Tag: trading

  • September 2025

    My goal this month was to work on better entries when putting on a trade. When I evaluate my trading now, this is one of the biggest factors keeping it from being an A+ trade every time. Honing this in will allow me to make more profits in a shorter timeframe, hinder me from over-trading, and help keep FOMO at bay. If this month’s profits are any indication, I’d say I might be onto something here.

    Now this might go without saying, but I really like to trade. I love all the drama and the act of opening and closing trades, and I want to do it all the time, forever and ever, amen. However, it is far better to do so when conditions are ripe, and that requires patience, I’m afraid.

    dedgummit

    So when I had to sit, watch, and do nothing for the first 4 trading days of the month while I was waiting on the perfect setup, boy, was I chompin’ at the bit! But wouldn’t you know it, my patience paid off when some trades showed up on day 5 and I made $2,314 in one day!

    In the past I would’ve entered other, weaker trades throughout the week, leaving money tied up for when a real trade showed itself, causing me to miss out on the bigger move.

    In this episode I’d like to show you how I’m attempting to get better at timing when to enter and exit a trade. I’ll show you just a few simple things I look for that put the odds in my favor, and show you what it truly means to buy low and sell high. You can take this information home with you for free to make sure you’re not another silly retail trader who buys at the top.

    This is super simple stuff, just stick with me. I’ve labeled a few things on the chart above, and I’ll explain them below. I will be using the same chart throughout the examples, but will zoom and crop different areas so you can get a better look.

    The Indicators

    Indicators help traders confirm whether a price move is genuine (supported by momentum and volume) or likely to reverse (due to being overbought or extended).

    They don’t predict the future, but they give insight into the supply, demand, and volatility of a stock. They help traders make informed decisions about when to buy or sell.

    Below are the ones I commonly use and I’ll explain how I interpret and apply them.

    Bollinger Bands

    Seen here in blue, they simply have a top, bottom, and middle line with a shaded area in between. This indicator can show you when something is likely overbought or oversold. The blue line running in the middle of the bands is the 20 Day Exponential Moving Average and it acts as a baseline. It is the average price over the last 20 days.

    When prices are volatile the band will widen, showing you the price range in which it will likely trade. The band will contract in periods of low volatility where the stock is trading sideways which can indicate a “price breakout” is near. This means a large swing in either direction could be just around the corner. You can think of it as the price being squeezed and then released with great force.

    When the stock is trading sideways it is referred to as a period of consolidation. You have buyers (bulls) and sellers (bears) evenly matched and both sides are rallying their troops. Eventually one side overcomes the other by sheer volume and the price will dramatically skyrocket or tank for a period of time as the losing side closes their trades and runs for cover.

    Bulls strike up. Bears strike down.

    The top of the Bollinger Band is plus 2 standard deviations from the average price, the bottom is minus 2 standard deviations. There is only a 5% chance of the price going outside of the bands, so when it does happen it will usually quickly revert. These can be great entry and exit points but are few and far between.

    Notice what happens each time the price touches the upper and lower parts of the Bollinger Band and also look for the rare instances it pops outside of the bands in the chart above. Sorta like bowling with those kiddie guard rails up, huh?

    The thing to remember is this is a trailing indicator, meaning that it’s not predicting the future, it’s showing you what’s likely to happen based on past and current information. When the price is at the bottom of the band it can still continue to go down, trust me!

    One way to put the odds even more in your favor is to wait for confirmation with something like the price retesting and bouncing off of one of the moving averages, which I explained here in a previous post and you can see take place in the example below.

    Estimated Moving Averages (EMA)

    This is the horizontal, orange line on the chart showing the average price over the last X number of days and is a solid indicator to use for determining the health of a stock. It can act as strong support, meaning the price isn’t likely to go below that for long as buyers like to buy at that level. You can clearly see this in the chart, each time the stock dips down to touch the 100 Day EMA it quickly bounces back up. Being patient and waiting for these opportunities is the key to becoming a thousandaire like myself.

    There are several different EMA ranges you can choose to overlay on your chart, I actually use several at a time. All stocks do not behave the same so you must take a second to see how the stock you’re trading behaves around these different indicators.

    Does the stock always hug tight to the 50 Day EMA? Does it sometimes take a little tumble, touch the 100 or 200 Day EMA, then immediately shoot to the moon for a few days before settling back down?

