This content outlines six key strategies for aspiring traders to grow small accounts effectively and avoid significant losses, emphasizing a disciplined, process-oriented approach over chasing immediate profits.
Mind Map
Click to expand
Click to explore the full interactive mind map • Zoom, pan, and navigate
Eight years ago, I was a college student
with no idea what I was doing, trying
random strategies, trying to grow small
trading accounts. And in the beginning,
my first summer, I took about $2,500 and
flipped it into over $15,000, only to
make one stupid mistake and blow all of
it in one day. After that, I spent years
clawing back acquiring information. But
fast forward to now, I'm lucky enough to
have 15, sometimes $30,000 profit weeks
and have scaled my trading and investing
capital well into seven figures. Knowing
what I know now, if I had to start over
with a small account, these are the six
secrets that I would use to grow those
accounts quickly with also not blowing
up any accounts. These keys took me
years to actually figure out. And number
six is probably the most important of
them all that took me from honestly
losing money in my trading journey with
small accounts that now allow me to size
into my day trades and scale up my
trading accounts. And my goal is to get
you to that point as well. So, let's get
right into it with secret number one,
which is only focusing on high quality
trade setups. It's really easy to fall
into the trap in trading and thinking,
well, if I can make $300 in any given
trade, if I just take 10 of those, I
should be able to make $3,000 in a day.
If I take 20 trades, I should be able to
make $6,000. This is not how it works in
trading for a few reasons. First big
reason is because trading, all you're
trying to do is adhere to your strategy
as closely as possible. And there's only
going to be a certain amount of trades
in any given session that are going to
follow those A+ setup criteria. If
you're trying to take as many trades as
possible, the probability of you forcing
trades that aren't there and taking
lower quality setups are going to be
extremely high. The second thing is
you're paying execution fees. So, if
you're taking a ton of trades that maybe
aren't your best quality, they may not
move fully in your direction and you may
end up spending a lot more on fees than
you've hoped. And additionally, it's
really stressful to try to make the
right decisions all day throughout the
session. And if they're not perfectly to
your strategy, trying to use your
discretion to be right. And it's going
to be way less stressful if you follow
this tip that I'm about to share with
you. This is what I always do when I'm
about to get into trades. And I've
taught this to a ton of people who have
thanked me deeply for this lesson. And
that is before entering any trade, try
to find every single reason to not get
into the trade. And what this is going
to do is eliminate something called
confirmation bias. And confirmation bias
is basically trying to change things a
little bit and try to go outside of your
rules a little bit to convince yourself
that there's a setup there so that you
don't miss out on an opportunity. And as
difficult as it is, I try to find every
reason to not take a trade. And if
everything is a green light, saying this
is undeniably within your system and a
good idea, those are always the trades
that end up playing out to full fruition
and being massive successful trades for
me. And if I'm sort of hesitant trying
to convince myself it's a good idea,
these are always where I start to get in
trouble. So this will allow you to be
hyper selective and only focus on your
highest quality setups. And also, you
don't have to trade all day long. Okay,
so let's move into secret number two,
which is mastering trading as a game
first, then focusing on the money
second. And this seems counterintuitive
because obviously the point of trading
is to make money. But in order to
actually ever achieve that, you need to
learn it as a game and not focus on the
money at all. So this is what I mean. As
professional traders, we're looking at
our trading with something called
expectancy. And this expectancy formula
is how much money we're expected to make
on any given trade within our systems
framework regardless of whether it's a
win or a loss. And this is going to be
important for multiple reasons that
we'll get into a little bit later into
the video. Okay. But what we do is look
at trades in terms of units of risk or
percents of account. Basically, whenever
we're entering a trade, we put a certain
amount of risk on the table with an
expectancy to make a certain amount of
reward if we're right about the
direction of the position. Now, this is
important because if you can strip the
money away from this and just look at
this as a simple game, this is where you
actually get into the mastery of
understanding trading, the mechanics,
how your strategy works, and the way you
need to actually act to then be able to
inject the money back into the process
basically by default. And now you
understood the framework and the money
is just a byproduct of you being a good
trader. Okay. What most people do in the
beginning and what unsuccessful traders
are going to do is they're going to make
their decisions around how they feel
about the money. And I used to fall into
this trap in the beginning. If I was up
on profit on the day, I would try to
hold on to my profits as tight as I
could and I would be changing my
behavior. If I was down on the day, I
would revenge trade, take more trades,
maybe some that weren't there, trying to
fight back to positive, which is
changing the behavior I know I need to
do in order to be successful. Or if I
was up on the day, I would take crazy
risks that otherwise I wouldn't take,
which would end up eating into my
profits as well. So, let's look at this
scenario in terms of a bad trader and a
good trader, what the good trader is
doing to actually be able to be
successful. So, say both traders are
starting with $1,000. The bad traders
risking $100 per trade loses two trades
back to back. And then in order to fight
back to positive, they double down, put
$200 of risk on the next trade and then
lose that, ending up with three losses
with now nearly half the account lost
and them almost needing a 100% return to
climb back to even getting to break
even. Notice how they're increasing
their risk when they're not performing
well and exponentially needing to
perform better and better to pull off
miraculous things in order to have a
fighting chance at maintaining their
account. Now, let's look at scenario
number two with the good trader. Also
starting with $1,000, but this trader is
only using $2.5% of their account or $25
per trade risk. Say they lose three
trades back to back are only down $75,
keeping their risk uniform each time,
even with one or two normalsiz wins.
