What's up, everyone? All right? So today I'm driving into the office. it's a snowstorm in New England But I'm excited. And that's because today we're hosting a special episode of Behind The Trades. The topic is 2017 A year in Review 2017 was the best year so far in my trading career and it wasn't the best year just because I made the most money.

It was also the best year because I started with only 583 dollars in my account I finished the year with three hundred and thirty five thousand dollars in verified gains today. I'm going to show you my broker statements I'm going to show you how I did it and I really want to inspire you guys I want you to know that being a successful trader doesn't require you to have a lot of money in your account, doesn't require a background in finance. All it requires is a strategy and a willingness to have the discipline to follow the rules of that strategy every single day. If you've got the dedication, the drive, and the discipline, the market is right here.

There's opportunities every single day and my job is to teach you guys the strategy so you can attack the market with confidence. My strategy isn't a secret I Don't keep it as a closely held secret I Share it with you guys. The only reason some traders aren't successful. it's not because they don't know the rules is because they choose not to follow them.

So right here is your opportunity to learn the strategy, learn the rules, and then take the step to follow them every single day. What's up everyone? Alright, so time for our 2017 Year in Review episode of Behind the Trades I Know you guys have been excited for this. I Tried doing this live broadcast earlier in the week and unfortunately the audio was all screwed up so I ended up having to cancel it and end up you know, fixing my audio stream settings and now we're back at it. So for everyone watching this live, you guys can put questions and the feed and I'll come through and answer as many of them as I can.

So 2017 I started on what was it gently I don't remember the data week it was January 4th or January 5th Started January 2017 with 583 dollars in my account. By the end of the year, I'd grown the account to 335 thousand dollars in profits, which is absolutely crazy. I've never heard of anyone making that type of gain in one year with that small of a starting balance. So one of the things that was really important to me is that I substantiate all of my claims.

So if I'm gonna claim that I Took five hundred eighty three dollars and turned it into three hundred Thirty Five thousand dollars I Want you guys to know that this is real money so you can come over to our website. You can scroll down to the bottom and you can see my 2017 broker statements starting here early in 2018 once. I have my first monthly broker statements. These will get posted as well I Keep at 24 months rolling a broker statement so 2016 is going to drop off and it'll be 2017 and 2018 pretty much from this point forward.

So if we go to the 2017 earnings statements, you can see the $583 balance I'm Jen first and a 335 thousand dollars of profit on December 31st. And these are the broker statements from the three brokers that I used during 2017. Now I'll talk a little bit more about each of these brokers and why I had to use three different brokers when we get into it. But just so you guys know, if you have any question about you know where these trades real, how much you know is where his Commission's anything like that.

You can see all of that right here on the verified earnings page. All right. So I'm gonna push this back down here now. let's jump in and go over the topics for today.

So I'm gonna talk about the first 44 days of this $583 challenge because these were without a doubt the biggest, really the biggest days of my career. from $583 to $100,000 in 44 days. March 8th was the day I crossed over a hundred thousand dollars of profit. So we'll talk about that.

We're gonna talk about my 2017 total gains and my metrics. For those of you get that, like the statistics and like to see my average profit loss ratios and my percentage of success and all of those stats, you'll be able to see them. We'll talk about my best day and my worst day for 2017. And then we're going to talk about 2018 and Beyond and the big goal to take $583 and turn it into a million dollars of profit? That's the goal.

And the question is not when I cross the million dollar mark, but just how long it's gonna take me to get there. Alright, so let's jump in. starting with $583 Number one: I Get this question asked all the time. Ross Why did you choose 583 dollars and 15 cents? That's a really kind of odd starting balance.

Well, I actually chose $700 I Funded my account with Sure Trader in December of 2016 I funded it with $700 However, on January 1st they deducted my broker fees which were like a hundred and seventeen dollars or whatever. it was one hundred sixteen dollars. So those fees came out On January 4 First before I was able to take my first trades. So I ended up starting the first day of 2017 with only 583 dollars and 15 cents.

Now, the reason that I chose to use Sure Trader is because they're located in the Bahamas and they do not enforce the PDT rule. So live traders have also asked: Ross how did you day trade more than three times a week with only 500 bucks in your account I thought you needed a minimum of 25,000 and that's true if you go to a trade Ameritrade Lightspeed you go to any U.s. broker, any U.s. broker and they're gonna say if you want to date trade in more than three times a week, you need a 25 thousand dollar minimum balance.

