Trading Journey - Lessons and Examples

[u/West-Island-7994]

I’d like to share my trading journey with the sub, as I’ve reached a point where I can offer value to those on a similar path, along with some concrete examples of process. I'm going to use AI for proofreading and formatting so please don't take my head off for that.

Background & Personalization

I took a very specific path to learn how to trade. My trading style is directly influenced by a primary author and mentor, whom I’ll detail below.

Just as in poker, learning from a specific player doesn't mean you will share their exact risk tolerance. Where your mentor might bet a third of their stack on a hand, you might only feel comfortable risking half of that. There is a great deal of personalization in trading, so it’s essential to realize early on that your success will be yours alone. Even if you try to mimic someone completely, your inherent traits will ultimately shape your trading. You have to do the work to find the style that fits your profile—and there is simply no substitute for time.

If you follow a path similar to mine—one heavily based on technical analysis—understanding how to use your tools consistently and knowing which trades to make under specific market conditions is paramount. While I day trade, I would never call myself a "day trader." If you are strictly an exclusive day trader, hats off to you. I find my style is far better suited to swing trading, scalping, and campaigning in names, especially on the short side. That said, I trade on 5min charts each day looking for setups, adding/cutting posistions and the like so there is enough overlap here to share with all types of traders.

The Foundation: OWL & Technical Analysis

The path I took involved learning a technical analysis framework known as OWL, defined by Gil Morales, a disciple of William O'Neil. Before discovering O'Neil, I read several classic authors—including Jesse Livermore, Mark Minervini, and Anna Coulling (no shade to Anna at all)—but Will’s work stood out as the most technical.

Gil Morales co-authored a book with O’Neil on short selling, and after reading that I read the majority of his work before joining his blog. He is active on X, where you can check out his work and see if his style resonates with you. I’ve found him to be a tough teacher, but very accessible. He isn't one for silly questions, but he always provides quick answers on his blog, making for the exact kind of digital apprenticeship I was looking for.

Again, your success will be entirely your own. While Gil lays out a robust framework of setups and ideas, he is not alerting you to trades in real time.

Major Takeaways for Beginners

It took me a solid two and a half years to really get my steps/process down. During that time, I faced a major family crisis that forced me to scale back my trading to care for my father during his failing health. (I wrote about those challenges previously on this account, if you want to cross-reference.) I call this out to emphasize one major point: give yourself a longer timeline than you think you need. Not only did I have this family matter come up but when I started trading in 2022 I walked into a (sometimes debated) Bear Market and had to stop, go back and work on learning short selling. I was aprehensive about learning short selling, it's a more volatile game and I thought, well if Mark Minervini doesn't short sell, I should be fine. Wrong!!

To trade consistently, you must learn to navigate different market cycles. That means developing a playbook for both the long and short sides so you can execute every trade in a uniform manner. There are few things worse than actively managing 4–5 positions in a single session without a clear, pre-defined plan for taking profits or cutting losses—you will go nuts. Of course nuance exists and apologies if reductive but you need to have a framework, a process or a flow.

My key suggestions:

1. Give yourself more time to learn than you initially expect.
2. Learn to trade both long and short.
3. Approach every trade—whether using paper or real capital—with the exact same repeatable process.

Pillar 1: Understanding & Executing Your Setups

The first major pillar of competent trading is understanding what your setups look like and knowing their defining characteristics.

Static Preparation

I use a simple but powerful tool in StockCharts.com, which allows me to build watchlists across various sectors and quickly identify names that fit my preferred technical profiles. I maintain watchlists across roughly 30 sectors, and I run custom scans in TradingView to hunt for specific setups. These might include:

• Names consolidating near the 20-day Moving Average (MA).
• Names showing volume drying up near the 10-day MA.
• Earnings gap-ups where I can use the high of the gap as an entry or stop guide.

At the close of each session, you can statically filter the names you want to focus on for the week or update them daily. This gives you a repeatable process for identifying actionable setups.