Now, their account is back to break
even, actually into small profit, and
they don't need to pull off any miracles
in order to preserve this account and
have a fighting chance. But this example
goes to show you that trading is a
long-term game. In order to even have a
shot at this, you need to be able to
preserve capital. It's really easy to
start changing things, revenge trading,
doing what you're not supposed to do
when the money is a component of this
process, and you're risking different
amounts of money on each trade depending
on superstition, how you're feeling,
your confidence level that can easily
get you completely thrown off the ball.
Focusing on it like a game is going to
eliminate all of that and make it much
more simple for you to understand what's
right, what's wrong, and what's going to
work over the long term. Okay? I always
tell people, trading is not about being
right. It's about making money. This is
often times misconstrued. Every time I
show a trade to someone who doesn't know
trading, they're always like, "Well, how
do you know that this is going to work?"
And I answer back to them. I'm like, "I
don't know if this is going to work."
And they look at me all confused. But if
I'm following this process that I know
works over time, all I need to focus on
is deviating from the criteria as little
as possible when I'm executing and I
know if it's a successful strategy, it's
going to result in profit over time. So,
the significance of any individual trade
actually doesn't matter at all. Being
right doesn't matter at all. is not
about gambling or fast money. The only
job of a trader is to execute the plan
as precisely as possible, minimizing
risk and maximizing upside potential.
And treating it as a simple game first
was how I was able to actually get to
that point. Okay, so let's get into
secret number three, which is do not
take profit too soon. When I first
started my trading journey and I was
talking to people who really didn't
understand trading, I would hear things
like no one ever went broke taking
profit. Take profit if you have it. And
if you've had things that have been in
profit and gone to loss, this may make
sense initially, but this is actually
the worst possible thing that you can do
as a trader. And maybe some of the worst
advice that almost made me completely
fail at this entire journey. So, here's
how to avoid it. Okay, I've done this so
much. This is probably one of the
biggest things that I need to combat in
my trading is taking profits off too
soon. I've been working on it full-time.
I'm getting much better at it, as I'll
show you here in a second. This is what
to avoid. Okay, so most people say they
enter a trade hoping that the price is
going to come up to here before coming
down to here. Trade starts moving
against them. All of a sudden, it moves
really quickly against them and now they
don't want to lock in a loss. So,
they'll end up holding it. Then, just
desperate not to lose any money. As soon
as the price comes back to the entry,
they take it off for substantially less
profit than they were exposing
themselves to. And from reinforcing that
sort of mindset, maybe they enter a
trade here. Price starts moving down
against them. They think, "Okay, all I
have to do is hold this again until it
comes back up so I don't have to lose money."
money."
Then the trade just continues to drop so
far that they're forced to realize a
massive loss. Or say you buy in at a
level like this, trade starts moving
really nicely in your direction. Then
all of a sudden it starts coming almost
all the way back down to your entry. So
then you take the trade off so that you
don't lose money only for the trade to
continue moving all the way in your
direction and resulting in a massive
win. If you're falling into these traps,
you're basically flipping the successful
mechanics of trading on its head. By not
wanting to realize a loss when the trade
is moving against you, you're opening
yourself up to catastrophic downside.
Okay? And if you're taking trades off
early that are starting to reverse,
you're basically reacting emotionally
from being scarred from watching trades
move into profit and then come down and
make you less money. And it's preventing
you from actually allowing your full
edge to play out and your wins to be
open-ended. What you need to be doing
and what successful trade mechanics are
is always being disciplined about your
risk and understanding the math behind
the game to make a decision on where
you're going to take profit before you
even enter a trade. That way, the
temporary fluctuation in price has no
impact on your emotions and can play
fully out in your favor. Some of my
biggest trades have been when I'm away
from the charts or actually overnight.
And the reason for this is because I
can't look at the chart and try to
justify reasons for me to lock in
profit. If I'm risking $1,000 and I'm up
$6,000 and then I watch that $6,000 turn
into a $2,000 win and I end up getting
closed out, next time I'm in that
situation, it's really hard to not think
about it and want to lock in the 6K that
could then turn into 15, $20,000. And
this is really where a lot of the money
is made in trading is allowing your
winners to run like crazy so that when
you go on losing streaks or you're not
performing successfully in trading, you
can actually still be okay. And I'll
show you an example of this happening to
me recently. So, I get into a trade.
Price pushes almost all the way back up
to my entry before breaking down and
moving in my direction. Then,
eventually, I get a big push down in my
direction. You can see I locked in 1300.
I have $1,500 in profit still open,
risking $1,000 on the whole trade. And
you can see price starts to move up
against me, but because of my strategy
and because of my rules, I don't take
the trade off. And then this trade
continues to immediately reverse,
continues moving substantially lower,
which resulted in way more profit than
if I'm just taking the trades off at
this level. Okay, the money was made in
trading or letting your winners run and
keeping your risk contained. Okay, and
this takes us into secret number four,
which is using one strategy at a time.
In the beginning of my trading journey,
there was a period where I was
completely lost. I was trying to find
all sorts of different ideas to try to
apply into the market. And what I would
do is basically try to find different
patterns, different ideas, and just go
into the market with just general ideas
and try to see if I could make profit
off of it. And I'd have some patterns
that would work, and I would think,
"This is the golden goose egg. This is
the perfect solution that I've been
waiting for." And it would stop working
for some time, and then I would bail out
on it and jump to the next idea. And
this is wrong for two reasons. This is
why it's important to focus on only one
strategy at a time. And the first reason
is sometimes the best trading strategy
isn't going to be the one that looks
like the apparent winner. Everything in
trading needs to be rooted by behavioral
studies and data. You can't improve what
you don't measure. If you're not
measuring yourself and looking at your
patterns and looking how to optimize
that, you're never going to be able to
get to the next level because it's not
always about following what looks and
feels to be apparently the right answer.
Okay? And if you're jumping from
strategy to strategy, it's going to be
infinitely harder for you to be able to
isolate variables, focus on what you
know works, and actually be able to have
conviction and get good at one single
thing. So, let's take this for an
example. Say we have two trading
strategies. One trading strategy wins
60% of the time and the other wins 30%
of the time. Most people are going to
see, oh, this is working more. I should
go with the strategy that is working
more often. But if we look at a scenario
like this where we have our 60% win
rate, but when we're losing, we're
losing 5 R 5R. This can still result us
over time in negative R and actually
give us an unprofitable result where if
we take that same 30% win rate strategy,
we're literally losing seven out of the
10 trades. But when we're winning, we're
making positive 5R, positive 5R. Say we
were just trading this and jumping from
pattern to pattern. Maybe we're getting
streaks of success with a higher win
rate strategy, so we feel like it's
working. And because the strategy that
wins less, maybe we have a lot of losses
right up front. If you're not measuring
that and you're jumping around from
strategy and not focusing all your
effort on one, the actual answer to your
trading that is less apparent may
actually never come to you. And this is
also why I harp on about it being
extremely important to journal your
trades. Like I said earlier, you can't
improve what you don't measure. What
feels like it's the best may not
actually be the best in trading. Okay.
And once I picked one strategy at a time
to focus on, this allowed me to get into
there, focus on the probability and
statistics of each strategy, master it,
have an execution plan, and then apply
it into the markets without needing to
guess on what I think is working, what's
not working. This is where I was able to
start scaling accounts and turning my
trading into an income generating
machine rather than just guessing and
gambling. Okay? And we see this with our
team as well. Most of the time we have
people come in and learn and the ones
that end up getting really really good
and becoming profitable are ones that
are hyperfocusing on mastering one
strategy. Jack of all trades is a master
of none and the same is true in trading.
Which brings us to secret number five
which is preserving your capital. Okay,
this is one of the big ones and one of
the most important things in order to
have longevity in your trading. As good
as your strategy is and as much as you
study the data, there are just going to
be individual trading sessions where
price action is not good for your
strategy. Okay, it's really hard to
account for that. But what I used to do
is I'd be doing really, really well. I'd
be following all the strategies and then
I would have a day where even though I'm
following all of my rules, I just keep
losing, losing, losing way more than
what I was statistically probable to
lose. Sometimes the market conditions
are just going to be bad for your
strategy. It doesn't necessarily mean
that your strategy is broken or you're
doing something individually wrong. But
this is a really dangerous territory as
well because you can think that you're
doing something wrong and if you're not
careful, you can overtrade because
you're thinking, okay, it's not
statistically probable for me to have
this many losses in a session. I should
just keep trading because it's a weird
anomaly and I need to make some money to
even out my data. And this can lead to
what we call blowup days or lapses in
judgment that can erase a lot of
progress and can be very very
discouraging to come back to if you have
substantial losses. And these draw down
periods can either make or break your
success. If you have a really bad day,
then god forbid you have a second bad
day after that, it's almost impossible
to recover. Okay. So, what I do for my
trading in order to prevent this is
basically have a rule for myself that if
I ever at any point go down by three
total loss amounts, I'm done trading for
the day. So, if I take a loss, take a
loss, take a loss, back to back, I'm
putting a pin in it, and I'm moving on
to trade the next day. Say if I have a
win where I make 3x what I'm risking and
then I proceed to lose six consecutive
trades, I cannot place any more trades.
And this basically prevents me from
having any single day destroying the all
the progress that I've made. The only
way I could actually lose is if the next
day I'm reapproaching the markets,
finding my quality setups, and then I
lose three again, three again. And if
you factor all of this in and you
distribute it over enough data, the
probability of that happening is
substantially lower. This is going to
keep you in the game and not allow one
lapse in judgment on any given day,
destroy your entire trading account that
you've been working on growing. The goal
of trading is to have enough consistency
over enough of a duration for you to be
able to then take profits out of and
sort of treat as an income generating
machine for yourself. If you're just
working on growing an account and then
blowing up, growing account blowing up,
you're never going to be able to have
the stability to treat this as a job.
And preserving capital and having these
stops on your trading was the number one
way that allowed me to prevent blowing
up accounts. Okay, which brings us to
secret number six, which was probably
one of the biggest aha moments in my
entire trading career that really
allowed me to start scaling accounts and
turn trading into a true income machine
for myself. Okay, and this is a pitfall
that's really easy to fall into and
really hard to sort of navigate through.
This is what I found work for myself.
And the secret is do not set and chase
daily profit goals. Even though while
I'm making content, I have a daily
profit goal, this has already been run
through and calculated through this
process. So, I'm going to show you how
to actually set and achieve your daily
profit goal, but it's not by chasing
that dollar amount each day. Here's what
I mean. Okay, most people who are trying
to solve a big problem, say we're
looking to make $10,000 a month in
trading, we're going to break this into
small pieces. Most people will think,
"Okay, well, if I'm trading 20 days out
of the month, that means that I need to
be able to make $500 per day in order to
hit my $10,000 goal." In academia, in
regular life, taking this goal and
breaking it into smaller goals is a
logical next step to achieve the main
goal. Here's why it doesn't work in
trading. Say we're looking to fight for
that $500 daily profit. And on our first
day of trading, instead of making $500,
we actually lose $250. That means that
the next day, in order to stay on pace,
not only do we need to make the $500,
but now we need to make another $500 and
recoup the $250 that we lost on the day
that we were supposed to make $500. And
like we were talking about all the other
psychological traps with, you know,
holding trades through losses, putting
more risk on a trade in order to try to
fight back in revenge trade, you become
way more susceptible to changing and
modifying your behavior trying to hit
those daily goals. And by chasing that
goal, you end up inadvertently shooting
yourself in the foot and never being
able to accomplish the goal. But this is
how I found I can actually set and hit
profit goals while making sure that I'm
still following all the fundamental
principles with trading. Let's say for
example, our goal is still $500 a day
and we're aiming to trade 20 days, which
means over the course of a month, the
goal is 10,000. So what I found works is
taking the goal, not focusing on the
money at all, and reverse engineering
success through following a processbased
goal. All I would focus on at first is
finding a repeatable strategy that I
know works. Then I'm taking it into a
simulated environment. So you can go
onto your trading view and use the
replay feature and basically trade and
journal this out over several months.
