Recently each morning I’ve had an intense feeling of gratitude for having this challenge to dedicate my soul to. I was remarking to a friend of mine that the immense difficulty of learning how to profitably trade is actually a positive rather than a negative. Not only does it provide a moat to your earning potential, but it is sufficiently hard enough that it requires me to focus my entire life around making it work.
When I was playing poker, I could be impaired by multiple handicaps and still beat strong opponents. It wasn’t a challenge anymore. Trading is SIGNIFICANTLY harder than high stakes poker, at least in some respects. Poker has a social and political game on top of the hard skill aspect, which is often overlooked when comparing its difficulty with other arenas of competition. How do you win tens of thousands of dollars from people and have them continue to want to play with you?
But outside of certain meta games, on a raw level of competition, trading is much more difficult than implementing some combo of GTO & exploitative strategies at a poker table.
That said, I have identified my sins and I know without a shadow of a doubt that I am improving, because now I am seeing OTHER people on the tape making the same errors that I used to make.
How cool is that?!
I sometimes circle them and go, that used to be me!
Also my consistent logging of trades, mistakes, daily report cards, and compilation of tape examples and maintenance of amending our playbook is definitely paying off. I see huge strides in terms of identifying setups, coming up with alternative approaches to spots, plugging leaks in my game, and gaining familiarity for common price action patterns.
We have a clear core playbook that I am executing on and working on turning into profitable execution.
I also have awareness and growing familiarity with each of the types of catalysts or surprises that pop up throughout the trading quarter.
–The above was written during breaks within trading hours today–
I just finished my trading day today and holy cow do I just feel an overwhelming sense of RELIEF.
I traded $ELAB again, a stock that I got killed in yesterday due to having a strong bias that it would go parabolic and collapse.
Instead it performed similar to $BATL in February & March, and I got wrecked in most of my positions.
Today I approached it without that short focused bias and executed purely based on price action and tape. I am so proud of myself.
These were some executions from the end of day & afterhours trading portion of $ELAB on April 1, 2026.
It is much sharper than my trading even just last week.
This was an example of identifying weak tape, aggressing at the right time (with one small puke), and setting appropriate profit targets. It was really a great micro scalp. Just a great trade that I wasn’t consistently making a week ago. I’ve taken this play at least 5 times in my last 20 trading hours.
How cool is that?
I really feel like my trading ability is improving. Following Bella’s // Lance’s process for improvement has been instrumental for organizing my thoughts and systematizing my approach to trading.
So I broadly feel relief. Things are working, the juices are flowing. I can tell time in is providing an almost linear (!) rate of improvement out so that gives me strong confidence that I am implementing the correct process and will make it in this discipline.
FLYING HIGH BABY, OTN