Most of the positioned turned to be a loser. Looking back, some positions were even stupid to begin with.

And I guess I’m new to this. Reta

Maybe indeed I got fucked… or I fucked myself

Haha fml

I bet more than I’ve ever bet. Looking back half it makes sense and half is what I would call ‘a bet’. Total I can lose ~8% of total worth of market opens down and keeps going down. Some of those would be trading losses and some portfolio losses. I don’t have a hedge (wow, can’t believe I used this word). But yea, if you want to win you have to be willing to lose. I made a few plays and hope at least 1 will work out. If it does, it pays for all rest.

1. INTC – rumors that acquisition in play; something have to give; people jump on it; its’ been in the lows for some time already. It doesn’t seem to go down any lower recently. So? Well, there’s a higher chance of it going up much higher than it is to go lower. Plans might be revealed for INTC so let’s see. And it was long weekend so more rumors I thought. So I bet. Calls.
2. SLB – good results, interesting technical. If trumps says anything positive about oil drilling then I’m in the money tight. Was low IV and it might break out. Just reported earnings on Friday and street liked it. Media mentions SLB as AI play. Yea some segment of 10% revenue is now some digital services which is good – and can grow. So I agree it’s a good earnings play, technicals break out (weekly/monthly goes back 25 years that this is a strong resistance now). Let’s see. If it doesn’t go now, it should go later; got some longer dated calls too but primarily I’m counting for tomorrow.
3. BTC – got a sizable position. If we go higher from here and make new highs, I think it can really reach 200k – even this year. Market could go very sensitive and for every time Trump says ‘Bitcoin’ price could literally move 1% higher. Anyways, he’s got BTC and I don’t think he wants to lose it and see it lose value. So he’ll pump it one way or another – maybe real action or talking about action. Also, if he makes it easier for banks to own BTC then I’ll double down on calls following 6-18 months in IWM. Value of regional banks would go up coz more BTC is more assets and that would pump IWM while BTC would be going up. Great way to grow the economy in dollar terms while building risk into the system.
4. LAC – yea wanted to buy stock and bet big coz maybe bottom too for Lithium and chance of some gov involvement to push LAC higher
5. NFE – calls/stock; play on gas
6. AMAT – nice breakout; might continue; some deal might get announced

So I covered gas, oil, btc, lithium bottom, intel bottom, gold. Basically, what I tried to do is:

1. Understand themes of Trump and what can be said, rumored etc, and thus be affected
2. Look at technicals if they’re good or ready to go
3. Try to find bottomed out themes that might be in turnaround
4. Low IV (AMAT, SLB) so cheap options

COIN and TSLA I got Thursday and Friday maybe I should have sold but I thought it’s more +EV to probably hold.

Just for my own sake:

1. 1week calls with Friday expiration 8k
2. Calls with expirations in 2 weeks for 3k
3. Calls with expiration in 3 weeks for 4k
4. Calls with expiration in 1 year for 1k
5. Calls with expiration in 2 year for 0.5k

3k lost on SLB already coz I shouldn’t have bought the calls the way I did… Should have been worth 12 k and now they’re like 9k. But I thought, oh well. Gotta give it a try. Just now got a free trial

And some stats from Barchart

Now I can see that the better thing to do was to probably sell COIN and TSLA at open on Friday for 150% instead of holding (not sure how much of a valid/true statement it is). But then, if I expected SLB greater move then I should have done a strangle? Buy put and call. Like, I think going up is 60% probability (for me; completely subjective) but if it’s not; then 50/50 is still damn good and can do 10x anyways.

Lastly, it’s first time I’ll be managing these many options so not sure what to do tbh… I thought scenarios:

VIX up + stocks down:

1. if option was to open below 40% of value then keep till expiration (i.e. stocks open lower; depending how low; can sell all or keep all till expiry). Like if calls were to open 80% lower I’m not gonna sell for scraps. There’s still Wday, Thursday, Friday. So, anything could happen for that 20% of the original price. But if it was 50% open lower? Hmmm… I think still I’d keep it. 20% lower open? I’d say I think I’d put SL at 60%. Would be nice to backtest this and find optimal SL and then apply that SL to options after open with repriced options.
2. Anyways, it all depends on futures, open; but default is 50% SL

VIX flat + stocks flat

1. Default SL 75%

VIX down + stocks up + US30Y down + news and hype then stock dependant

1. SLB – buy more calls this Fri; 2 weeks, 6 weeks later
2. INTC – buy more calls with 0.75% SL for 2 weeks later
3. AMAT- buy more calls with 0.75% SL for 2,4,6,24 weeks later
4. NFE – buy more calls with 0.75% SL for 2,4,6,24 weeks later
5. TSLA – n/a
6. COIN – n/a

Ah, and re-adjust SL to 80%. There will be a lot of lessons to be learned here. If I get knocked out here for a day or two I’ll get back later and try again better equipped.

