How to Recover When You're Deep in the Red

Anyone can trade well when things are going great. What separates real traders? How they manage the bad days when confidence is crushed and the account bleeds.

In the last weeks I decided to challenge myself with a small account and I found it very hard.

So I spoke with some friends, profitable and professional traders of prop firms, hedge funds, individual traders.

I asked them some tips and here's what they told me. 1️⃣ ACCEPT THAT BAD DAYS ARE PART OF THE GAME

You will take losses. You will have brutal days. Even the best traders go through drawdowns, sometimes for weeks or months. The difference? They don’t panic or abandon their process. Your job isn’t to avoid losses, it’s to control them so they don’t wipe you out. If you want to trade long-term, you must get comfortable with setbacks and see them as part of the journey.

What You REALLY Need to Day Trade for a Living

So, you want to day trade for a living?

Forget the Lambos and “get rich quick” dreams. The truth is, trading full-time is a business, not a side hustle.

Here’s what you ACTUALLY need to make it work (and avoid blowing up): 👇🏼 1️⃣ A setup isn’t a strategy

A good setup is just a starting point. If you think you can make a living by spotting a bull flag or a double bottom, you’re in for a wake-up call.

A full strategy includes risk management, trade execution, and the ability to adapt.

After a life time in trading first italian markets then Us, I’ve tried nearly every broker out there.
I used plaftorms like realtick, metatrader, sterling, das trader pro.

Here’s the truth: the right broker = your success.

Often traders want to save money but would you race in Formula 1 with a cheap car?

Here’s my breakdown of the top brokers/firms and how to choose the best one for YOUR trading style. 🧵 1/ My top pick for the best broker for U.S. traders: Cobra Brokerage @cobra_trading

This is for advanced traders, who can open an account above PDT.

With lightning-fast executions and one of the best inventories of hard-to-borrow stocks, it’s built for professionals who demand top-tier performance.

Das tader pro and sterling

🧵 Trading Success in 5 Steps: Your Blueprint for Growth 📈

This is the sum of principles that traders like Mark Douglas author of Trading in the Zone and other traders as Ray Dalio have 1/ Step 1: Master the Basics 📚

Take one month to build a solid foundation:
•Choose a market/asset (stocks, ETFs, etc.)
•Understand market fundamentals
•Learn technical and fundamental analysis
•Practice with demo trades
•Master risk management and trading psychology
•Test strategies & review your trades

Nail the basics first.

5 Ways To Read Price Action

1. Highs and Lows 2- Support and Resistance

Avoiding the Traps in Small-Cap Stock Manipulation

5 minutes worth 8 years of studying and tracking small caps 🧵 Small-cap stocks, known for their high volatility and low liquidity, often attract traders with the promise of quick gains. However, these same characteristics make them prime targets for manipulation. Understanding these traps is essential to navigating the landscape safely and profitably.

TRADING PLAN

1/9
Don't trade without a plan! 📋
A written trading plan guides your decisions. It includes:
Where, how, and why you enter/exit trades
Risk management strategies

How to find trades and much more 2/9
How to manage your trades:
Define your entry/exit points: stop loss, profit target, trailing stop loss, or indicator

Always have a reason for your moves!

12 Top Traders and their Best Tip 1.The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham:
•“The individual investor should act consistently as an investor and not as a speculator.”

Market makers and institutional players often employ sophisticated strategies to capitalize on retail traders’ behavior.

Here’s a short breakdown of some of the “secrets” and tactics used 1. Retail Traps and Market Maker Tactics

Market makers use strategies like “spoofing” and “layering” to create a false impression of supply and demand. They might place large orders on one side of the order book (which they have no intention of executing) to push retail traders into a position. Once retail traders react, these orders are pulled, and the market maker takes the opposite position

I'm writing a COMPLETE THREAD about one of the Best Trading Strategies “The Ross Hook”

Trading it on my accounts swing and European stocks since 2003

❤️ this post if you are going to READ it 1. ROSS HOOK TRADING STRATEGY

To trade the RH pattern, we need to follow several steps:
1Find a 1-2-3 pattern.
2Wait for violation candlestick to emerge (it is considered to happen at the breakout of point 2 of the 1-2-3 pattern).
3Open a trade after the point 2 retest.

This is all you need to know about strategies

1. breakout
2. pullback
3. crossover
4. reversal

Give me 1 minute to explain them to you First you need to learn the wyckoff cycle which is formed by:
- accumulation
- markup
- distribution
- mark down

I'm 43.

I've been dreaming, thinking, loving trading for more then half of my life.

I spent over 39,000 hours studying the best traders, practicing, testing, trading, and having mentorship with them.

Here’s what I found on how to become a day trader: The market is a jungle.

You are going to trade against the biggest, most powerful, and highly resourced institutions like Citadel.

For example, they have 100 portfolio team managers running operations.

Hear it from Keith Griffin himself in this insightful

8 most famous risk management quotes to learn by heart

1. Paul Tudor Jones: The most important rule of trading is to play great defense, not great offense. 2. Warren Buffett: Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing

🚨 THE MOST POWERFUL SETUPS

Small caps are very manipulated.

You can focus on news and you will see good news dump and bad news run.

You can focus on dilution and you will see often that stocks with dilution run and stocks without dilution fade.

So where to find edge?
🧵 1. Volume is key

Volume will never lie

Use volume to find confirmation for
- runners with high buying pressure
- faders with heavy selling pressure
- exhaustion for reversal
- capitulation for reversal

But volume alone is not the answer

Trading Lesson on Volume - AVOID THESE ERRORS

Learning how volume works will give you an edge in trading. These are my tricks that I learned during the years observing the market.

#thread 🧵 1. High Volume Reversal Setup

How many times they told you buy the breakout on high volume. WRONG! If you do this often you will get trapped on liquidity trap by smart money.

Becoming a better trader #thread

It took me 25 years to improve this process but this is what my 6 & 7 figure traders that I mentored have been doing to become successful.

I am going to share all this: My Goal: improve my trading skills and focus the next week only on the best trading opportunities.

Let's take small caps for example ( I will do a different one for mid&large caps)

1. Analysis 3 categories

First I analyze all the "hot stocks of the week" and divide them in 3 main categories

- gaps above 30% with at least 1M volume traded
- non gaps stocks that extended after the open 30% +
- overextended plays (runners for more then 1 day)

An example below of a scanner with edgetotrade

Working since starting of the year with Mikeyta, from a $30K account to $200k in 7 months. He is a full time trader that needed that extra conviction to raise his level. Now he is ready to scale up.

How he did it till here. July over $30K month 1. Reduce scalping and improve day trading habits

He was over scalping and made him a little stressed. He wanted a clearer way to trade and he focused more in taking less trades and holding winners more.

This meant also less commissions.

How to recover from a big drawdown

I recently had one conversation with a student about his problems in trading his account after a 25% drawdown.

This trader is based in Europe and trades the futures market and started talking about how his life changed when he started to trade for a living.

Let's see if you are this type of trader, give your comment.
1. Trading part time and trading full time is very different. In part time you still have the safety of a sure income because you have a job and trading is more like a passion, like a hobby.

When this becomes your first and maybe only source of income you will need to upgrade fast. This means you have now to manage fear of not making money, the stress, the pressure of bringing home a paycheck for you and your family.

Expectations create for certain traders stress.
How good can you handle this?

Patience: trader’s public enemy no. 1

If impatience is killing your profits, read this:

How to Develop Patience in Trading 1. Understanding Impatience

Impatience is the opposite of patience. To improve patience, we must define its dark side. Impatience will:

•Make you anticipate
•Raise your FOMO
•Create anxiety
•Make you frustrated
•Cost you opportunities
•Lead to impulsive decisions
•Increase trading errors
•Cause overtrading

The man who turned $10,775 into $18 million in 16 months from June 1998 to December 1999 and later $18 million to 42 million in just two years.

The 10 points of his Trading Strategy from the Legend J. Dan Zanger you need to read: 1. Make sure the stock has a well formed base or pattern such as one described here before considering purchase. Dan highlights stocks with these patterns in his newsletter like cup and handle, wedge, pennant & more. His principles are technical analysis on momentum stocks.

FREE 88% STRATEGY

Most trading chatrooms failed to teach you a real consistent strategy.

I know because I tried and enrolled every chatroom out there when I started.

Stop paying $$$$ for chatrooms that give you no edge, just pumps and alerts. I'm here to share a real, proven strategy for free. This is the Gap & Crap Version @SmallCapRoom

This is for all the short sellers out there that have still difficulties to be consistent in trading stocks.

The idea is to wait a stock that gaps up and to short it in the first 10 minutes out of the gate.

This can still be improved and you can reach out anytime for help.