Obviously that is impossible for a lot of us and for me with my $583 account, there was no way I was willing to only trade 3 times a week so I had to get creative and I found this broker in the Bahamas called Sure Trader. A lot of people use them and the cool thing about Short Trader is that they don't enforce the PDT rule. So I put 583 dollars in there and I was able to day trade as much as I wanted to. Their minimum account balance is $500 so I plan to fund it with 700 thinking I would give myself a little bit of a cushion in case my first trade was a loss.

You know I'd have a $200 cushion before I had to add more money but of course they won up to me and said let's make this even harder, have him start with 583 bucks and let's see what he can do. so I had an 83 dollar cushion before I would have had to add more money into the account and I'm fortunate that my first three days were Green Day's and I was able to build the account up to over $1,000 Now, this wasn't the first time I had traded with sure trader in 2016 I did a $1,000 challenge. The challenge was to see how quickly I could grow a thousand dollars in one month and I turned it into I think eighty six hundred dollars by the end of the month. So it was.

So I've traded it short trade or a couple of times and I knew that the only challenge with trading there really was that the can would be higher than I'm accustomed to. and because Commission's you know can be obviously fairly expensive. that meant that I had to be very selective about what trades I was willing to take. so I wouldn't get myself, you know, chewed up just burning commissions.

So I was very selective. trade the best, leave the rest. And so in those first 44 days, it started with $583 and turned it into a hundred and write over a hundred thousand dollars. So let's look at my equity curve.

this is a trader view. This is the software that I use or the website that I use to look at all of my metrics. And what's cool is you can go to import trades and you can import your trades from almost any broker you use. You can import them from sure trader you can import them from Lightspeed Etrade whatever.

So let's look at my starting date of January Let's see January 1st 2017 and then we're gonna go to March 8th 2017 and we'll filter this down. look at the 90-day view. Oops, that's weird. 1 1 2017.

All right there we go. All right. So here we go here is the first. well, the first 44 days so you can see on day one I made a hundred and fifty six dollars, One hundred and fifty six dollars on my first day.

That was gross. That was before commissions. Let's change this to net my net profit on the first day was three hunt. Ari Let's go sixty days First Profit first Profit did you to do? It's so small I can barely even zoom into it.

Yeah are right around a hundred bucks. Day Two: $187 Day Three: A hundred and fifty dollars Day for 150 for day Five One hundred Fifty three Day Six Two Hundred Fifty eight Day Seven 283 So the first seven days were very slow. so let's actually look at what was the date here. The date on this was the 11th.

so let's look at 111. The first seven days of trading of zoom it in 125, 187, 150, 154 So these are my first seven days. The detailed P&L is I Took 14 trades and I made money on all 14 of them. Accuracy was 100% I had a total profit of 1313 dollars.

So now 1313 dollars plus the 583. All right. So let's get out the calculator. So 1313 dollars plus five 83 is 1896 dollars.

So at the end of the seventh day, I had almost two thousand dollars in my account. And here's the other thing that's interesting wisher trader is they give you. They give you margin like all accounts that you would open in the United States you get margin. So if you open a twenty-five thousand dollar trading account with each trade, you get four times margin.

That means you have a hundred thousand dollars in buying power and you can trade on borrowed money with sure trader. because they're in the Bahamas they I guess can choose to give you as much margin as they want. They give people six times margin. So 1896 dollars times six is eleven thousand dollars in buying power.

So on day seven, I had eleven thousand dollars in buying power. even though I only had about eighteen hundred in the account, right? So very quickly my buying power increases. On day one, I had $583 times six which is thirty five hundred. Just about thirty five hundred dollars in buying power.

So what did I do on those very first trades Because those were very pivotal? The very the first week is is so critical. So on the very first week I was primarily trading stocks under five dollars. That's where I made the bulk of my profit. I was choosing stocks under five dollars because I knew I could take almost a thousand shares if I bought a three dollar stock with thirty four hundred dollars in buying power.