    It only takes a few seconds to interpret the story a chart is showing you. It’s also handy if you keep the list of stocks you trade relatively small. It’s better to get acquainted and have the feel for a few stocks than to be scattered trading whatever random ticker is popping that day. I’ve done around 80% of my trading this year on just one stock.

    And I’d have to say, “Sofi So Good!”

    Prices usually revert to the mean. Prices can jump up and down, but they will move back to their average levels. I’m trying to show you how to capitalize on these swings, how you can make money off of other people’s fear and greed. The way God intended.


    Relative Strength Index (RSI)

    The primary use of the RSI is to determine if an asset’s price has moved too far, too fast, and if it might be due for a reversal. It measures momentum, not volume, and is another helpful piece of the puzzle.

    To keep it simple you use this the same way as you would the Bollinger Bands. When the price reaches the top it could indicate a pullback is due to the stock being aggressively bought and now it might be considered slightly overvalued.

    When the price reaches the bottom it could indicate that the stock has been aggressively sold and buyers might consider it a good buy at these levels as it’s slightly undervalued.

    In the example above you can see where the price dips outside of the Bollinger Bands and also touches near the bottom of the RSI. This could be prime time to enter a trade.

    Now it may seem like both of these indicators react the same, but you will often find instances where the RSI is doing the opposite of what the price is, and this means that a reversal is probably imminent and this is referred to as Divergence.

    Example of Divergence. You’re getting new lows on the price but new highs on the RSI. This is followed by a price reversal.

    This is why it is important to use these indicators in conjunction with one another to get a view of the bigger picture and to confirm that everything is lining up.

    All of these indicators are one trick in your bag and you wouldn’t make a decision based on a single one. It’s about reading the heavens and having all the stars line up in your favor.

    My morning pre-market routine.

    Volume

    This is one is crucial as it can confirm the strength of a price movement. Volume is the number of orders coming in. It’s traders showing up for all the excitement.

    Traders analyze the relationship between price movement and volume to make better decisions. Below is how you might interpret these signals.

    When price moves you want to take a look at the volume to see if it justifies the move. Sometimes price will jump up on very little volume and this usually means that the price will reverse soon. The price will lie to you sometimes. Volume should confirm the move.

    It’s easy, you just make sure those little bars at the bottom are substantial enough to push the price up, as you can see in the large swing in the chart above. You got a big swing in price with lots of volume there supporting it.

    Let’s take a look at what happens when volume doesn’t back up the price movement.

    A classic example of volume not justifying the move. Womp.

    See how the volume isn’t telling the same story as the price movement? You will often see the price climb like this, but without confirmation from the volume it is likely to be a weak lil’ baby trend.

    One last note is that it’s important to look at these different indicators on different timeframes, as well. If you planned on holding something for a while you wouldn’t make decisions based solely on the daily chart. You would also want to zoom out and look at the monthly and yearly chart, allowing you to see the greater trend. Things might look great today, but the one-month chart could be atrocious.

    That wasn’t too bad, huh? Now you’re more informed than the average retail trader! How about that?!

    If you’re new this may seem like a lot but it’s all pretty simple and straightforward. You can quickly reach a point where you’re able to look at any given chart and decipher a lot of information from it in a few seconds. It just takes time and experience. I’m not having to watch charts all day, I just like to sometimes. Trading does not have to be complicated. I do just fine keeping it simple and sticking to a few rules.

    Sadly, this is real. Someone trades like this. I didn’t even know you could get circles involved.

    I hope this helps to demystify some of the process. I plan on gathering the more educational parts of my posts and putting them all onto a dedicated page so they can be easily referenced in the near future.

    Mistakes Were Made

    I’m only human. I let FOMO get the best of me one morning and jumped in on a trade. This usually isn’t that big of a deal but things were different this time.

    Now that I sometimes trade on margin I have to keep a certain amount of cash in the account as collateral. The amount of collateral required is based on how risky the stock I’m trading is. I mostly trade with stocks that only require 25%, making them on the safe side of the spectrum.

    For instance, if the stock’s price was $20 and I wanted to buy 100 shares on margin I would only have to put up $500 as collateral and not the full $2000.

    But every once in a while I’ll briefly trade a more volatile stock and that’s what went wrong here. It required 75% collateral and I completely forgot about that while also not even noticing until it was too late. When I hastily jumped into the trade it put me close to receiving a Margin Call instantly.

