As of my last trading session yesterday, on Friday March 27th, 2026, I was down $64,906.82 since beginning to click in just over two months ago.
I opened this blog with a post describing how losing roughly half this much would cause people to question my sanity.
As my losses have mounted further, my confidence that this will work out has actually increased.
Either A) I am detached from reality or B) the slope of your P&L curve is a lagging indicator of ability and it shouldn’t be monitored hawkishly to determine progress.
I AM TEAM B.
Since my last update there have been four mini chapters of my trading journey.
– I tried opening up my size and got rebuffed quickly with large losses.
– I decided to restrict my size but then requested my broker to take the limits off so I could limit myself at my discretion- and blew up even worse.
– I did some aggressive soul searching
– I reinstated max position limits of $5k only to realize that I needed to reduce them further to $2.5k and finally to $1.5k as I work on building out and refining our playbook.
That is how I wake up today, at 430am on a Saturday, determined to improve my trading ability and confident that I will turn it around.
This past trading week started out extremely roughly but by the end, my partner and I formalized a process for documenting our playbook and my trading improved significantly into the end of the week.
On Friday I was able on three different occasions to spot “weak tape” and either exit or enter positions with immediacy, for the floor to fall out each time in the following seconds, causing my decisions to either save me windfall losses or make chops.
When I played poker I would often be able to read people’s hands. In games with two cards, I could guess their exact holdings at some unusually high frequency. In games with four cards, I could guess their type of hand, sometimes to the 4th card, with spooky accuracy.
Reading tape is just the same as hand reading. And my tape reading abilities have improved ENORMOUSLY. Not only have I gained familiarity with the scope of contexts (nanocap, smallcap, megacap, tight or wide spread, high or low liquidity, changing volumes, time of day, MOO/MOC, premarket and afterhours, IPOs, retail squeezes, real and fake news events, acquisitions, mergers, lawsuits, etc etc) I traverse for my trades, but I have also gained a much stronger understanding for the interactions of participants on a market microstructure level.
I finally can drop into a ticker, understand the context, identify fruitful or barren setups, and execute or move on swiftly. The 60+ executions/day I average are finally bearing fruit for rapidly improving my competency.
I keep a list of “trading sins” that I need to iron out of my game and refer back to them anytime I commit a sin, or expand the list when it is net new but clearly an archetypal error.
Spirits are high. Our tech is in the best shape it has ever been. I’m working through adding my 3rd and 4th monitor, where after initially adding them, I didn’t want to use less than four while troubleshooting a memory issue as I use every inch of my screen space.
Bella teaches trader development to have these stages: 1. Sampling different types of strategies, 2. Developing YOUR playbook, 3. Refining the nuances for each play in the playbook, 4. Being a CPT (Consistently Profitable Trader).
The four stages of my past week fit between Bella’s stage 1 and 2.
The past two months has included TONS of trial and error, experimentation with trading across timeframes, asset classes, and contexts. Trying different types of trades.
At this point my partner and I have a collective playbook of 33 scalps and counting.
This week we started documenting them, assigning them names and categories, and figuring out a working hierarchy to relate them through.
I went from running around like a chicken with its head chopped off trying to click in to a variety of circumstances getting my executions mixed up, not having clear entry & exit rules, losing track of trades or even forgetting I had them open to deliberately moving from trade to trade. Rarely entering more than one at a time. Referencing each by name verbally as I enter it. Having defined entries and exits. Abiding by my designated entries and exits. Referring back to my trading sins as I commit them to reinforce not making the same mistake in the future. And turning around Friday from a -25% loss in a single ticker (caught offsides limit down in a low float nanocap stock due to a lack of situational awareness) to consistently trading my way back to a modest winning day over 31 trades.
I kept my head on straight. I went from one good trade to the next and booked a W. During those following trades I traded calmly and made great reads. I’m proud of how I traded Friday.
That’s why I see my P&L and I shrug it off. I see a clear roadmap ahead of me.
– Flesh out our playbook in more detail, both for existing scalps and to record any ones we missed.
THEN
– Work on my process which includes verbalizing the type of each trade I’m making as I enter it, entering sharply or sharply adding size and clear reasons for exiting or taking size off the trade.
– Work on cashflowing around a core position
– Work on cutting my losers quickly at predetermined points
– Gain robust competency on our core scalps
– Eliminate lazy click-ins
– Avoid taking trades that I can’t name. If it looks like a great setup, then record it, watch how it plays out, and pitch it to my partner. Then name it and consider taking it next time.
– Approach each trading day with patience. Markets are opportunity generating machines. We have an OBSCENE number of opportunities to capitalize on. There isn’t any reason to take trades outside of our playbook or to take suboptimal entries to FOMO in to a trade.
– Letting the market tell me when to exit a trade rather than exiting based on vanity P&L/ percent gain metrics.
– Avoiding taking profits habitually at the next stage of resistance. Staying in winning trades longer. The stock can progress further than you anticipate. Let it tell you when to exit rather than clicking out to secure profit like a safety blanket for a small child.
THEN
– Book a winning trading day with inputs I am proud of.
– String a bunch of these days together
– Have a profitable week
– Have back to back profitable weeks
THEN
– Increase my size slowly and journey my way back to netting a single dollar of profit lifetime.
I have been optimizing for speed of improvement and have made almost every novice trading mistake I’ve read about. I’m at peace with my P&L. I am fortunate to be beginning trading from a position of financial strength, the scale of which is becoming clear to me as my life continues uninterrupted during this losing period.
I have good daily process. I log a daily report card every day. I record all of my trades with screenshots, commentary and areas to improve. I do this for every trade of every trading day. I also record my sins and reinforce avoiding them in the future.
I blog a few times a week, engage with a trading community on discord about their setups/approaches and look for stocks I’m missing out on, engage actively with quality trading videos, review recordings of my screen for my trading day on 4x speed skipping from trade to trade watching for things I missed and refining my entry/exit heuristics. I read vetted trading content and textbooks. I monitor fintwit for sectors and stocks that may be outside my field of vision.
I practice rigorous physical conditioning, cutting out vice and maintain a 430a / 830p sleep schedule so I can bring my A game each day.
I started trading with an expert background in strategy both as a pro gamer and competing with sharps for my food as a pro gambler. My partner provides access to bleeding edge technology and institutional trading insight. I simply do not see how sustaining this quality of inputs, with that educational foundation, and with the quality of my teammate, over the course of the rest of this year will yield anything but reaching profitability.
Conversely, while chatting with friends this past week I remarked several times about how if I’m struggling this much, regular people are completely screwed. Trading in 2026 is HARD.
OTN BABY.