I could buy approximately you know eleven hundred shares and that meant if I made ten cents I could sell it for a hundred and ten dollars profit and that's what I kept doing I kept buying as many shares as I could and selling as soon as I had ten or fifty cents profit. So one of the things that I Did is and I'll open up. This is my Interactive Brokers account that I'm trading in right now, but this is actually the same platform that you use with Sure Trader. This - Trader is a white label software so a lot of different brokers use them and so that's actually one of the things that's nice about Sure Trader is your trading on software that's fairly familiar.

so let's go to let's see hockey setup. Alright, so add new item. So what I did is I created a hotkey to buy based on 95 percent of my buying power. Alright, so how do we create this? We go to Order Script Wizard I say I want to buy order shares is buying power BP times a percentage I said times nine five so that $3,400 to buying power.

multiply that times 0.9 five and I'm gonna be taking three thousand, three hundred and twenty three dollars worth of stock. So three thousand, three hundred, twenty three dollars divided by a stock. that's you know. Let's say Six dollars a share 320.

Let's seize six. Divided by three. Twenty three is thousand. Two hundred by 6 would be five hundred and Fifty Three shares.

Alright, so I'm taking instead of having to do the math in my head which obviously even with a calculator, takes a second. I can just have the program do it for me and boom it's gonna send the order for five hundred Fifty three shares symbol will be whatever ones there the price is gonna be ask plus ten cents I choose my account which this is my Interactive Brokers account. My route can either be a smart order or a market maker ecn. Time and force is a day.

order and mode is load and scent. build the script right there. That's it. So now I map this to a key.

Let's say I map it to shift + 9 when I press shift + 9. I'm taking 95% of my buying power in that tray and that's what I did for the first, not just the first seven days. I did that for like the first two weeks and that's how I was able to grow my account so quickly because every day when I had a winner, my buying power increased. which meant the next day I could take more shares and more shares and more shares.

until finally, I was able to take fairly good-sized positions. Alright, so let's see, we've got the first eleven date or the first seven days here. now. Let's bring this back to Three Eight 2017.

Alright, so this was total profit in those first 44 days of trading: 101 thousand, two hundred eighty dollars and forty seven cents from $583 to a hundred grand in 44 days. Real profits Accuracy: seventy five percent Success A verge Winners: Thirteen hundred dollars average Losers: Eleven hundred dollars. So good profit loss ratio. Making more on my winners than I was losing on my losers.

Let's go back to the overview here. So this was my first. You know the first seven days that we looked at. Then on day eight, I had a $1700 winner, I had a nice big winner and a $1700 winner.

seventeen hundred dollars times six. That winner added ten thousand dollars in buying power that I had the next morning and so on that day I went from having only ten thousand dollars to the next day having twenty thousand dollars of buying power. Which meant I could start taking bigger size I made eight hundred dollars the next day, twenty three hundred dollars on day and see nine. Day ten, couple small days, couple small days, and then scaling back up.

nineteen hundred, twenty three hundred, seventy five hundred. So here on the at the end of the month, you know I'd taken this account and turned it into let's see total Profit by the end of the month was let's see if we scroll back up. I think I grouped all of my sure trader gains through February 6 because that was the last day I traded in that account. so profit from January 1st to February 6 were 41,000 dollars not I mean seriously, not bad at all.

So that was the first 44 days. It was incredible. It was a really great hot streak, but things slowed down for me a little bit. so if we look back at the whole year, will press filter and we'll click on the calendar.

Actually no, let's click on detailed and then two days and times. Alright so this is showing us performance by month: I made $16,000 in month one Sixty thousand dollars in the second month I really started scaling up fast in the first couple weeks of February month 328 thousand and then here we are in: April I lost four thousand, two hundred, twenty nine dollars. So all of a sudden I went from having three amazing months making over a hundred thousand dollars to having a month where I lost money and what happened was basically you know every trade I was getting into just wasn't working out I just kept getting stopped out I kept finding. you know that I was running up into resistance.

