How To Reach Peak Trading Performance (Thread)

Trading is you versus the Market. It’s a one on one battle with a system designed to take your money if you lack discipline and an identifiable edge.

To achieve success and be able to take on this opponent, you must conquer your own faults and work towards incremental improvement.

Learning to trade, analyze charts, and manage risk are skills that you can carry with you for a lifetime.

However before you can reach the performance phase and consistently capture alpha, every trader must go through learning phases.

Your journey begins as a rookie trader, thrust in the midst of a pitched battle between yourself and the market.

10 Trading Tips for any strategy. (Thread)

1. Find a Trading Method That Fits Your Personality

Becoming a great trader is a process of self-discovery. It is very important to understand this from the get-go and start by finding a proven style, or methodology that jives with who you are.

2. Trade With The Trend

Did you know 3 out of every 4 stocks follow the direction of the general market? Anytime you are trading against the trend you are putting the odds heavily against yourself.

3. Stay With Your Trading Strategy After A Few Losing Trades

Next time you take a loss, try not to take it too personally. Sometimes you can do everything perfectly and you are still going to take a loss. That’s part of being a consistently successful trader.

4. Post Analysis Is The Secret To Success

By maintaining a trading journal and doing post-analysis, you can answer extremely important questions like…

What is working? What am I doing right?

What is not working? What am I doing wrong and how can I fix it?

There is only one proven way to prevent blowing up your account:

Setting Stop losses.

Properly setting & implementing stop losses will save you millions over your career.

Here's a top down guide with everything you need to know about Stop Losses, broken down step by step 👇🧵

In this 🧵, we'll cover:

· The Goal of Stop Losses
· How to Place a Proper Stop Loss
· Answers to Frequently Asked Stop Loss Questions
· General Guidelines to Protect Your Account

& tons of examples!

Let's jump in 💪

Overall Goal of Stop Losses 👇

The goal of a stop loss is to cap your downside while maximizing the upside from proven setups.

It is impossible to be correct on every trade you make, so it is very important that you implement stop losses to contain your losing trades!

Let's look at some examples to show you how important stop losses can be:

$PTON (Weekly!)
$TSLA (2020 B/O)
$NVDA (1999 IPO B/O)
$AMPH (Last Week's Action)

In each of the examples above, you could have used proper stop losses to capture massive upside gains & protect yourself from huge downside losses!

An Introduction to CANSLIM (Thread)

CANSLIM is a growth stock investing strategy developed by William O’Neil.

O'Neil was the founder of Investor's Business Daily and in 1964 he became the youngest person to ever purchase a seat on the New York Stock Exchange at age 30.

O’Neil's success came from studying the greatest winning stocks of all time and the methods of the most successful investors of all time including Bernard Baruch, Jesse Livermore, Gerald M. Loeb, Jack Dreyfus, and Nicolas Darvas

From this research, he distilled 7 key characteristics which showed up again and again in the top-performing stocks of every market cycle.

Together they form the acronym CANSLIM

Current Quarterly Earnings Growth
Annual Earnings Growth
New Products/Services/Management/Price Highs
Supply and Demand
Leader Versus Laggard
Institutional Sponsorship
Market Direction

3 Simple Steps to Quickly Grow a Small Trading Account

--- Thread 🧵 ---

1️⃣ Define a Repeatable Edge

A basis of any successful trading system is having an edge over a series of trades.

Without a well studied edge, you cannot succeed in the market.

Example of edges:

Trend system
* Trading during the power trend
* Trading stocks that are in uptrends
* Trading GROUPS that are in uptrends

High Volume Edges
* Highest Volume Ever (HVE)
* Highest Volume in > 1 Year (HV1)
* Highest Volume Since IPO (HVIPO)

2️⃣ Define Entry Tactics from that Edge

Once you have an edge, you need an entry tactic.

Entry tactics are repeatable and definable. You should know your entry and exit points before ever placing a trade.

Examples of entry tactics:

Trend system
🟢 Enter on two closes above a KMA
🔴 Exit on two closes below a KMA

High Volume Edge
📊 High Volume Close
📊 High Volume Support

Edges & Entry tactics have to be repeated CONSISTENTLY to reduce randomness when trading a small account.

Ed Seykota turned $5k to $15M in just 12 years.

Here are 20 of Ed's key quotes & takeaways to maximize your trading returns 👇🧵

"If you can’t take a small loss, sooner or later you will take the mother of all losses."

"Systems don’t need to be changed. The trick is for a trader to develop a system with which he is compatible."

"Having a quote machine is like having a slot machine at your desk – you end up feeding it all day long. I get my price data after the close each day."

"In order of importance to me are:

1) The long term trend
2) The current chart pattern
3) Picking a good spot to buy or sell"

There is one simple habit that William O’Neil, Nicolas Darvas, and every other Market Wizard share that is the KEY to their success & outperformance.

The habit? Analyzing their trading through post analysis.

Here is our guide to doing post analysis like a Market Wizard.

🧵👇

Post Trade Analysis (PTA) is one of the most important parts of any trading system.

It is the process of analyzing each & every one of your trades, highlighting:

✅ Setup/edge
✅ Market env. at time of trade
✅ What you do well/poorly

& more!

By the end of this thread, here’s what you’ll learn about PTA:

1. Non-negotiable Benefits of PTA
2. The most important metrics to look at
3. Letting results guide your trading
4. PTA Frequency guidelines
5. Top Trader Template
6. Secret Bonus Tip

Let's get right into it.

PTA Tip #1: Non-negotiable Benefits of PTA

By analyzing your trades, you are ensuring that:

· You will know what works best for you
· You will know what is holding your performance back
· You will know how to FIX your trading issues

& there's one more hidden benefit of PTA...

Analyzing who you are as a trader builds a foundation of CONFIDENCE.

If you are struggling with your confidence, there is no better place to start than taking a cold hard look at your results.

What to do if you are not trading well. (Thread)

Impatience and instant success are built into our minds from the get-go. We want instant wins and instant rewards.

This has as much to do with our psychological build-up as it does with the society we live in.

In this thread, we will cover:

What to do if you are not trading well.
How to stop the drawdowns when no progress is being made.
How to have a systematic process that protects you from yourself.

So what is it that drives us?

We all want the market to reward us for our hard work, the effort, and time we put into it.

We want input to equal output.

However, there is no such thing as input = output in trading.

Trading is about consistency, persistence, and hard work without the certainty of any reward.

What is the biggest challenge that traders face?

It's not the market. It's not the competition. The biggest challenge traders face is themselves.

That's why we've put together this list of five short lessons that will help you overcome your next trading obstacle:

1. You need to be disciplined enough to wait for the perfect opportunity.

Successful Traders:

❌ They don't force trades or take unnecessary risks.

✅ They wait patiently for the market to provide them with a high-probability setup before entering a trade.

2. You need to only take calculated risks.

Successful Traders:

❌ They don't take irrational risks or blindly follow the herd.

✅ They make calculated decisions based on their analysis and plan.

3. You must be able to accept losses.

Successful Traders:

❌ They don't try to avoid losses at all costs.

✅ They know that losses are a part of trading and accept them as part of the process.

4. You need to have a defined edge.

Successful Traders:

❌ They don't trade based on hope.

✅ They have a defined edge that they execute repeatedly.

As traders, we primarily compete with ourselves to honor our rules and execute our edges.

With money on the line, trading is an incredibly strenuous mental game where emotions can flare up leading to costly mistakes

The Importance of Mastering Trading Psychology.

(Thread) 👇

Trading Psychology or the Mental Game of Trading encompasses solving problems regarding emotions such as Greed, Fear, Anger, Confidence and Discipline.

Contrary to popular belief, having a strong mental game does not mean eradicating emotion.

Instead, it means learning to transcribe your emotions into data that you can use and analyze to connect past states to current ones.

Trading is a performance sport.

We execute at our highest ability when we can use emotions as fuel and for intuition but are not so dominating that they cloud our judgment.

Think about the best athletes in the world : Kobe, Jordan, Lebron, Messi, Ronaldo, Federer, Nadal...

They compete with passion, emotion. This drives them and they are able to unlock their full potential.