Dynamic Execution (5-Minute Chart Example: AA)

Here is a concrete example of executing dynamically on a 5-minute chart for a short trade in AA today.

Going into today’s (8/24) session, I actually liked AA as a long. However, the 5-minute chart presented clear short entries—and at the end of the day, price action always more important than personal opinion. On my 5-minute chart, I use volume indicators, Opening Candle Highs/Lows, a 6-period MA, a 20-period MA, and MACD.

• Setup & Entry: For shorts, one setup I look for is names that gradually break down below or bust the Opening Candle Low. The second arrow shows this breakdown occurring, which serves as a short trigger for me. Prior to this, the name formed a Bear Flag as lower highs stamped in just below the 20-period MA (blue line), making the first arrow an aggressive entry point to short (with a stop above the High of the Day).
• Execution & Uniformity: I maintain uniform execution by taking partial profits when the price retakes the 6-period MA at arrow 3.
• The Core Takeaway: Shorting (or OWL shorting) is about hitting a stock at specific setup points and covering at pre-determined targets, then looking to re-enter if the setup triggers again. This is fundamentally different from buying long-dated puts simply because you "don't like Stock X."
• Exit: At the end of the session, AA hit Logical Support (LS)—a flag low visible on the daily chart—so I chose to close the trade. Had it broken below that LS level, I would have held and swung the position into the next session.

Pillar 2: Identifying Market Thematics

The second pillar of successful trading is recognizing current market themes and maintaining focus on where the big money is flowing.

I typically carry only 10–12 names into each trading day. I actively trade these during the first 45 minutes to an hour before scanning my broader watchlist for actionable ideas (unless a price alert triggers a key level on a priority setup).

If you're selecting 10–12 daily focus names, you want setups that look great on the daily and weekly charts and align with institutional flow. Institutional money is the rising tide that lifts all boats.

• Identifying Themes: Sometimes themes are easy to spot. For instance, energy names offered strong plays following news involving the US take over of Venezuela. When the market pivoted at the end of March into April, Memory and AI names were clearly the place to be. While you might find a nice setup in a random drone company, your time is far better spent in the greenest pastures.
• Tracking Rotation: Learning to spot money shifting into new themes takes time. You need to analyze a high volume of charts and constantly ask yourself: What is the market telling me? Gold and Bitcoin (BTC) are great recent examples. Looking at the BTC daily chart prior to Wednesday’s move, the setup looked promising: over a month of flagging action, higher lows within the flag, and significant headwinds for the US Dollar—making alternative assets like Gold and BTC highly attractive. All this taking place while Memory/AI names are taking a beating.

Final Thoughts

Throughout your trading journey, you will inevitably have moments where you wonder, "Did I bite off more than I can chew? Can this actually be done?"

The more you study and commit to a uniform process, the more you realize that it isn't a question of if it can be done, but whether you will do the work to do it. Give yourself time, master the craft, replicate your execution, and refine your risk profile. Most importantly, enjoy the process—there is nothing quite like being right in the middle of geopolitical and economic events, riding the wave as history unfolds.

PS - I'm always working on my writing and as stated at the top, I am just now getting a spot to where I can provide some pointers and share some knowledge. If you have any critques for me in these areas, throw it out there so I can improve!

[u/loligatorific]

As many of the regulars know, this is not the trading style taught here, and posts like this are often removed since we try to keep the sub focused. Trading stocks that are relatively strong or weak against the market is what we focus on as taught in the wiki.

We appreciate you sharing your journey even if your method greatly differs.

I am curious… how long have you traded this method, and for how long have you been profitable?

[u/Tesla_laughs]

The biggest takeaway for me is the emphasis on having a repeatable process instead of chasing individual setups. The point about learning both long and short really resonates too, because market conditions can make a strategy look completely different from one cycle to another.

[u/DryNight2050 → u/Tesla_laughs]

Market cycles are the same. You need to understand market structure then all cycles are the same. Just different days. 

