Adam Lewis

You sound frustrated Milos. Unfortunately trading is a very, VERY personal thing. You need to find your own style. Some people are scalpers, some trade reversals, some are really really good at ABCDs over 2 hour trades. The only guidance anyone can give you is find your style that suits your personality, patience and risk tolerance. I'm still very much doing this.

Much to my frustration I only started seriously tracking in February. I was making consistent losses until the end of 2020, then worked on discipline. Fixed risk hot keys changed my game, helped me manage risk and position size correctly. I now simply never lose more than 1R on a trade, and often I'll come off earlier if the position degrades. The link below is to a post where I go through my February stats in a little bit of detail. March was also profitable until.... Well, until it wasn't! This was entirely my fault. I'm currently about -3R for March, I think.

100% correct Peter. Good risk management allows profits with less than 50%. My stats for February were similar, c. 40% win rate but 20R profit for the whole month. This month hasn't been so good thanks to a few days mid-month when for some reason I figured I'd not be disciplined for a bit and surrendered 7R!

Day trading for a living... Clearly this is possible. However, for me it is the very final step of a long journey, on which I'm still at the early stages after 9 month in sim. Don't think in terms of doing it for a living. Think in terms of smaller more achievable steps. First, break even consistently. Second, make small profits and have it as a side hustle. Third, scale up and develop a cushion. Only after this are you really ready to make this your full time career. Along the way the key is to learn from mistakes. Journal thoroughly. Scrutinise your performance. Do more of what's working and stop doing what isn't. If you notice patterns that are leading to loss, try to prevent them. This is about the best you've got.

I use IB for long term ETF investments. I am approaching $25,000 invested in these ETFs, and so can soon also begin to use the account for day trading above the PDT rule (I currently use CMEG but the lack of shares for short is restrictive, hence I'd like to move as soon as possible). I'm aware it's possible to partition IB accounts. Ideally once over $25,000 I'd create two partitions - one for investing to keep my ETFs and one for trading that I can fund and use separately. However I'm not sure if each partition would need to be over $25,000 to satisfy PDT, or whether the total value of the account and all partitions within is what's taken into account? I've got a call out to IB customer services but they're taking a long time to reply, and I wonder if anyone here has an idea. Thanks!

For me - I use limit orders to open positions (buy or short) and market orders to close them (sell or cover). Really, if you're selling a position, you want to close your position at the best price available without delay. The nightmare scenario is to be short a stock that suddenly belts up and you're stuck trying to use limit orders that won't fill.

Yes but outside regular market hours you'll need to use a limit order, market orders won't work. Is that the problem you're having?

Ah sorry it was BearBullCMEG2018

I used the BearBullTraders2018 promo code (I think that's right), and that gets you 0.50 per trade up to 1,000 shares? And then something like 0.004 per share over 1,000? Works a treat and it's a game changer paying 1/6th the fees I was before!

Me too, and that we never post P/L screenshots on social media! Be quietly successful is my aim.

This is so important! I mean the thing is, he might not blow up his account, and good luck to him. I hope he continues to make huge % gains. The issue is you've decided that penny stocks aren't for you, so you're not even really talking about the same thing. If he told you he was making $thousands running a pizza restaurant, you wouldn't immediately go and try and open your own pizza restaurant, right? Thus it is with trading. Penny stocks and the mid-cap, mid-price stocks ($20-$100) that seem to generally be favoured by BBT are very different things. I agree that getting the membership here has been superb (I think I've already made back the lifetime membership fee on BBT low commission CMEG trades anyway!), it's changed how I approach trading. In general this is how the traders journey looks to me: 1. I want to make more money. People make money in the stock market. I wonder if I could do that? 2. Oh shit, look at this on YouTube, these guys make $20,000 a day in 30 minutes trading the stock market! I'll do that! Lambos for Xmas! 3. Shit, I made some money! This is easy! 4. ...Hang on a minute, I lost a bit. Huh. Those guys on YouTube didn't lose any. What's that all about? 5. Ok, this is really hard. Let me go back to a Simulator. 6. This is going to take a really long time to figure out, isn't it. Turns out those guys on YouTube have been doing this for years already! They didn't mention that, they just made it look really easy! ...and after this point, traders divide into two camps. The first camp who wanted some quick and easy money decides it's not worth the hassle, and they lose interest. The second camp accepts this is going to take years to figure out, and that they might continue to lose some money on the way, but commit to finding the persistence and the patience to learn about it. I've always said in life, whatever you're trying to do - hit a golf ball, speak Vietnamese, trade the stock market - anything is possible, but only if you have persistence and patience. Failure is part of the journey, and you'll need persistence to continue to try despite that failure, and the patience to learn from your mistakes. I've hit thousands of golf balls into lakes, but I learned from my mistakes and can now get round our local 9-hole course in pretty good shape. I once accidentally asked my Vietnamese wife's father if he'd like to take a shower with me (I meant to ask for a toothpick, which in Vietnamese is tăm, but instead got the tone wrong, and asked for a tắm - a shower), but I learned from my mistake! And so I hope it will be with trading. I'm going to screw up many times yet, but when I do I will try to learn from them. With persistence and patience I'll succeed, and not only will my golf scorecard look excellent and I won't have bits of pork between my teeth, but I'll have a very healthy side income to boot!