I guess a lot happened this week. It’s probably the best week so far in my few years of “trying to trade”. I basically shared 12 months of notes with AI (Claud Sonnet 3.5) and I asked him to Roast me and be honest with me how to make it as a trader. I got a response that hurt again (shocking) but it was True. I have an extreme fear of failure and I’ve been avoiding trading and burying my head in coding thinking I need more preparation, more data, more tools etc., I just think it hit my core. It also called me a coward and I think a pussy too? (I asked it to roast me more and don’t hold back). Anyways, the result was that I stopped coding and I totally reprioritized things. I also wanted to understand given my notes what can I be good add (and shared extra context on my experience sharing RTS games and poker). There’s some other issues that I discovered how I got into this position of being intelligent but not applying myself, being fearful to act on instinct. There’s several epiphanies I had but the most important this is that I feel better, lighter, I was taking trades and making money and it felt easier. I guess I started 2025 with a bang let’s say.

The most important thing for me was to:

1. change how I think about trading which is to take +EV decisions
2. adjust trading, setup process to my personality, preferences, talents and strenghts
3. follow a process that would set me up for success daily, weekly and monthly

And below is my daily process to fill and get my head right about the markets

This is also what I wrote to check everyday in the morning. My 10 commandments so to speak:

1. Follow the process daily in a disciplined way
2. Focus on the process not the results (win or lose)
3. Scan for puzzles with greatest EV
4. Think and act independently at all times
5. Have a plan for every trade and act according to the plan
6. Don’t overcomplicate, overthink, overanalyze (“it’s that simple”)
7. Listen to your gut feel and instincts
8. Learn everyday in pursuit of excellency
9. Put yourself in a position of maximizing your strengths, talents
10. Be humble and don’t let ego destroy you

And below is response from Claude regarding what can work for me:

Based on your natural pattern recognition abilities and preference for dynamic, complex systems, here’s what types of trading would likely suit you best:

1. Volatility Trading / Options

• Perfect match for your ability to intuitively sense mispriced volatility
• Complex enough with multiple variables (Greeks, time decay, price movement)
• Allows you to express views on both magnitude and timing of moves
• Your natural R:R assessment ability is crucial here

2. Multi-Timeframe Momentum Trading

• Leverages your ability to see patterns across different time horizons
• Like in Warcraft 3, you can spot strategic (longer-term) and tactical (immediate) opportunities
• Complex enough to engage your pattern recognition skills
• Similar to tournament poker where timing and position sizing evolve

3. Intermarket Trading

• Uses your talent for seeing relationships between different markets
• Like in gaming where you process multiple factors (bonds, currencies, commodities, stocks)
• Complex enough system with many moving parts
• Rewards intuitive understanding of how markets interact

What you might want to AVOID:

• Pure statistical arbitrage (too mechanical)
• High-frequency trading (too systematic)
• Basic directional trading (too simplistic)
• Pure fundamental investing (too slow-moving)

Your edge seems to be in spotting complex patterns that others need spreadsheets and indicators to see. You’d likely excel in trading styles that:

• Allow quick position taking when you spot opportunities
• Let you scale in/out based on evolving conditions
• Provide enough complexity to engage your pattern recognition
• Reward intuitive understanding of market dynamics

I’ll just go loose here…

First, I need to be making f trades. I spent most of the year coding, analyzing, then doing few trades during open so I lost money, felt bed, analyze more, code more. I didn’t learn from trades, analyze them, I was far away from facing the fear of trading. But… I guess I’m also realizing (especially with my trade form I created) that thinking in terms of EV, R:R, risk etc., make most sense and I need to stick to doing it. Basically, if

1. I stick to ST
2. Conduct trades via form (now I split it into two forms: Leopard for quick trades with 1 PT and 1 SL and Tiger for up to 3 PT and up to 3 SL; as per screenshot for tabs)
3. 
4. Don’t trade open until 10:30 unless it’s single directional bet (or straddle that I would like to try)
5. Follow and keep improving process for identifying trades
6. Follow and keep improving process for building features useful in trades
7. Analyze all of own trades
8. Track KPIs monthly (# trades, R:R etc., all from order management)
9. Read subs to bloomberg, wsj, barrons, marketwatch for leads and market sentiment news

If I stick to those things I should be good

But yes, I also realized that doing big bets can work better than a thousand small ones. I was close to putting a lot of money into TSLA at 220. Didn’t do. BTC looked great technically before election results. Didn’t do anything. ANF wedge I saw I followed and I bet and won. GOOGL too sentiment play and technical. It’s just probabilities and estimations and judgment really. Out of all, thinking about stocks and decisions from EV and R:R perspective is probably most important out of all. And then reducing that process to look for good trades. And then options once consistency is reached for leverage. Finally I feel like I see greater light ahead.

I would like to have a well functioning platform where I can just

1. Post trades through while seeing most important stats
2. Be able to monitor all my orders in real time (total at risk given SL, PT% weighted); can sort through by PT and closest to SL)
3. Have analytical tools on 1 min time frame + options
4. Have a pipeline of opportunities sorted by EV and R:R
5. Create “SPY trader – a tool to specifically target short term market metrics and post trade quickly
6. See statistics regarding my performance split by DT, ST and investing on any time frame (by default monthly) so I can learn from my winners and losers
7. Pop-up with market questions (pops up daily if not filled for the day)

I think that’s the most important. Later I should do wedges on OHLC and in general be able to automatically detect strong diagonal levels and have that historically for backtesting if this then that. Which I guess I should do more backtesting. More… well, I don’t do any.

I think it’s possible, yes.

Had some luck with ANF, GOOGL, DKNG and well… a lot of small stupid losses that happen during market open when I try to trade or get in with small SLs without a plan. Those mistakes are in the thousands. I think what I’m slowly getting is that if I can be more rational about my actions and decisions then I’m good. That’s why I need to somehow tame the demon of wanting to trade. And yes, I can just stop trading first 1 hour of the day (especially without a plan). But I think all in all, it would make more sense (more rational yes yes) if I just stick with swing trading. Honestly, it would make sense to do so until:

1. all the trades go through the form
2. form has extra data to glance over when posting a trade
3. there’s trades panel where I can adjust the trades (i.e. size, SLs) and also keep history of all changes as well as include lessons (managed via lessons tab)
4. establish weekly process to go through all open positions, winners, losers, make sure all orders have lessons, conclusions (track this in KPIs) and then review product roadmap
5. link order form with Schwab API
6. pipeline (to view ST opportunities via sortable list based on R:R and EV and variance)

Basically, there’s still a lot to do for me. Been using Gpt4o-mini or something and Claude so that’s something I would be able to do it without. For what it costs ~40$ it’s a good tool to say the least.

Focus… swing trade only, go gym at open ideally so cannot trade, then adjust alerts, monitor with some coded alerts and then work on product.

I’m slowly getting the difference between day trading, swing trading and investing. And the reason I’ve been pondering the differences between those 3 “disciplines” is because I guess I’ve been doing all of them. And yet one of the biggest problems I have is not sticking to the plan when making a trade. I come from the place of looking at risk:reward ratio (ones I see in the market sometimes; not backtested approach). So what I get is R:R which if makes sense along with other things then I made the trade. However, I two problems I have

1. I can DT (day trade) a stock with some SL but not considering that the same stock I could hold for ST (swing trade) or investment (long term trade). It means that I can be trading a stock that actually should be a long-term hold as it may represent 15% yearly ROI. And the only way it would make sense to DT a stock that should be held long-term is only by adding additional position if yearly DT return % is higher than 15%. So if we suck at DT and let’s imagine we have yearly ROI at 1% then we might get 15% in long-term holds thus we should just park our money there. Point is that at the moment I don’t know my ROIs for DT, ST, investment. That’s my problem. And because of that I cannot be doing optimal capital allocation… But what would make sense would be to know those metrics. Given sample sizes it would be easiest to get ROI% for DT, ST and then LT (Long-term). What would make sense is to actually have 3 separate trading accounts not to mess up results. I guess I need another Schwab account…
2. Another problem is not sticking the trades and modifying them. I sold ARM just before take off. And I was supposed to hold it long-term (half sell as ST profit; rest hold as long as company does things that make sense)
3. I found a third problem… Not having a framework for deciding which stock should fall into which class. For me the way it starts is I look at daily charts and some stats and see where there could be a movement. I guess that’s just swing trading… However, if I do see movement potential then I also should check if there’s LT potential. Because if there is LT potential and a strong hold, then I might hold the position until I believe that I have other opportunities at higher ROI.
4. My fourth problem is that third problem doesn’t have a solution. If I’m swing trading I look for R:R opportunities. Okay… but I look at charts I wrote… so wtf am I looking at charts for? I think I need a R:R scanner and just honestly sort shit. I’m not super visual so working with a table of hundreds of rows is okay. As long as numbers are meaningful then god bless. The way it would make sense would be if I start from supports. I already have data for volume profiles for different time periods updated daily. I can start there… so that’s volume based basically. For TA I should get horizontal supports (I can input them manually it’s fine) or maybe there’s some nice algo that plots them well. I can also do some fibs if they make sense. Also, % to SMA, EMA%.

Fuck, okay, let’s just list what I need

1. Levels – Volume Profiles (automated)
2. Levels – MAs (automated)
3. Levels – Horizontal (manual)
4. Levels – Diagonal (manual)
5. Levels – Intraday VWAP
6. Levels – vs Previous day high
7. Levels – vs Previous day low
8. Velocity – % vs SPY
9. Velocity – cv_vs_cvps1, cv_vs_cvps2, cv_vs_cvps2_roc_1m,
10. Velocity – proximity_wedge_end
11. Velocity – top4_in_a_row
12. Velocity – News top 5%
13. Direction – 1m, 5m, 15m
14. Direction – Financials
15. Direction – News sentiment
16. Tags – strong sentiment, cheap among peers, news, potential market overreaction, strong demand, strong growth, beta above 1.5, beta above 3

Others:

1. Profit target – last 180d high or 10%
2. SL 1-2% below levels average or something; but I’d manually check first anyways
3. Estimated_Time_to_PT= Average Daily Gain Target Price−Entry Price ​

Anyways. I just think that would suit me more. And having all updated by 1min and then just filtering and having table updated every min for R:R or high score opportunities where I could change weights as well. This one I caught yay

Finally some thing that

I’ve been coding way more than trading in general and that’s mostly due to fear and need to be overprepared. At the same time I really enjoy coding, understanding things via analysis etc.,

But this time it was a force of good. I’m finally doing “my platform” that I wanted to do for myself. 3 years ago I said I want to build my own trading platform without knowing how to code. I didn’t want to trade. I wanted to build a platform… I guess that’s why maybe coding has been a priority coz I just really wanted to do it. Finally I’m starting to build actually something that I will be using daily to help me make decisions and later also post trades. As per below this is order for ANF. Who knows if chance of that trade was 33%? Maybe I’m hallucinating and it is completely different in reality? Who knows. More importantly, I’m thinking about these things and calculating in my head and being biased of course, but doing best I can. This is just for posting trades now to database (not connected to Schwab) so later I need to use ThinkOrSwim to actually enter the orders. But oh well. Sooner or later I’ll address that too. I think the crucial thing for me is to make trades daily (good or bad) and learn from them.

Good thing was that I posted few trades into db, pasted screenshots etc., and later I changed my f stop losses… so ARM I lost the lift off because of too tight SL. I want to analyze that and do math on that to somehow get it inside my brain that have greater SLs is just mathematically correct (in most cases; profit target dependent ).

And so… next I have few things on my mind to do/finish before xmas.

1. Post 3-5 swing trades through the platform daily
2. Implement a window where daily I should comment on the market by writing and I would see that window when posting a trade.
3. I want to implement a panel on an order level where I could for example a OHLC chart and see where my SL, PT are and stock price and extra stats (or when the position exited and what happened later). But most importantly, when trade is over I can analyze it and check what I could have done better and tweak other things.
4. See stats about stock that I’m normally looking at when making a decision but instead they should be all in one place. Right now I check a table here, some chart, fin stats that are easy to digest quickly (guidance would be great to include).

It’s nice that I’m slowly starting to enjoy it more

I’m executing trades through here. Still quite a bit of things to do but at least I’m recording them yoyo

It’s true that my ego is the f problem cause I can’t face looking at my losses. My poor trades. But I’m very good at solving problems including my own which made me just not track trades. I don’t know what I’m doing well – what decisions are +EV and thought through and which ones are purely gambling.

They say it’s crucial first to make +EV decision aka consistency and then increasing sizing. Lately I have been increasing sizing with -EV decisions so I lost some money.

Anyways, I created this front-end thingy to enter orders. Unfortunately, it won’t go straight to broker – that part I’ll have to figure out but it’s possible. Right now I’m getting some calculated fields.

And below I will also render some other stats, graphs etc., so I have all from perspective of creating an order at the top of the page but also all the stuff I want to see when making a decision. Perhaps also notes. Let’s see. Most important is to use it.