So here in April you can see: I had one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight red days whereas January only had one red day so you know my accuracy. Really kind of turned around in in April and I was I was pretty stressed out but at the end of April I took a little vacation I went to Italy and I said I'm gonna just slow down and focus on a quality trades and in May I did turn it around in May I made a profit of sixteen thousand dollars so I got myself back into the green, started rebuilding confidence but then June I made less eight thousand July I made sixty three hundred August only fifty five hundred and I was starting to question like what's going on here I'm having why is trading so slow for me in the summer of 2016 I made ninety four thousand dollars an article about me on the Huffington Post during the summer of 2016, ninety four thousand dollars So the fact that during the summer of 2017 I only made in those three months like fifteen thousand dollars was really kind of can. I was like what's going on and then in September I lost money again and at this point I was starting to feel really frustrated. I had just basically had a six-month period where I only made a net profit of about $35,000 so I was starting to ask myself what's going on? Is my strategy not working? Is the market changing? Did traders leaves the stock market to go start trading cryptocurrency? because during this time crypto currencies were super hot and I just didn't know what was going on I really couldn't quite figure it out but in October I set this plan that I would stop trying to swing for the fences because I had been trying to kind of hit home runs I said you know what I'm just gonna focus on base hits and I'm gonna have the goal of closing every day in October green not having a single red day and in October I made $35,000 I didn't have a single red day for the whole month so it was my best month in terms of accuracy Green Green Green Green And then it gave me a lot of confidence going into: November Not only did I beat the profits I made in October I Had the best month of my trading career with eighty-two thousand dollars in profits.

So my best month previously was fatwas February was 60,000 here plus another 8,000 in my regular trading account made just under 70 thousand dollars total profit in February November 82,000 and I thought wow, that's the best month ever by a lot. No way am I gonna! You know that I don't know how long it'll be before I can break that record and in December I made an 84 thousand dollars. The momentum continued and here we are in: January and I finished the month with over a hundred and seventeen thousand dollars in profits. My account right now is at right around four hundred and let's see: four hundred and Forty Five thousand dollars.

Four Hundred and Forty Five thousand dollars. That means I'm 45 percent of the way to my goal of a million bucks. It's going to take me some time to get there, but I will get there. So I'm excited for 2018.

but when we look at 2017, what I want to do is show you some of these metrics. So let me back this out here. I'll move this back down. So the 2017 total gains and Metrics I finished the year with a total profit of actually 335 thousand dollars.

This is a little bit higher because it doesn't import bank fees, wiring fees, and there's certain other fees that you get charged. so this is always a little bit higher than my actual P&L which is why I have the statements right here. So we've got this statements now: I Traded as soon as I was over $25,000 I moved my money to the US and I started trading with Speech Trader I traded there in February March and April and then in May I decided to move my account to Lightspeed Trading Life Be Trading Offered our students a special reduced Commission rate of two dollars per trade and part of that was contingent on me being a trader there and of course showing you their software every time I trade. So I trade with Lightspeed I have a reduced Commission rate as well of two dollars and fifty cents per trade.

All of our Warrior Pro students have two dollars per trade commissions which are incredibly low. So even though my Commission's are actually a little higher than they were at Speed Trader I made this switch because it really helped our students. So starting in May I was at speed at Lightspeed and that's where I have traded through the rest of the year. I'm still trading with Lightspeed except for my IRA account my individual retirement account which is with interactive brokers.

So $335,000 average daily sorry average winning trade about a thousand dollars average losing trade also about a thousand dollars. So showing that my profit loss ratio is close to one to one. basically. Even so, that means if I'm right, fifty percent of the time, I'm breakeven right? That's just simple math.

My accuracy is 68 percent success. If we actually go back all the way to 2016 and we even just go to today's day, what you'll see is that let's oops, 32,000 18 you'll see over a long period of over 1,800 trades, my accuracy is 68 percent. So this sixty eight percent accuracy for me is really a pretty proven metric. That's where I trade.

That's my, that's my profit loss ratio, my average winners versus my average losers. Alright, so we'll go back to 2017, so 68 percent success, which is good. It's a positive profit loss ratio if we look at the profits by day of the week. I made the most on Wednesdays and Thursdays But I think that's because the two best days of the year happened to be on a Wednesday and on a Thursday best day was 34,000 on Wednesday and then I made 40,000 the next day on Thursday So that helped a lot.

So Performance by hour of the day. You guys know that I have a sweet spot. I Trade from 9:30 to 10:30 11:00 a.m. The first two hours I've proven time and again you can own.

You don't need to trade all day long to be a profitable trader. If you can only trade for two hours, you can make money 9:30 to 11:30 That's where all my profits are I Don't trade in the afternoons and I don't trade pre-market You guys know that I start my day when the bell rings. That's at 9:30 We've already looked at my total profits by a month of the year and now one of the things I want to show you is let's see, let's look at price and volume. This is kind of interesting.

so this is again getting a little bit more detailed on some of these metrics here, but I think some of you will really find it interesting. so let's see. well let this load up for a second. All right.

So Performance by price So stocks under $2 I made forty three thousand dollars on stocks between $2 and $5 I made a quarter million dollars, two hundred and forty thousand dollars profit. So this is my sweet spot. Stocks between $2 and $5 stocks over $5 40,000 bucks, stocks over 10 19,000 it's above 20 I lost $10,000 so this is my focus. So when I see a stock hit one of our scanners and I see, it's below 2 I'm often gonna be a little bit cautious when I see it's above 5 or above 10 I'm very cautious above 10 above 20 I ignore it I Know my Sweet spot.

It stocks between $2 and $5 That's where I make the most money. It's not surprising that I make the most when I trade with larger size 20,000 shares is total shares traded. So if I buy 10,000 and I sell 10,000 I've traded a total of 20,000 shares buying and selling. so anything more than 20,000 shares.

that's not surprising. that's the bulk of my profits. Let's see performance by in trade price range so obviously making the most money on stocks that have a larger price range that move more than $1 per share. Again, not super surprising there.

Now let's look at let's see instrument so instrument is gonna show you my top 20 favorite stocks, the ones that I love the most and this is my list of stocks that I hate the most and I never want to hear you say the symbol because of the ones that I lost the most money on and this is cumulative profit and cumulative loss. So these are my biggest enemies and these were my best friends in 2017. This is an interesting one. My performance by the instruments.

Volume: Okay, so this is how I performed based on the amount of volume the stock had. So stocks with less than a quarter million shares of volume I Lost seventy six hundred dollars on stocks with between a quarter million and half a million shares of volume I made a thousand on stocks between five hundred thousand shares and a million shares of volume I Lost five thousand dollars on stocks above a million shares of volume I made fifty nine thousand between two and a half and five million Ninety six thousand between five million and ten million. A hundred thousand above ten million and up to twenty four sixty one thousand above Twenty Five million 22000. This is total volume on the day.

So I do best on stocks where the total volume is between two million and at most 25 million shares of volume traded on the day that I traded that stock. So okay, that's fine, should then we just scan for stocks. It in the last five days traded more than five million shares of volume because that's where I make the most money. The answer is no I perform best on stocks where the relative volume is 500 percent or higher and I that's by far.

So why would a stock have five hundred percent higher volume than average? 500 percent higher volume and average is the result of breaking news. It's the result of some type of catalyst and so what. We're looking for: our stocks that have news that came out this morning a headline this morning, and that's what propels these stocks up so quickly. That's what send the stock.

That's what sends the stock from. let's say, $2 to $3 $4 $5 and higher. So my focus is on stocks that I expect will have high relative volume and I expect that because of the breaking news. So that's a really important metric there.

So we don't just search for stocks with high volume. We look for ones that are gonna have high vault high relative volume today because of news market behavior. This one's not fairly significant. This just says my profits based on the movement of the overall market.

Not surprising that most of my profits come when the market is just sort of sideways, because most days the market is kind of sideways, so nothing really super exciting there. Let's see all right next one down, win-loss expectation. This again is just profit loss ratio and my average success rate. and then my cumulative drawdown.

So the most drawdown that I had at any point was $22,000 drawdown. which is not insignificant I mean that is a fairly big drop, but again, relative to the growth I had in the account, it's not that bad. So that was in May and then I had another fairly big drawdown in November. All right.

So let's see, let's scroll back up here or I'll move this down. So those were my profit loss ratio about one to one, my accuracy, and my consistency all right. Next one down, we have my Profit Trifecta Score! Alright, so I Talked about the Profit Trifecta in our Warrior Pro class I Talked about during our talk about during our webinars. What I've kind of realized is that there are three components to being a profitable trader Component Number one is your profit loss ratio.

Mine is 1 to 1. Your second component is your accuracy. My accuracy is about 68 70 %. The third component is your consistency.

How many weeks of consistent profits do you have? Or how many months of consistent profits do you have? So right here. the way I Score. This is: you get one point for each tier. So with six weeks of consistent profits with 70% accuracy, just under 70% and with a one to one profit loss ratio, my score is 13 and we're scoring out of a total of 18 points.

So your best highest score would be 18 points. Now I've actually dropped down I was a 14 and I dropped down to 13. And that's because of my profit loss ratio. So we created this scorecard so you can visualize what area you need to focus on to become a better trader.

and it's very clear that I need to focus on improving my profit loss ratio. Consistency can't get much better. Accuracy is really pretty solid. This is the area that needs the most work.

So what I need to do is I need to work on having smaller losses or having bigger winners. And it's easier to focus on smaller losses than bigger winners because we can't control the size of our wins. So again, we talked about the profit trifecta more in our webinars, which you guys can check out or of course, for students in our class. But this is my score for 2017.

That's where I finished the year and I'll be I continue to track my progress through all of 2018. So I'll do my 2018 Year in Review in early January 2019. So now let's look at my best day and my worst days of the year. The best day of the year.

$40,000 in profits? That is insane. That's it's. more money than I made working a nine-to-five job in New York City Going into the office every single day of the year for an entire year and I made more in one day. If you could have told me, you know 10 years ago when I was working in that office that that would be a possibility.

I would have quit that same day I would have walked out. but it took a long time to get here so second best day was $33,000 the day before in two days I made seventy three thousand dollars profit. Absolutely crazy. But what's not uncommon for me is that my big red days follow big green days.

So big red days where I get too aggressive I push it too hard and I fall into the red. In fact, my worst red day was a $15,000 loss on November 27th. So here we have the best day and the worst day side-by-side definitely. you know disappointing that I had a day where I lost 15 grand.

That's a substantial loss for anyone, but when it's in the shadow of a week, we're in two days. I made $75,000 I Think it kind of. It softens the blow a little bit. It makes it not quite so bad and so you know.

One of the things I would say is to try to remember to keep it relative What we're looking at here are some pretty big numbers and that's because number one I've been training for a long time and I have a lot of confidence and number two I am trading with large-sized The only way you can trade with large-sized is when you've built up your confidence. So these are big numbers and for a trader who's only been doing it for maybe a year, the big number would be four thousand dollars of profit and a $1500 loss, right? Or you might even say $400 a profit and 150 dollar loss. Those might be big numbers for you for where you're at right now. For where I'm at, these are you know my best day In my worst day.

Now when I think about the best day and the worst day, those are the extremes of 2017 and everything else is just in the middle. A day where I lost $8,000 it's just in the middle. It doesn't matter. A day where I made $8,000 it's just in the middle.

It doesn't matter. So I try not to beat myself up on days where I'm losing five, eight thousand dollars and at the same time I try not to go crazy celebrating on a day when I make eight or ten thousand because those are just regular days within my range within my standard deviation. So you know this is a big range, but it means anything in the middle is just just a regular day. One of the challenges with trading is that when we make money on a day when I made $40,000 I didn't really celebrate I didn't do anything special because you know what my job is to make money.

My job is to come in here every single day, take trades, and make money. So I don't celebrate when I just do my job because what do you? don't celebrate just doing what you're supposed to do? But on a day when I lose $15,000 you better believe I Was pretty disappointed myself I was upset with myself I was I felt ashamed I felt like I am better than this I shouldn't have allowed myself to be so aggressive I should have stopped trading sooner. This $12,000 loss was my last trade of the day I shouldn't have even taken it. This was my own fault and so that's a challenge Where the best day is? Just yeah, this is my average.

That's what I'm supposed to be doing. and then when you have a bad day, you dip down so that's kind of the emotional rollercoaster. You don't really have ups, you just have steady and then down, and then down, and then steady and then down. So a little bit of a psychological challenge with trading and I encourage you guys to sort of embrace that and to try to give yourself a pat on the back when you have had a good day or you have had a good month and let yourself off the hook.

On a day when you have lost money because this is part of being a trader, you will have days where you lose money I will have another day where I lose $15,000 The only way that wouldn't happen is if I decide to stop being aggressive. but if I stop being aggressive I'll also stop havin $40,000 Green Day's and that means I won't make 400 or 500 thousand dollars this year. So if I want to reach my profit targets I have to be aggressive and that means I have to be willing to have a fifteen thousand dollar a day if someone came to you and said you know, look, I'm gonna give you the opportunity to make 300 thousand dollars in one year, but you're actually gonna make 450 thousand and you're gonna lose a hundred fifty of it, you know, or whatever. a hundred of it.