It's not really several months. It's
going to take realistically between 2
and 5 hours to do this process. But
you'll have 2 or 3 months worth of
complete data as to how you would
perform with your strategy over time.
And out of this, all you have to do is
calculate how many risk factors you
made. So if you're risking $100, you
make $300 and you make $300, that's
positive three risk factors. If you lose
100, that's negative one. And that's the
only number that you need to find out.
to say over the course of these 20
trading days over a single month, we're
statistically likely to make positive
15R with our strategy. Now, all we're
doing is taking the monthly goal and the
15R, and we're dividing this monthly
goal by the 15R, which is going to give
us how much risk we're going to use on
each trade that we take in order to by
default reverse engineer our daily goal
without ever actually focusing on the
dollar amount. And this ties back into
treating trading like a game. And now
all we have to do is focus on as closely
as possible adhering to the strategy
that we know works. We set our fixed
dollar amount and by default we're able
to hit our goal, but we're not falling
into the psychological traps of trying
to hit that dollar amount every single
day and not knowing how much we need to
risk actually to end up hitting our
overall goal. Okay? And say you come up
short of that goal, now you know what
your actual data is over time. You can
make modifications to this model. And
this is really how you're going to treat
trading more like a business. This is
why when we take people onto our team
and through our education, first we
start with the foundation and we're only
focusing on the process first and not
focusing at all about money. Then we
drill into the data proven strategies.
And then in the implementation phase and
the practice phase, this is where we can
start integrating capital. This is
basically what worked for me that I
boiled down that I now share with
others. Okay. And you can see when
students are sharing their success,
they're showing in terms of R. 8.5R win
in this case was $1,200. Shout out
Felix. You can see Nicholas 10R win on
soul. See another example up 14R today.
In this case, it was 670. So, focusing
on that process first. And this is
incredible for me to share. But just to
show you sort of what's possible, we
have members like Joe here after first
locking in the process was able to lock
in over $72,000 worth of profit via five
payouts from Topstep, right? You can see
another one of our traders here focusing
on process equity curve, higher lows,
higher high, and focusing on that
process to be able to do this. We got
Pat. Shout out to Pat. This month, he's
had one of his best trading months. He
already made $20,000 worth of profit on
his accounts. You can see here. And
we're also getting new funded traders
basically every single day on our team.
And it's just humbling for me to be able
to see that I've gone through the
trenches of this, made these mistakes,
take all the information that I've
learned, aggregate it down, share it
with people that in their first several
months are able to do things like this.
Trading is one of those things where if
you master it, even at a small level,
all you have to do is inject more
capital into it, and you can really turn
it into a machine for yourself. Okay. If
you want to dive into more trading
strategies, I'll put videos right here.
If you're interested in joining our team
and learning more, I'll put the link
right here and in the description below.
If you're still here and you appreciate
this, make sure you hit the like button
on the video. Subscribe if you want to
know when I drop next ones. But until
next time, I will see you all in the next
Click on any text or timestamp to jump to that moment in the video
Share:
Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds
One-Click Copy125+ LanguagesSearch ContentJump to Timestamps
Paste YouTube URL
Enter any YouTube video link to get the full transcript
Transcript Extraction Form
Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds
Get Our Chrome Extension
Get transcripts instantly without leaving YouTube. Install our Chrome extension for one-click access to any video's transcript directly on the watch page.
