A Swing Trader’s Literature Review – My Edge 🔪

As a 2nd year university student in late 2019, the fascination of putting on my first trade and seeing myself make money kickstarted my journey of active speculation. Since then, I’ve largely treated this endeavor as a long ‘literature review’ – finding commonalities in the techniques, psychology, and methodologies of successful traders.

That said, I’ve decided that it’s time to give back. This thread will spell out the books, interviews, and specific individuals that have had a large impact on me personally and my development as a trader. I truly hope that those of you who are serious in improving your trading will find this breadcrumb trail transformational.

(A thread 🧵) 1/ Books

A. Technical Analysis –

To quote the late William O’ Neil:
“In the world of medicine, X-rays, MRIs, and brain scans are “pictures” that doctors study to help them diagnose what’s going on in the human body. EKGs and ultrasound waves are recorded on paper or shown on TV-like monitors to illustrate what’s happening to the human heart […] Would you allow a doctor to open you up and perform heart surgery if he had not utilized the critical necessary tools? Of course not. That would be just plain irresponsible. However, many investors do exactly that when they buy and sell stocks without first consulting stock charts.”

This I believe highlights the need to have a solid foundation in technical analysis. It is not ‘voodoo’, but a real time depiction of supply and demand from the collective. Learning to read price action will greatly increase the odds of success in speculation. And with that, some books that I highly recommend reading (especially those marked with *).

· Technical Analysis Explained by Martin J. Pring (*)
· How Charts Can Help You in the Stock Marketby William L. Jiler
· Getting Started in Chart Patterns by Bulkowski
· A Complete Guide to Volume Price Analysis by Anna Couling (*)
· Technical Analysis Using Multiple Timeframes by Brian Shannon (*)
· Maximum Trading Gains with Anchored VWAP by Brian Shannon (*)
Trading Price Action Trends: Technical Analysis of Price Charts Bar by Bar for the Serious Trader by Al Brooks

24 Aug 2025: Trading Aggression 🧨 (A Thread)

A lot of you have been asking me how I was able to have the guts to get so aggressively positioned into the Jackson Hole event, so I thought I would share a little more about my thought process, the context, and a lesson on how I approach trading aggression. 🧵

The Context -

As usual, the context is very important in setting the stage. I was coming off a very good July, well into triple digit territory YTD and psychologically in a good headspace to continue my 'trading flow'.

Those who read my previous posts, I have mentioned to always focus on the following in your trading operations:

(1) Preservation of capital,
(2) Consistent profitability, and
(3) Pursuit of superior returns.

I have been able to achieve (1) and (2) thus far, so coming into August the priority was to focus on (3).

The Market Environment -

Nearing the end of July, I had noticed that as the market continue to grind higher, the environment had become increasingly bifurcated. I had begun to see a mix of both long and short setups, different to what we had witnessed all of late April - June.

On 31/7, the $QQQ staged a (somewhat) euphoric gap open, outside 2 standard deviations from the 20-EMA upper Bollinger band. It was at that point that I struck, initiating short positions which led to a good start to the month of August.

Given the bifurcation, it was also at this juncture of the market where I begun to adopt shorter term trading, maintaining a long/short portfolio, and frequently selling into strength/covering into weakness aggressively to keep the ball rolling.

The goal is to chip away and build cushion in this choppy market environment. Thus far, I would say my 'offense' is split into 2 waves prior to the Jackson Hole announcement (making this wave 3).
Wave 1 -

With the euphoric gap open in the $QQQ, I took the liberty of initiating short positions, along with opportunistic longs to gain traction. Some trades below:

May 2025 Trading ⏫

As I began to look through my trading for the month, I wanted to share my thought process that led to me placing these trades in May, culminating in my performance thus far.

The Context:

I believe that context is extremely important as it provides insight into my headspace at the time. Here is a TLDR of my monthly performance recaps:

> Jan 2025 (MTD/YTD | 7.01%): Started the year cautious as I noted the changing market environment since Dec 2024. Adopted the mindset of ‘chipping up’ and selling into strength more aggressively – trying to build cushion to work with for the year.

> Feb 2025 (MTD/YTD | 8.82%/16.44%): Spent the first half of the month getting chopped up by my mistakes and unfortunately got caught in the Valentine’s Day $SERV gap down. Made up for it recognizing the market shift and shorted the market towards the end of Feb. Got into a ‘trading flow’ as trades came naturally as the opportunity set presented itself.

> Mar 2025 (MTD/YTD | 12.43%/30.92%): Continued my ‘trading flow’ and got traction shorting the US market. At the same time the HK equity market was running hot, and hence I adopted the strategy of Short US, Long HK.

> April 2025 (MTD/YTD | 0.08%/31.03%): Markets got ‘liberated’ and traded the April 07 capitulation low via $TQQQ mainly. Noticed losing focus towards the latter part of April and gave those gains back through overtrading. Finally gained some traction towards the final stretch of April as I positioned myself in the liquid ‘leaders’.