Are you gonna be okay with taking a hundred thousand dollars in losses? Are you gonna be able to emotionally handle it? Or would you prefer to just have a job where you get the same paycheck every single week even if you're only making a hundred thousand a year? Which would you prefer a higher thousand making the same amount every week or three hundred thousand where you have these big swings in your P&L For me obviously I've chosen the latter I've chosen to be more aggressive and I have to remember that that's a choice that I made on those days when I am in the red and that it's okay. This is just part of the job. Having red days is is not a There's nothing wrong with it. I'm a very successful trader I still have red days.

So if you're a beginner trader and you're having red days, you're getting frustrated. Just remind yourself of you know that being this is just part of the deal. So one of the things that we noticed on those really strong days was this incredible momentum in the market. and I'll just pull up a chart of the biggest winner that I had here.

OPH See so OPH see back in November I'll pull this back here. This one's been consolidating around $4 but back here in November we have this morning where all of a sudden out of nowhere the stock started to squeeze up. It's started to squeeze up and it's it. Hit a high of it.

opened at two dollars and 80 cents and it hit a high of four dollars and 80 cents. It was halted on circuit breaker. It resumed higher and squeeze all the way up to seven dollars. It was halted again, it opened and then zoomed up and squeeze to $11 From $2 to $11 that's already a 400% gain.

It continued higher and tapped a high of 13 96. I actually was able to sell some of my shares in the 13 90 s. this and I didn't get in at the very bottom I wasn't in this at $2 I Got in in the middle of the move but I rode that momentum. This was an incredible move from $2 to $14 in one day.

and that right there was the biggest trade of my biggest winner of my career now. LF I n was a stock that put in an even more impressive move and this was let's see. This was certainly part of the sympathy that we were seeing in the market in. November Let me just pull this back here.

Alright, so let's see. Here's the day. This was on this: Sorry, this was December 18th the momentum continuing. This stock went from on this day: $39 all the way up to a hundred and fifty dollars a share.

A hundred and forty two dollars. That was an incredible move. Over the course of four days it went from seven dollars to 142 dollars a share. Now I didn't trade it because I felt like, well my statistics tell me I don't do well on stocks above 20.

So I'm just gonna leave it alone. So next thing I know it goes from 20 to 30 to 40 to 50 to 60 and I'm thinking oh my god, this is insane. Should I buy it here? No no, no, that's chasing that's giving in to the fear of missing out. Just don't touch it.

60, 70, 80 90 Oh my God. Okay, it's gonna hit a hundred. I'm sure it'll pull back 110 120, 130, 140 It's then halted going down and it resumes at $57 Incredible. It goes all the way from a hundred and twenty-five dollars and it drops to $59 It then bounces all the way back up to 96 dollars before dropping even further.

Incredible action. I sat out I made 335 thousand dollars last year without trading this. I actually did take a couple trades, but I didn't trade it in this area and you know for me I just I felt like it was too risky. It was outside my price range and it wouldn't be a smart one to trade, but it just goes to show the level of volatility that we saw in November and December it was just.

it was absolutely crazy. It was really insane. So that is really the best day in the worst day and Pxs which I can show you here. This one was a unfortunately a false breakout the trade that I took so I jumped in thinking it was gonna squeeze higher and it ended up completely reversing on me and I took a really good-sized loss on it.

So that was. let's see what day was that that was right here? I Believe no that was the next day this was I ended up making my money back on it was this day here. so on this day I bought it right up here as it squeezed up to 350. I was in at 350 with 10,000 shares.

As you can see, it dropped from 350 all the way back down to a low of $2 a huge drop and I lost $12,000 I lost more than a dollar per share on that trade. Meanwhile I walk away and I'm frustrated. Done for the day. It ends up squeezing all the way back up to five dollars before dropping again before the end of the day.