I've been taking a look around it the last few weeks but not finding much use for it so far, seems less useful for day trading anyway and more for intermediate positions. Mostly people trying to pump their own positions and telling everyone else how smart they are. Brian's swing trade email is a lot more use!

I'm sort of in a similar situation, trading in Vietnam and with the market opening at 9.30pm local time and needing to be up for work before 6am every day and therefore needing to get to bed, I really don't want to trade beyond the first 40 minutes. At the same time this rather suits me! Similar to above, I like the pace of the open, you'll find several set ups for certain strategies in the first 40 mins. My trading journey: I began to paper trade low float penny stocks back in July 2020. I wasn't very good at it! They are very volatile. I moved to mid-caps in November and took out a BBT lifetime membership. This has been much better, mid-caps are just slightly less volatile and a little more reliable. My big issue now is discipline, and learning to wait for a set up before trading. I am making progress. I've tried to trade 1 minute ORBs, and have had mixed results. I don't agree you should be watching 6 x time frames per stock, especially not in the first 30 mins of the market. On. DAS Trader I use a 6-ticker watchlist of 1 minute charts built with the help of Carlos and Brian (Brian especially since he'll be trading the open), and then I've got a main tab where I place trades which uses a 1 min, a 5 min and a daily. But yes, 1 min ORBs are difficult to trade. It's partly the mentality - you're so keen to find this setup, you've got to make decisions so fast, and often you'll end up getting a really crappy entry chasing a stock that looks like an ORB but is already extended. Andrew is superb at it - and with practice and experience, they will become easier to trade. But for now I've stepped back from 1 minute ORBs. Recently I've had more success trading reversals (and 4 green days last week, a first for me!). I've noticed most days at least one of the stocks on my watch list will flush at the open and sell off strongly for 2 to 5 minutes, first as profit taking creates selling pressure and then as shorts step in looking for their own ORBreakdowns. I don't need loads of time frames to see this happen - 1 minute charts work fine. What goes down must come up: these stocks become extended and find a bottom. Shorts cover, longs step in, and you hit a reversal. If you can find a way to keep stops tight you'll get excellent R:R. Another strategy I trade is a VWAP break, usually long biased. It works best on stocks green for the day, but which sold off on the open. It also works well for stocks where you missed your reversal entry. They'll come back to VWAP, and often pause at VWAP as people begin to sell positions. One of two things happen here: either it rejects VWAP and sells off again, in which case I don't enter. Or it holds VWAP and continues on up, in which case you can get an entry with a good tight stop just back below VWAP. I hope this is useful! Good luck and stay in touch, sounds like we're in similar boats!

With these 8am spikes, I don't think it's possible to buy and sell at the low and high, shares aren't available for trading at these prices from what I know. The spikes on your chart are just recording the transactions. If you watch the L2 you won't suddenly see shares available -50c and +50c, for example. Otherwise you could set some very nice limit orders right before 8am and get heavily discounted stocks!

A key to this will also be keeping stops really tight. You need almost instant resolution to remain in the trade, as is the case with scalps. Once a trade starts tickling around break even it becomes a coin flip and it's really not worth waiting around to see what happens. Holding a large size, the second you see your p/l dip into the red you'll need to cut the trade to protect against a sudden flush. However, I do agree with you on the principle of banking profits! I'm just starting out still, trading small size (so like 50 share positions, aiming at $15 profit per trade). I've started to bank profits earlier, having seen so many trades push into the green only to fall back.