The purpose of bringing up these monthly recaps is to highlight three things:

> First key towards super-performance: Keeping the monthly drawdowns small. Doing so enabled me to bounce back quickly once I found my ‘trading flow’ again. As a recovering ‘boom and bust’ trader, I had no problem trading very aggressively when the time calls for it, but it was in controlling the drawdowns when I encounter trading friction. Thank you @CFlanders7, I literally meant it when I said meeting you was the ‘aha’ moment!

> Second key towards super-performance: Always bear in mind the following trading principles in order of most important to least important – preservation of capital, consistent profitability, and finally, pursuit of superior returns.

That was my approach especially given the market conditions in the first 4 months of the year. The long side was generally not conducive post DeepSeek gap down (preservation of capital), and the market generally favored short side trades after that. I was lucky to have had a playbook in shorting which allowed me to make progress (consistent profitability), all while waiting for the opportunity to swing hard on the long side when market conditions got better (pursuit of superior returns).

> May turned out to be the month I was looking for to pursue superior returns. Having built up a 31% return by April, that enabled me to be in the mindset to aggressively gun for it, and that would not be possible if I was flat for the year instead.

Now, on to some trades in May 🧵 The Market:

The April 07 capitulation low was the signal to tilt your bias towards the long side. Coming out of the weekend, fear was at an all-time high, friends were texting me on whether to capitulate, it was the end of the world!

However, what we saw was a gap down that immediately got bought up, AND leaders pulling off undercut and rallies with reference to left-side lows, many have also not even traded below the 200-SMA, showing huge relative strength because the $QQQ was trading below all key moving averages. (Look at $PLTR $CRWD $SPOT $HOOD $NFLX etc.)

The next thing we saw in the coming days was that price action in relation to the news flow began turning positive. There was everything to hate about the rally: hedge fund managers were underinvested, some even shorting! Yet, every single time a piece of bad news came out, price action did not go down. That smelled like news failure to me and spoke very loudly on market positioning.

With all that said, I did my best at the time to get positioned long late April, finally latching on to a couple of names which provided the initial cushion. As the month of May rolled in, I got into a trading flow as the setups presented itself and I was just trading – eventually getting myself into heavy margin and snowballing the return into what it is today.

16 Mar 2025: My Current Weekend Routine🧵

With a little more time this weekend, thought I would just share what I do on the weekends to prepare for the trading week ahead:

Market Context -

Firstly, it is important to understand the context, i.e. where we stand with regards to price action. In the $QQQ, we've essentially gone straight down from the Feb 20 double top, violating all key moving averages.

Last Friday's price action hints at a bounce if you use $NVDA as a market tell - it has successfully stage an undercut and rally using the Feb 03 low as a reference point. Notice that the move higher is 'wedging' on lower volume. Therefore, the expectation here is we get a bounce and have not bottomed yet.

Bottom-Up Screening -

I always begin my weekend routine looking at stocks first. My weapon of choice is @Deepvue simply because it is amazing and easy to use. Using a combo-list, I flip through all the charts and attempt to identify stocks and themes-in-play. Bear in mind from a market context standpoint many stocks have broken down all key moving averages, the key here is to find those bucking the trend and have exhibited relative strength throughout the entire decline

Currently, I run 10 different screens - a mix of pre-set screeners from Deepvue, and ones I've created/modified depending on my trading needs.

Stocks that look good gets added to my watchlists. Some themes I have noticed showing strength:

1. Commodity Related Names (Precious Metals)
2. Emerging Markets (China/HK mainly)
3. Biotech/Healthcare
4. Insurance

Charts to follow next.

Precious Metals (Gold and Silver)

09 Jan 2025:

My Top Winners of 2024:

Before I start prepping for 1½ weeks in the US, I wanted to study my biggest winners of 2024:

• How I handled them
• What they had in common
• Identify areas of improvement

Post-analysis is vitally important for any serious trader. It allows you to review your actions outside the heat of the moment (trading) without a rose-tinted lens.

Study the past, so you can emulate and enhance your performance in future.🧵 To put all this into context, here are my stats for 2024:

• Avg. Gain: 5.24%
• Avg. Loss: 2.63%
• Hit Rate: 32%
• Total Number of Trades: 857
• Avg. Days Gain: 5 Days
• Avg. Days Loss: 1 Day

One jarring thing I’ve noticed is the total number of trades I made in 2024: 857 trades!

Overtrading has been an issue for 2024, especially during poor trading periods (add tilt into the mix and it gets worse). Reducing the frequency of trades during poor market environments, avoiding random trades, and taking quality setups within my rulebook in strong market environments is a focus point for me in 2025.

Diving deeper, I also noticed 7 trades contributing to the bulk of my PnL: $AGQ, $APP, $DJT, $IBIT, $INOD, $RDDT, $UPST.

Let’s take a look at them: