Smart Lessons From 3 Rough Days Of Trading For Me
- Hey, Tim Sykes here wanted to do a video recap on my last three days of trading, some of the worst trading that I've done in all of 2020. Yesterday in fact was my biggest loss of the year. Of course, during my all day live trading webinar. And I encourage you to watch that over and over again, to see what I did.
I still minimize my losses rather well, got a little unlucky, but the biggest thing that I want you to understand is that in the past three days, the market has shifted. Last week it was ridiculous. Last week there were so many plays with clean charts, perfect panics, perfect spikes. And it was just like, Oh my God, why is this so amazing? That turned out to be like the height of all euphoria. And now this week, it's a rather rude awakening for people who think that the market is always just gonna offer up countless opportunities that go up 200, 500, a thousand percent in a day. That's not realistic.
You have to adapt. It's not necessarily you, it's the market, the market ebbs and flows. So I'm gonna go over this trade by trade what I did, right, what I did wrong. And if by the end of this video, you understand that, that the market goes in and out of where you should be aggressive or conservative.
Leave a comment underneath this video saying, I will adapt. That is what trading is all about. You must adapt. None of my top students that I ever made a lot of money without adapting.
The key to success is going from pattern to patter, stock to stock testing, optimizing, refining, realizing that you're never gonna be perfect, but at the same time you can still get better. Before I get started with the charts, latest $50,000 donation to Rancho Relaxo in New Jersey another animal sanctuary. I'm donating all my trading profits to charity, but December specifically is for animal sanctuary. So I'm going to all of these animals sanctuaries dressed as Santa. And if you follow me on Instagram, you can see the videos of me surprising them too.
They had no idea I was coming, and in case you're feeling left out, I also have a free new holiday guide, I'll post the link to that underneath this because I'm dressed as Santa and I feel like giving holiday gifts to everybody, not just charities. It's pretty cool, I've made 120,000 so far in December. Very flawed trading, I know it sounds cool like to make that, but I'm taking excessive risks.
I'm on the verge of cracking, I was just talking with Jack Kellogg. I mean, he's at nearly half a million this month, which is crazy. That is not normal, most traders lose, never forget that.
So don't think like you're necessarily gonna make a hundred thousand or 500,000 a month, but both of us are on the verge of cracking. We're both like, we cannot wait for the weekend because we are burnt out, We are frazzled. And that comes with trading too.
I'm not gonna sugar coat it and be like, look, we're all just making money, it's so easy. Its not. It is mind-numbingly frustrating especially when you're trying to take the meat of the move and for whatever reason you can't capture it. And there's new holiday guide, It's gonna be a hundred percent phrase that you have no excuse whatsoever. But in this new holiday guide that I've been working on, you'll see a lot of these plays.
And I go over the good, the bad, the ugly. I want you to understand what it's like to be a real trader. It's not the easiest job in the world, it's not the best job in the world, it's a job.
And it's a different kind of job where you really have to use your mind and those of us who are trained in these kind of counter-intuitive lessons and rules, we do well, but there's always the risk of loss. There's always the risk of danger. You can never get too comfortable.
The moment you get too comfortable as a trader, is the moment that the market will remind you that this is not a normal job. So I'm happy as Santa, but after this video, like I think I just went to sleep 'cause I was so tired. So watch this video, I'll post the link. I'm gonna try to get this new guide out by the end of the year.
But I do want you to say that you're gonna study hard. So there's, there's two buttons. One where you can enter your email and you get the free holiday guide. And then there's a second button where you can tweet at me and I want you to tweet at me if you promise to study hard over the holidays, if I get enough tweets, I'm gonna release it sooner, but I'm still not convinced that people are even gonna watch this over the holidays. So we'll see how many tweets I get. But this is my little challenge to you.
This is my little holiday guide. Anyways, going to the traits here. The past three days, nearly 6,000 in profits, but this is not representative of my trading, okay? This is like the worst $6,000 I've ever made.
And you'll see it trade by trade. By the way, in my last video lesson, I had like two days in a row of like 12,000 each, two consecutive days. So like 12,000 last Friday, 12,000 on Monday, all the charts were working out perfectly. I couldn't keep up.
There were too many trades with solid setups and it was just like, everything was flowing. Then Tuesday happened, I started off with RSCFs and RSCF, I was buying it back here if you remember, they had the patent for shipping these vaccines at ridiculous low temperatures, didn't really take off on the first round. Really took off here when it broke out past 80 cents a share. And I bought this breakout and I was riding it up. I underestimated it the whole way up and then the way down, it just was not like perfect panics like we're used to like really perfect panics and bounces lately and this was just the opposite. It did gap up on the new patent, which congratulations two weekends, people but then this was Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Tuesday it literally just, it just kept downtrending.
There was no panic even yesterday. I mean I made a little bit, I mean, this was probably my best trade here, capturing this morning panic, but even this, I didn't trade it well and then today was just, there was no trade for me, but this was the beginning of really some dangerous slippery slope type trading for me. So don't get caught up in the 6,000 over three days, I probably should be down yesterday I lost 7,000, okay? So it's not all rainbows and sugarcoated dollar bills. So I lost a little bit trying to dip by this and I said, no bounce so quick loss follow rule number one, cut losses quickly. I mean that's the best that you can do when a stock doesn't do well. This one probably was my best trait of the week.
This was December 15th, so this was Tuesday in SFOR, it was getting just nutty from four cents on Friday closing at 15, remember I was buying it here at nine, selling it at 11, selling it again at 13, just thinking this is crazy. Then it goes to freaking 21. And then Monday, you know, again, Monday we had a perfect morning panic and a nice bounce. This is what I look for in an overextended stock, and I nailed that. Tuesday, we had a little bit and just not much after that. So this is when it really started to slippery slope on Tuesday.
Wednesday was very choppy, Thursday today was very choppy also, but this was my kind of adaptation to the price action. There was only a small dip at the open. I got a lot of questions. Like, why did you buy it? You're not waiting for a massive panic like normal. Sometimes when there's no massive panic that can lead to a spike. And, I actually underestimated, I bought it in the 14s, sold it in the 16s, nice little three grand profit.
And it actually bounced all the way up to 18. So I took like basically half the profits, but you don't always have to wait for a morning spike or morning panic. Here on RSCF here now I tried again on the dip by, on our RSCF and it was a classic panic this time. And I'd like to go bigger the second time when the panic is bigger, but really it just really wasn't a good bounce. And again this was Tuesday. So Tuesday I actually finished up nearly five grand on the day, but the plays just weren't working and it's important that you recognize when something is not working.
So I tried again with SFOR and I'm basically just trading SFOR and RSCF back and forth. Like, they worked for me so well last week and on Monday and now Tuesday, not so much. So I said, no bounce, cut losses, very strange stock market makers playing games. I don't know what's going on, but at least I'm cutting losses quickly I'm protecting my overall gains. And then I tried like an intraday buy SHIP their stocks to trade breaking news. I'll throw this out there every now and then, a speculative trade didn't work out, small gain, but whether it was a small gain or a small loss, I was pretty much out.
Then into the close TMXN, this was actually interesting. So this one was spiking on Tuesday and it was kind of bunchy in here and I got it towards the bottom of the range here in the low threes and it looks like it closed strong, but while I actually had it, it was really choppy here in the low threes. And it just could not close strong.
And I was like, why, what's going on here? Like last week we saw these a hundred, 200, 300, 500, a thousand percent runners, this one is struggling even just to get back to the mid point of the afternoon range, not even the day highs. So I profited, but I really thought that it was gonna break out. And then in like the last five minutes after I sold, it really close stronger, I felt guilty missing it.
It actually gapped up the nice, the next day, nicely to the fives. But, there was a huge panic. And again, huge panic downtrend, downtrend, downtrend, no bounce. So last week, multi hundred percent spikers and perfect crashes and perfect bounces, this week no real great multi hundred percent gainers and the dip buys haven't been working. Does that mean that the strategies over, the bull market is over? No, it just means that the market goes through ebb and flows, but this 1500 put me up 4,500 on the day. Now, Wednesday was my worst trading day of the year.
Started out trying to dip by our RSCF into a panic, but sure enough I basically got in a little too soon here at a buck 10, if you watch my all day webinar from yesterday, even though I profited I was just like, there's something or no the first one was a loss. And I was like, there's something wrong here, right? Like, I was just like, no balance rule number one, if you watch the webinar, you can see me trying to get out for a profit. I got in at 110, I was actually trying to sell some at 115, 116, and I was not getting executed. So some of you have been frustrated by OTC executions.
It happens to all of us. So I had a prophet could not get out and it turned into a loss. Then I got the partial execution on the bigger panic that I wanted.
So I actually did get the panic that I wanted all the way down to the 90S which turned out to be the exact bottom. But the problem with that is even though I picked the exact bottom, I got literally 1/5 or like 1/10 , actually of what I wanted executed. So I nailed the bottom but if you only get 1/10 of your position size, I think it was 1/10. What did I get? 2,500 shares, 3,400 shares, but I wanted 25,000.
So I got like 1/8 of my position size. So basically break even, but very frustrating. Again, it's not just about the money that you make or loose. Like you wanna execute good patterns, you wanna take the meat of the move. Like there's a certain I don't know, just gratitude or certain feelings of achievement when you nail these plays.
And I just, I did not have any gratitude. I did not have any achievement, I had massive frustration, even though I was breakeven. Then I tried another dip by on ALPP. This one led to more frustration.
So this was yesterday. It spiked, which I missed the morning spike from 86, all the way to 120, but I got a nice dip here to one and I got some executed at one add then I really tried to add up to my position here. You can't really see it on this chart, but it dipped to like 92, 93. And I was trying to really double up, get my average, like 96, 97. I could not get filled for the life of me. And so again had I gotten filled, get in my average with a rather sizeable position at 95, 96 97, and then selling anywhere 103, 105, 107, that's a nice little, 10% bounce, nothing huge, but I did not get the position.
And I said, I don't know E-Trade is giving me issues. And it it was frustrating, right? So I had that, then I was trying another more, one more dip by on TMXN and it was just like, no, it couldn't bounce. So I was out.
I tried another dip by on SHMP, which I tried to less volatile play. I'm trying everything, I'm really overtrading. But this stock has gone for basically 15 to 30 and I was taking advantage of this morning panic. I nailed the bottom here. The problem with this one was that I was not patient enough.
The real bounce didn't happen until the afternoon. I don't think I'm ever gonna be patient to buy a morning panic and then only get the bounce in the afternoon. So small gain there in hindsight.
Yeah, it should have been more patient, but look at the issues, okay? Too early and being impatient caused this loss, nailing the bottom, but only getting a small position size, pretty much nailing the bottom here, but getting a small position size TMXN just not working at all. SHMP me being impatient. So really look at every single play what'd you do wrong.
All of that I mean, I'm basically up like a few hundred on the day. This is the biggest loss of the year for me, REFR I have a separate long-term newsletter. This is just, what's so funny.
And it's not funny, it's kind of sad. I was holding this ever since the breakout a few days ago, right here on December 1st. it didn't close strong, but it tested the 340s, 350s. They made components for cars for automatic dimming for the windows, it saves on energy for electric vehicles, it saves 5% up to 5% of the range, which could be very useful.
They're gonna be in the new Fisker electric vehicle. No one really knows about them as an electric vehicle play. I always, for whatever reason, if you go back through my years of video lessons, I always get hung up on this company.
I always like fall in love with the technology and I should have been out, right? Like when it failed here, when it failed to hold the breakout, I probably should have just gotten out but I was like, no, this is my long-term newsletter. I like the whole idea, if electric vehicles start getting hot again, and this company, all they need is one press release, no press release comes, electric vehicles are not as hot as they were a few weeks ago. The stock is down trending, I'm still holding it in the 280s.
I'm like, well, you've got the range, the bottom of the range here is like 260, 270 so I'm protected. What happens Wednesday? It takes out 260. Let me just show you what happened. This was on a lunch break from my live webinar. And I'm like, Oh God, I told myself 260 was support and it breaks it right here.
So I exit, I sell my shares. And then literally, this is the strangest thing. I don't know if the promoters are doing this just to mess with me or what, but the thing spikes back to 350, literally an hour after I sold, I held the stock for two weeks, which is an eternity for me. And then within an hour of me selling, this would have been a $5,000 profit instead of a $5,000 loss.
You can't predict these things. I still don't know what caused this spike. I just think that it's funny and people were asking me like, don't you feel bad about the $10,000 swing? And the answer is no. Remember I donate a hundred percent of my trading profits to charity, I wanna donate more to charity.
So, it kind of sucks, but at the same time when you're holding a swing, it's so much more inexact than a morning panic, or like a first green day. I just think it's very strange that it's spiked literally within an hour. And I would not have held for $5,000 profit.
I most assuredly would have been out at 330 making 10%. I would have maximum made three grand on this. So it wasn't a $10,000 swing it was $8,000 swing. That makes me feel better. And then this is a slippery slope. So TSNP, I'm trying to catch the max panic, this is what's most frustrating I think.
TSNP I'm wisely avoiding this drop, I'm like no it's not perfect goodbyes aren't working, but it just goes into like this crazy panic here midday. And I just had to jump on it. I felt guilty, like missing it. I'm like, I think this thing is gonna bounce. So I'm buying in the eights, I'm adding in the eights, but it just keeps going and it goes down to the right at eight, I cut it because I'm like, this thing is going to the sevens, which sure enough sevens are the bottom and then it bounces all the way to 14.
This is a hundred percent bounce. So I had a small loss on it, but it's funny because it did bounce. I was on the right track, I was there for it.
But, again it's not a perfect bottom. It actually double bottomed, which I can't remember the last time that we've seen the double bottom on these kinds of plays. Usually it's like max panic and then bounce or max panic and weak bounce or no bounce, but it double bottomed and the stock doubled. So I was on the right track, but no money for me.
SFOR this is where I got a little sloppy because I'm like, okay, they're releasing their Zoom wannabe product on Friday. It had already spiked up in the morning at 12. And it had broken at twice here at 125 and I didn't chase it wisely at 125, I didn't want to chase it at 11, but when it dipped here to like the 10s, I was like, well, it'll probably retest the 12s, heading into the product demo. So I just kind of bought it.
And this was probably my worst trade of the day where it's not at support, which was at nine. It had already basically tripled or quadrupled top here in the 12s. Why am I buying it in the 10s? I tried to impose my will on the market thinking like, Oh, intro is gonna be Friday, it's got to come up. It doesn't have to do anything. And I got caught in this I tried to get executed, trying to sell it, trying to protect myself.
And I just could not even exit. I tried to sell it at 10. And again, with these market makers, I don't know if its a market makers, I don't know if it's E-Trade, I don't know if it's a market or a combination of the three, but I am just not able to sell sometimes when these things are panicking, I'm with all the rest of the newbies who are panicking. So that was my worst loss of the day and that kind of sucked. And then I finished off the day strongly with my trade on RSCF into the clothes. It was a strong first green day play.
I actually thought that I might hold it overnight because it was a strong first green day play, but I was just so frazzled from the earlier traits. I was like, let me just take your profit. Now, as it turned out, ignore these typos, stock actually dropped immediately from the get go. So it was right to sell into the clothes. Sometimes trading scared and being frazzled really helps.
Now onto my best trade of the week. My scariest trade of the week this morning, I did not, I couldn't even alert it because it was so quick and it was so scary. I think I said like I'm buying it and I'm trying to sell it. This is a huge runner, a higher price runner up from 31 all the way up to 197, very similar if you put the pattern overlay and it's very similar to RSCF, but very different run up here. And it was just actually pretty crazy how much it ran, but I like trying higher price stocks prompts to Matt Monica by the way, today he had a record day on this.
He made 27,000 on this one and I think 33,000 overall that's his best day ever. I think he's closing in on 600,000 in profits, but he is, I think he was long the stock overnight. I think he sold into the gap up and then he'd also bought the dip by. This is a classic four and five pattern for my seven step framework. And the thing tanked from basically 197 down here to the 80s. And I actually bought it at first.
I mean, I showed the screenshot, I couldn't alert it cause it was just so damn quick. I ended up with 1200 shares, but at first I bought a thousand shares, I got executed at like 85, right on this dip right here. I got really like low the day was fantastic thousand shares at 85 is going up to like 93, 94, 95. I'm trying to sell it like locking in the seven, eight grand and I can't sell it.
And I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. It just would not execute a thousand shares. And then it came down to like 82, 83, 84. And I'm like I had to, I was trying to sell it, all the way down.
I was trying to sell it at like 91, 90, 89, even 88, 'cause I was like, even at 88, I'm still making three grand, but when it came down and then it couldn't, I couldn't get executed. I got zero shares out of the thousand shares. I put in like five orders with E-Trade. I didn't know what was going on, but I knew that it was down, literally 50% on really low volume.
And I saw it kind of bunching up the buy orders bidding here at 80, 81, 82. And I was like, let me just add to this position. Let me try to add another 500 shares.
This is the benefit of having a big account and trading with a relative small size. I know that an $85,000 position is a lot for everybody. But I trained with a really small percentage of my accounts. I'm up over 1.1 million this year. So I could throw in like a quarter of a million or even a half a million on one of these places. I don't think it would be on BITW 'cause this one's extra scary and risky, but when it's my perfect pattern, I'm gonna be a little more aggressive.
Some people said like, I didn't even explain this fully, but some people saw my commentary and they're like, why didn't you exit? I'm gonna be more aggressive when it's a perfect pattern. And that gives me more confidence. And I added 250 shares here at like 82 or something. So I got my average to like 84, 50 or something like that.
And then it was respiring and I got out here as it bounced into the low 90s I ended up making seven grand. It actually went all the way up to 112. So we're talking that this thing went up what 15, like nearly 30 points a share, nearly $30 a share. So nearly yeah, if I timed it perfectly, right, we're talking 30 grand in profits, but very scary. So this is just a classic morning penny dip buy. And this one worked rather well for me and Matt Monica.
So that was my best trade, but it was also risky. And then I tried a bunch of little trades, just again, once I'm frazzled, I start really getting more conservative in position size, more conservative in my plants. And you can see a lot of small executions, like I'm trying different stuff, but a few hundred up, a few hundred down, I'm not really that interested. BTSC was a Bitcoin breakout play. I actually played it well, broke the day high, I've been underestimating Bitcoin plays.
So I bought the day high breakout I had patients, I sold it actually on that first top. I didn't even know that it double top tier, but I'm just buying a breakout on Bitcoin and I'm testing it 'cause I haven't really taken advantage of Bitcoin at all. And then a few other trades here, just a few hundred each where I'm trying to dip by plays or ZKIN was that stocks to trade breaking news play. But after this week that I've had, after that $7,000 profit today, after the $7,000 loss yesterday, I'm just frazzled and that's where my head's at. And I want you to see that.
So after you take big losses or big swings, or you're not getting executed, great, feel free to like size down, get more conservative. Again, adapting to the market, not just adapting to the market, adapting to yourself, recognizing, maybe this isn't your day, maybe this isn't your week. You don't have to try to be a hero, You don't have to go for $2,000 profits. Like I normally do. You can see after my big trade this morning, like all my trades are relatively controlled, like losing a few hundred, making a few hundred and just keeping it relatively stress-free. So, Ooh, I feel better now that was like my confession, I'm still profitable, but I kind of wish that I was down 5,000 'cause then maybe you would respect this lesson more.
I feel like people don't respect like the lessons, like even when I was giving the live webinar yesterday, everyone was like, Oh, you are a human. It's good to see you lose. And I'm like, what? But I get it you wanna see losses. And sometimes it's just a slippery slope for me. I got a little slippery, a little undisciplined with REFR, a little undisciplined with SFOR.
But because of these patterns, because there's so many plays, I still finished green after a nasty three days, but I'll tell you on Friday, I'm gonna take it very much smaller with position sizes. I'm gonna try to do fewer trades. I'm gonna try to be pickier 'cause I've made nearly 20,000 this week, but you know it's a very slippery slope once you start getting undisciplined.
Forget about losing 7,000 in a day or 2,000 in short-term trades, I mean, you get undisciplined you can lose 20,000, you can lose 50,000. It gets very scary. So I have to recognize that I'm a little off, the market's a little off and I'm gonna size down and adapt.
So again, leave a comment underneath this video if you understand, say I will adapt and I'm also gonna post a link to this free new holiday guide that I'm working on. Let me know if you're gonna study hard over the holidays. I'll see you guys in chat.
2020-12-22 19:07