So I made back the losses on this stock or most of the losses in the move here on the first which is good. So I did recover on it, but definitely a disappointing day. And I think the big reminder there is statistically when I have a day where I'm down more than two thousand dollars nine out of ten times I will not finish that day in the green and if I keep trading I'm gonna go deeper and deeper into the red. So one of the things that I did with my speech trader account is I told them if I had a day where I'm down more than a thousand dollars, deactivate my account.

So I can't take any new trades and they were happy to do it because of course just want to see me be successful and trade there for a long time. So that helped me minimize my downside. Loss is a little bit in their first part of the year I don't have that same thing set up with Lightspeed so it's up to me to make the decision to stop. and as you can see from this fifteen thousand dollar day, I still have some work to do in that department.

And of course this is what brings down my profit loss ratio, right? These types of losses really hurt my metrics. So if I want to have my profit loss ratio for 2018 be one point five to one or two to one I need to have smaller losses. These losses are just too big and even here in the first part of the year and I've had a couple big losses. so I really need to tighten those up.

So as we look to 2018 and beyond, the big goal for me is to take this 583 dollar account and turn it into a million dollars of profit. And when I cross that line which is at this point just a matter of time, I will have proven that you can make a million dollars in the market with as little as five hundred eighty three dollars. Being a successful trader does not require you to have a background in finance. It doesn't require you to have a lot of money in your account.

All it requires is that you attack them the market every single day with a strategy. That you have a skill, you develop a skill and that you're consistent. And if you're consistent, if you have a strategy, you can be a successful trader. So during our webinars, we talked about the three core concepts every trader needs to master in order to be profitable.

And I really encourage you guys to check that out. The webinar is about an hour and a half, two hours long. We host them live and we have some recorded ones as well. So I encourage you guys to take a few minutes to watch one of those webinars because they will help you become a better trader.

They'll help you understand how to manage your risk, how to find the stocks that I'm trading every day, how to choose strong stocks to trade, and how to find the A quality entries. Alright, so again, 2018, the goal is just to keep building this account. I'm at four hundred and forty five thousand dollars right now. forty five percent of the way to 100k or to it start to a million dollars.

This is. it's a marathon. It's not a sprint. This is absolutely about the the long haul the big picture.

So I'm just settling in. I'm gonna be working on growing this account at least for the rest of this year. I Think if I break over a million dollars this year, it would be thanks to an incredibly strong market. It would mean that I need to make a total of six hundred and sixty thousand dollars this year.

So I don't know that it'll happen in 2018. It's certainly a goal that I have. It may happen in 2019. but I will be working on building this account every single day.

One of the other things that I'm doing is trading in my IRA account. So I made a an IRA deposit for 2017 taking out the gains some of the my gains from this account. So I made my 2017 and 2018 contribution here and I'm working on building this account because of the tax advantages of growing an IRA account, right? So the profits as they grow our tax-free I don't pay any income tax on them. and because this is a Roth IRA the profits when I withdraw them, the gains when I withdraw them will be tax-free as well.

The only rule is that I can't take the money out until I'm 59 and a half years old without paying a penalty. So this money is there for the long haul. But hey, if I can make six hundred thousand or $700 in that account, it's tax-free and it's a really big gift for myself in retirement. So I will be trading in that account more as the account builds up.

Right now, it's only at ten thousand five hundred dollars, so it's gonna be a little bit of a process to grow that account. but once I get it above twenty five thousand, I'll be able to day trade as much as I want. Right now I'm limited to only three times a week because the PDT rule. So right now I'm training in both accounts, but eventually I'll probably be trading mostly in this account and the gains that I have in my Lightspeed account will just be for you know, daily cost of living and and things like that you know, making a hard thousand dollars in a month I don't need a hundred thousand dollars to cover my expenses for the month of January so it would be really nice if more that profit I could be putting away for you know for down the road.

Alright, so anyways, that's it for me. I Wanted to give you guys this 2017 year in review. Get you excited for 2018? I Can already tell this is going to be a really great year. We're off to a fantastic start and I'm looking forward to seeing all of you guys in the chat room at where you're trading so we can teach you how to trade this market with confidence.

Alright, so if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below. I'll come back and answer them later today and of course throughout the year I'll just keep coming back and looking at this video to answer any questions that you guys have. All right! So I'll let you guys enjoy the day and I'll see you back in the chatroom. Alright, thanks everybody! if you're still watching, you must have really enjoyed that video.

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