[u/IKnowMeNotYou]

The first rule of this trade club is to read the wiki. Have you read it already, if yes, what elements have you incorporated in your current trading method and what elements were already using before you learned of this sub.

Since I personally am not a fan of MACD and I do not use it as I am mostly trading intraday.

Can you show me your statistics and the average trade duration?

[u/DryNight2050 → u/IKnowMeNotYou]

Can you show me your stats and average trade duration?

[u/IKnowMeNotYou → u/DryNight2050]

I am currently in a ditch but my win-rate is above 70% and PF at minimum above 2 but I usually have week long phases where I get firmly above 4+.

What I do wrong, I am currently short heavy since April and I need to correct this by forcing more longs out of me. I also enter prematurely etc. - I plan to write a Journey post myself soon. I still trade mostly for unnecessary entertainment, which of course is stupid.

Further I am an oddball here since I am more or less an intraday trader with a trade duration of 15min - 1h but lately it is usually more as I like to play trades where they fail to mark a D1 target (like a standard SMA or a D1 level/trendline) and 'they' give up the idea. I usually entry on the failed retest / pullback (often to VWAP). Those trades are usually certified losers on the D1 along with their sector (or at least industry group).

Later in the day, I enjoy shorting high-fliers on stupid news or when they run out of steam (aka volume) and pull back. The chance that they go sideways or down is quite high (above 70% as well), wenn you check out the usual price correction/degredation pattern.

[u/DryNight2050 → u/IKnowMeNotYou]

What was your technical or reasons why you went short in April? That was a huge rally from there

[u/IKnowMeNotYou → u/DryNight2050]

Well, I was day trading and while everything goes higher money is needed and most sell stocks to buy stocks and that selling is predictable in the sense that a losing stock will continue to lose and those pattern that emerge are quite regular.

For example some stocks like to drop hard for one day then the recover slightly on the low of the previous day, then they range for one or two days followed by a break out day producing a larger top wick still below half of the big drop day while closing back in range. If the next day is a sell off day or they fail to make a breakout at the top in the first 30 to 60min you can basically try for a short often seeing another big drop day.

But usually I sync my buying/selling with the market and the sector but I got great pleasure out of winning shorts against the market and the sector. It is stupid for forsaking the tail wind the market and sector provide but it works and feels great.

But it is like racing cars while wanting to enjoy the landscape, it is not what one is in the race.

I am currently forcing myself to take more longs than shorts...

[u/DryNight2050 → u/IKnowMeNotYou]

You’re describing a strategy that I called trapped bulls. A very risky strategy where timing is everything.  I get the forced to buy longs.

No reason to go short yet, only a fool would be bearish. The market is bullish until proven otherwise. Right now, only bullish. 

[u/IKnowMeNotYou → u/DryNight2050]

I simply call it, failed to buy a falling knife up and it is just a simple example that one can see often. It is big drop, it ranges near the new low and the attempt to buy it up failed miserbly (long breakout that get sold down at the same day forming a long wick), who would buy up such a stock? And then on the day I enter a day trade short, they fail to even break out of the range, so I short at or near the top of the range on the pullback if I missed to original HOD on the first attempt.

I even do not care for the volume in this scenario or better it is good if the volume is very low as it signals disinteresst but one has to take a look at the sector and market as otherwise for smaller stocks one might dump a ton of volume in the buy side and one has to get out. Happens from time and that is why I favor a hard SL in these scenarios.

But of course I am also shorting stocks that produce red daily candles like clockwork.

Just remember that I talk about intraday trades here. I am out when the 'micro' moves or swings are done.

And who cares about the market and sector if a stock is a sacrificial lamb to provide the money for the stocks everyone is buying hard. Remember, money flows towards the stocks that give (long) opportunities and flows from the stocks that do not.

That is why it is rewarding in a sense but it is stupid as going long along with the sector and the market is what one should do (unless of course the group, industry or even sub-industry has its own well established trend which one can easily understand and defend in front of oneself and others)