a truly interactive, 24/7 forum such as Slack, Discord, MS Teams or Google Hangouts would be a good place to start. These are great platforms to develop more communication between members. These rooms could be moderated by contributors. I know this may be taken as me being critical. I do not intend it that way. I would not be where I am as a trader had it not been for BBT. I sincerely want to see the community flourish and help many traders in the future. I intend to do what I can to contribute to that end. I think it is vitally important for traders who have improved and grown more experienced to find a way to give back to the community.

Nice iniciative, willl try to be laser focus as possible and add a possible solution on everything I can : The Good : Moderators goals, approaches and time on screen are invaluable to me. Thanks Peter, Thor and Aiman !! @Andrew Aziz a heck of a trader come true ! We all agree that his own style of trading has evolve a lot in the last months, but I see that as a nature. Markets always change. Technology keep improving every single day and, some bugs are inevitable, but I truely accept that the response time is awesome. So thanks to Sebastian for that part 🙂 The PM show has gone through the roof .... Tech, information, news, charts, .... I say it is the best one out there for sure so congratulations to @Carlos M. and @Norm The Bad : I think that the community growth is fine, however the chat went crazy some times and I just stoped watching it many many days since a couple of months. Also related, the bigger the community, the more diluted the information will be so I proppose to go over more rules to control what is posted on every tab. In this case : LESS IS MORE !! I would restrict the tabs to a max of 3 : main trading chat + trade screenshots + support .... everything else can go to the forums IMHO having 2 moderators at the opening talking about different trades plus the chat with some more, is so much noise to me. So i started to watch some opennings only when I have nothing clear, or mute them and only pay attention to the chat in case one of the members/mods are trading something I am interested. Solution : Andrew could do the openning as usual and Brian could join him in the chat or later on. IDK. The Ugly : Too many tabs on the chatroom make impossible to follow up all the conversations ... As a spanish foreigner, I appreciate the effort to add a Spanish tab, however, I am always watching the main tab Andrew stoped giving the Youtube reviews and I think that it is important for the community. Even if he does not want to publicly air the PnL, which is fine and acceptable of course, the information is not about the result, but about the process. I found very usefull information on his reviews, that sadly we all are missing now because he goes with the live trading only. Solution : 1-3m small recap with no PnL info that will keep him connected with members and possible new members 🙂

Here is my experience, Andrew Aziz has gone from making 1k - 2k a day to making 7k-10k a day. The amount of moderators, as well as their roles in the community, has become increasingly more valuable. The overall size of the community has increased drastically from my view. Carlos and the premarket show are much more polished than they use to be. The chatroom has significantly more issues as far as 'going down' or having issues, probably due to the increase of members. The forums are now very useful, and the success webinars and downloads are honestly a 'cheat' in terms of understanding how to approach trading effectively. The chatroom has become more impersonal as a direct result of the increase of members, but that isn't a fault of the moderators. Andrew Aziz exposed most of us to day trading mid cap stocks rather than penny stocks like Ross Cameron, so the suspicion of moderator manipulation and 'pump and dump' discredit are all gone. I would like to see Andrew Aziz play back a full week of his trades during the open with commentary. An unedited starting and pausing the intraday trading video of himself, not using screenshots, using full video beginning to end. It would be very helpful for him to say which trades were impulsive, and which trades were not. Through this deconstruction it would demystify why he taught a completely different way of trading than he employs in his books, even though that information was valuable. Overall this is still a growing community, and as a final comments, Andrew called so many stocks 'garbage' that they now call that 'dogs breakfast', He use to wait 5-10 minutes to trade, now he waits about 1 minute. His winning day percentage has always been ridiculously high. I was on a US Navy deployment in the South China Sea when he came to San Diego for a meetup, so I still haven't met him. Looking forward to it.

Can other Canadian residents confirm the buying power they receive from Interactive Brokers for US stocks? I am in SIM now via BBT life-time membership and I am now exploring opening a live account. I've read that IB provides 4:1 buying power but when I looked at their site, it appears this is only 2:1 for Canadian residents for US stocks. Can other Canadian traders please comment on their US stock buying power with IB? From IB Site: https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=26658&hm=ca&ex=us&rgt=1&rsk=0&pm=0&rst=080804080401 Canadian residents -- 50% margin requirements compared to US residents -- 25% margin requirements ---> My understanding is --> Cash amount in account / margin requirement = buying power Canadian residents: $25,000 in account / 50% margin requirement = $50,000 buying power US residents: $25,000 in account / 25% margin requirement = $100,000 buying power @Brian Pez @Andrew Aziz or other Canadian resident forum admins, can you please comment on what your BP ratio you have with IB? Just making sure I understand this before I proceed. Thanks!

Hey Thomas, First, welcome! Second - it's 3.33:1 for Canadians.

I shared my thoughts on the classic ABCD/Flag strategy. This pattern presents itself in virtually every move, across multiple timeframes. The formation consists of: 1. Run-up/sell-off 2. Profit taking/consolidation 3. Continuation Let me know your thoughts!