    Not only was it a terrible movie, in more ways than the obvious one, but a margin call is also a frightening event I hope to avoid! This occurs when your broker requires you to put in more money because the value of the assets that you own on margin have dropped.

    If you do not deposit more capital within a few days the broker will close out any positions and sell whatever is necessary from your portfolio without your permission to try and recoup as much of their money as they can.

    Fun Fact: Elon risked a Margin Call earlier this year after he threw up a Nazi sign in front of God and everybody causing Tesla shares to plummet. The problem was that Elon bought Twitter using Tesla shares as collateral and then they lost half their value after the incident.

    Newsweek – Could Elon Musk Face Margin Call Over Tesla Stock?

    I hope to keep a clean record and never receive a Margin Call. This was the reason behind me closing the trade out for a loss and it was the right thing to do. This was not an easy decision as you’ll discover you’ll always find room for more hope when things aren’t going your way. You just KNOW the trade is going to turn around and will find the means to justify it.

    The effects of Copium

    I was faced with the decision to either hold on to the trade and hope for the best (gamble) or cut my losses. If the stock continued to go down I would lose even more money and risk a margin call. My other choice was to play it safe and close for a small loss. I chose the latter and chose correctly, as the stock did not behave the way I predicted and would’ve lost even more money.

    I made over $2000 the previous day but losing that $82 completely overshadowed that. Funny how the brain works. I could only focus on that tiny loss. I felt silly and was disappointed in myself. I knew that this very day would come and I would be standing here before you in judgement.

    These types of lessons tend to stick with me and hopefully this will be the last time I let excitement get the best of me. Rules are important.

    I had another small loss, but it was purely an accidental, user error. I lost $24 because I closed a trade instead of opening a second one by mistake. It could’ve been way worse so in the future I will take the time to slow down and double check what I’m doing.

    Monthly Roundup

    I have decided to forgo my monthly percentage goals and trade solely on vibes. I don’t want to force trades or have any more pressure than there needs to be. Now that we’re waiting for the perfect setups, we will more than likely be trading a little less. I went into some detail about this last month in case you missed it.

    In September I made $5,281 in total.

    I’ve increased my accounts by $15,273 so far in the year of our Lord 2025.

    Profit and Loss Calendar for September

    Here are the trades.

    Clicking the image will take you to my Theta Gang profile where you can view more details and notes on all of my trades.

    My monthly performance in 2025.

    Since buckling down and really sticking to these guidelines I’ve laid out, I have freed up a ton of time and energy while bringing in my best month yet. When a setup shows itself you can learn to act without overthinking and do the dang thang. When things don’t line up you learn to be patient and wait for something better. The beauty of rules is that they take out the whole decision-making process.

    In the stock market you figure out what kind of trading you like to do, you set some solid rules for yourself, learn from your mistakes, and you will watch your account grow.

    In life you figure out what kind of person you want to be, you set some solid rules that direct your compass towards that ideal, learn from your mistakes, and you will watch yourself grow and be of better use to the people around you.

    Now make like you’re a bull breed and show ’em how to strut,
    Chris

    Lend as little as $25 to create a more equitable world.
    Donate directly to the poor.

    If you’d like to give trading on Robinhood a try you can click my referral link HERE and we’ll both get some free stock.

    Furthering Education:

    This short video shows you why the market moves and how things will trade in a range before breaking out to find a new range. These breakouts are what we’re looking for and this will help visualize the whole concept.

    A great video going into more detail about volume, why it matters, and how to read it.

    This nice little video explains quite a few things I discussed today. If I hadn’t just found it right now at the end of editing this I would’ve told you to just watch this instead during those parts.

  • July 2025

    The Universe has a subtle way of giving you little warnings before having to resort to more drastic measures to get your attention.

    I’ve been into tarot for a few years now and I have a tendency to overexplain myself so to not come off too weird so I’ll just say I do not see them as some sort of spooky fortune telling device that prophesies your unchangeable future.

    Often when I draw a card I’m reminded of a character trait that I could lean into a little more. Self-control, generosity, nurturing, patience, compassion – all these things are inside of us but for one reason or another they sometimes aren’t the easiest to bring to light. But the suggestion of one small change can make big, lasting changes when compounded over time. You hold a lot of wisdom inside of you, these cards are just something else to help remind you of that. They’re a tool to help you on a journey of self-reflection if that’s your thing.

    On my last card pull I had gotten the King of Swords and kinda half-assed the whole thing to be honest. I didn’t give it the time and thought that I normally would. I have a whole journal dedicated to these sort of mystical endeavors but I wrote nothing about it, just went through the motions.

    There are 78 cards in a tarot deck so imagine my surprise as I shuffled and pulled the King of Swords again a week or so later. This time I decided to sit with it and really contemplate what I could learn from this card and apply it to my life.

    • Strategic Action – Don’t just react—plan. Consider long-term consequences before making a move.
    • Clear Thinking – Strip away bias, wishful thinking, and emotional fog. See the situation as it truly is, not as you hope it to be.

    When I trade I can easily get swept up in my emotions. I trade impulsively or over-trade more times than I’d like to admit. Although I’ve only had, like, 4 losing trades this year I could be doing better by not making silly mistakes that leave my money tied up for a long time or messing with cheap meme stocks. So to accomplish this I needed to start working on a plan and a set of rules. And let me tell ya, doing this lead me down a whole ‘nother rabbit hole that has completely changed the way I’m currently trading and will be even more apparent next month. (I’m already at my monthly goal of 10% in the first two weeks of August. – Future Chris)

    I’m very pleased with my results from trading but there has been a nagging feeling that I needed to refine my rules a little. I shoot from the hip a tad too much for my liking. This was made clear after some LEAPS I bought shot up to $2000 in profit then went negative and I did nothing because I didn’t have an exit strategy for that position. I told ya’ll last month that I would be buying more LEAPS but I didn’t take the time to figure out when to take profit on them causing me to not make as much money as I could have.

    Hope is not a strategy in trading. You need to be able to take any situation, look at it with total impartiality, and then come to a balanced and insightful decision.

    I needed to hunt for setups like the American cougar hunts for food. Not searching frantically everywhere wasting energy, but up in a tree watching the patterns of prey and striking when the opportunity arises.

    I am, what they call, a technical trader meaning I make decisions based off of chart patterns and not from reading a bunch of boring financial statements.

    So I needed to decide on a setup that I felt the most comfortable with and just trade that, it’s just that simple. And that leads us to …

    The 50-Day EMA

    When you’re looking at a chart there are all kinds of indicators that you can overlay and use to help make more informed decisions. One of those indicators is the 50-day EMA (Estimated Moving Average). It tracks the average price of a stock over the past 50 trading days and is a good indicator of the current trend. A rising 50-day EMA suggests an uptrend, while a falling one indicates a downtrend. 

    The 50-day EMA can act as a dynamic support level in an uptrend (price bounces off it) and a resistance level in a downtrend (price struggles to break above it). Things trading above the 50-day EMA is good sign. Things trading below it could mean something’s amiss.

    Let’s take a look at the setup that I’m on the hunt for rawrrr…

    You can see on my little chart there that after a huge drop the price will rise above the 50-day EMA (pink horizontal line), pull back some to re-test it, and will either rocket upward or take the fast elevator down. This is usually a volatile moment so you want to be correct when choosing if and when to enter the trade.

    That’s why it’s so important to wait for conformation after a retest. You want a nice, fat candle with plenty of volume supporting it. I miss out on a small amount of profits from not getting in at the very bottom but I’ve been faked out so many times it’s not even funny. So I will take a small decrease in profits in exchange for putting the odds greatly in my favor. I don’t want ALL the profits, only some of them.

    By waiting for an event like this to happen (and it does often) I greater my chances astronomically because I’m going with the flow of the markets and not guessing what’s going to happen next.

    I’m tired of trying to time tops and bottoms. I’ve had to change my mindset to watching the action play out and sometimes waiting days to take on a trade. I’m not a market wizard and it doesn’t do much good being a contrarian in this area of my life. I gotta go with the flow.

    Candlesticks

    Candlesticks will show you a more detailed picture of what’s going on with price more clearly than the plain line graph we’re all used to seeing. There’s tons of videos on learning how to read candlesticks so I won’t go into that right now but it’s a skill worth picking up.

    You can toggle the time frame that each candle represents from nanoseconds up to days. Until recently I hadn’t realized how much I was also getting faked out by looking at the shorter timeframe candles. I needed to scale back and look at the bigger picture so I started with the 15 minute then eventually settled on the 30 minute and 1 hour candle.

    Here’s an example of how different those candlesticks can appear when looking at the same stock event on different timeframes.

    5 MINUTE – This gives the illusion that things are taking off and you better hop on unless you hate money. One green candle after another with the price appearing to break above the previous high.
    30 MINUTE – This would have seemed promising and if I had been watching it in real time it would’ve been tempting to enter. Price is not shown breaking above the previous high.
    1 HOUR – Obvious rejection by a big red candle soon after it crosses over the 50-day EMA just before diving off a cliff.

    … kinda like life, huh? Sometimes we need to zoom out and slow down a little to get a better vantage point and see how things are going and how they might play out from here if we continue down the same path so we don’t rush into things …

    Anyways, being in a trade way longer than you planned while clogging up money because you got impulsive and bought on the first big swing you see feels bad, man. I’m still in a trade I did that exact same thing with 2 months ago. I’m here to help you not do the same.

    There’s a lot of trading going on second by second but I don’t need to hear all that noise and that’s what I’m doing by looking at the shorter 5-15 min timeframe candles. The trend of the hour is stronger than the trend of the minute. Tides vs waves.

    “Rushing into action, you fail.
    Trying to grasp things, you lose them.
    Forcing a project to completion,
    you ruin what was almost ripe.

    Therefore the Master takes action
    by letting things take their course.
    He remains as calm at the end
    as at the beginning.

    He has nothing,
    thus has nothing to lose.
    What he desires is non-desire;
    what he learns is to unlearn.

    He simply reminds people
    of who they have always been.
    He cares about nothing but the Tao.
    Thus he can care for all things.”
    ― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

    Alright, wrap it up already Lord have mercy!

    Now usually this is everyone’s favorite part where I say, “My monthly goal is to increase my accounts by 10%”, but after much thought I’m gonna give myself a little more wiggle room and shoot for a range of 5-10%. Things change up quite a bit next month so I feel now is a good time for the switch. In July I achieved an increase of 4.5% bringing in $757.20 total.

    I know what you may be thinking and it may seem as if I’m lowering expectations and the bar for myself but this decision will hopefully be made more clear in next month’s post. I can assure you that is not the case.

    I’m up 82% this year increasing my accounts by $7,411 so far in the year of our Lord 2025. Even though it keeps touching all time highs, the S&P 500 has only returned 9.5% in this same timeframe.

    Profit and Loss Calendar for July

    Here are the trades.

    Clicking the image will take you to my Theta Gang profile where you can view more details and notes.

    Here’s a table of my monthly performance compared to the S&P 500’s.

    Profit% ChangeS&P 500
    Jan$1,214+13.7%+2.7%
    Feb$1,741+16.85%-1.42%
    March$339+2.8%+5.75%
    April$182+1.46%-0.76%
    May$459+3.64%+5.9%
    June$3,840+38.6%+5%
    July$757+4.5%+2.2%

    10 Things I Hate About Skew

    And before we go, it’s not really visible in my charts here, yet, but in the spirit of transparency I did take a big loss that’s spread out over a couple of months. I finally admitted defeat and closed out all of my SMST trades for around a $900 loss. Didn’t let it get to me and put the remainder of that money to good use. I love being a contrarian but I’ll have better luck going with the flow and trading with momentum, not trying to bet that a stock is going down when they usually just want to go up, even when their dumb.

    This was an inverse ETF based off MicroStrategy which I still think will crash and burn but obviously not in the timeline I had hoped.

    Thanks to SMST going through a reverse stock split, some weird math, and a call with my brokerage it took me a long time to calculate this loss into my stats. I will still need go back and edit some numbers.

    This one stock has been behind the only losing trades I’ve made this year and the only time I followed someone else blindly. I went in heavy, too, and paid the price. Important lesson here. I would’ve had over 100 trades with no losses had it not been for this hiccup.

    But, in the end, this all made me consider that maybe the real profits are the friends we make along the way.

    From our charts to yours,
    Chris

    PS – I hope this goes without saying and, perhaps, something I should’ve been stating this whole time, but obviously this is not financial advice. I’m just showing you what I do and trying to spare the people close to me from some of my rants.

    If you’d like to give trading on Robinhood a try you can click my referral link HERE and we’ll both get some free stock.