Answering DVD FAQs

Below, I'm going to provide answers to the most commonly asked questions I've been receiving about my upcoming DVD. Please post any additional questions in the comments section, and I'll do my best to add them! If you want a better idea of what my live trade examples will look like, make sure you check out this post for a video of an OTC breakout, or this post with a video of a Nasdaq short.

For those of you who are interested, I'll do my best to keep this post updated with a link to the best discounted price for the DVD. Currently, the best deal is coupon code "NEXT100", which will save you $800!

Wow guys, thanks so much for the early feedback on my DVD. Reviews have been incredible so far, be sure to check them out in this post, or check out the official "Investimonials" page for my DVD!

Is this DVD good for a beginner?
I absolutely believe it is! The most relevant part for beginners in this DVD will undoubtedly be Chapter 2, which focuses on all of the tips I have for new traders. I started trading with absolutely no market knowledge, so I draw most of this material from mistakes that I made when I first started trading and things that I wish I had known from the start.

The main topics included are:

-Market and Trading Basics
-Basic Trader Lingo
-What is Short Selling
-Trading/Computer Setups
-Account Building 101
-Overcoming Your Emotions
-Annoying Rules/Regulations
-Choosing Brokers
-Intro to Market Scanners
-Handy Desktop Applications

If you learned from Tim Sykes, why not just buy his DVDs? What makes yours better/different?
My style of trading has diverted greatly from what Tim teaches in the last couple of years, to the point that we're rarely trading the same stocks anymore. I trade completely based off of chart patterns, and I only trade liquid stocks that are easy to enter/exit. So if you're looking for different patterns and different strategies, you don't have to worry about that. While Tim and I are both successful traders, there's a lot we do differently from each other.

The other aspect is that this DVD has 35 live trade examples, where I recorded my entries and exits and explained to you my thought process throughout the trade. This is so much more useful than looking at end of day charts and, in hindsight, telling someone where they should have entered and exited. Instead, you get to see where I actually DID enter and exit, hear how emotions played a role, see how I handle bad trades, and so many more subtleties that you'd otherwise miss completely. I will teach you the strategy, I will show you my attempts to trade the strategy, and I will explain exactly what I did right and wrong in every single trade.

What makes your DVD better/different than Nate's? (Investorslive)
While my trading strategy is closer to Nate's than Tim's, there still are quite a few differences between our styles. I must admit, Nate's DVD was a big inspiration to me to create this one, as I loved the idea of showing live examples as I traded them.

One big difference is that I go much more in depth when it comes to OTC trading, and although the OTC market is in the midst of a dead patch, the opportunities that do still come around like new promotion releases are some of my most reliable and most profitable trades that I make. You will also get both introductory/beginner information and specific trading strategies all in one DVD with me, while Nate has that split into two products. So you can definitely save a buck by getting it all in one place with mine.

How long is your DVD?
My DVD is roughly 16.5 hours long. At least 10 hours of this content is live trade examples of my top strategies.

Will the DVD be a hard copy, or streaming only?
There is currently only an option to stream the DVD on your computer. If this ever changes, I'll be sure to announce it.

Does your DVD teach level 2?
Yes, I teach level 2 basics and show new examples that I recorded to illustrate points. You can also find free level 2 educational material on this blog.

How many different strategies do you teach?
There are eight different strategies I cover in this DVD. Three of them are buying strategies, five of them are short selling.

How many of your 35 live trades are listed stocks vs. OTCs?
13 of the trades are examples of different OTC strategies; the other 22 are listed stocks (Nasdaqs.)

Do you show losing trades?
Absolutely! Some of our best lessons as traders are from our losses. 7 out of my 35 examples are losing trades. Several of them show me cutting a loss as planned, when the setup doesn't work. But in the others, you actually get to see me get stubborn, fight the stock, and turn a bad trade into a bigtime headache.


Let me know if there are any more questions you need answered!

Another Clip From My Upcoming DVD

Below you will see another video of one of my 34 live trades from my upcoming DVD, "Trading Tickers: the Long and Short of it." If you haven't seen it already, be sure to also check out the clip of my FNMA trade from Chapter 6, as it shows a very different type of play. I hope you all enjoy this clip, and please post below or on the youtube comments section if you have any questions about either one! If you're interested in learning more of my rules and strategies, please check out the DVD info link and get discounted early bird prices!

25 Minute Clip From My DVD

Below you will see a video of one of my 34 live trades from my upcoming DVD, "Trading Tickers: the Long and Short of it." I hope you all enjoy it, and please post below or on the youtube comments section if you have any questions! If you're interested in learning more of my rules and strategies, please check out the DVD info link and get discounted early bird prices! 

Details About My Upcoming DVD (and How to Win a Free Copy)

UPDATE: Congrats to profitly user "Zero2Hero" for his winning submission - "Trading Tickers: the Long and Short of it"

As many of you already know, I am very excited to announce the upcoming release of my only DVD, a guide I have put together to teach my entire trading framework! Before I get into any details, I have to begin by thanking ALL of my followers over the past few years. The response I received when I started this blog was beyond any of my expectations. I was stunned by the traffic that poured into the site and the support I've received from all of you, especially during my struggles.

At this point, the one thing my DVD is lacking is a good name, so I'm going to turn to all of you for help. On my DVD profitly wall, please post your best name suggestion! Whoever provides the best suggestion will win a free copy of my DVD! This contest will run until the end of June 10, 2015, only one suggestion per person! Your help is very much appreciated!

I also must stress, THIS IS NOT a "Get rich quick" DVD! I will show you everything I have learned through my career that has helped me become consistently profitable, but that by no means guarantees success. Trading is not easy. In fact, 90% of traders fail. If you want to be a trader, you're in for a steep learning curve, quite a bit of stress, and wild emotional swings. This is NOT something to do for quick cash, and this is NOT gambling! This is for someone who wants to understand how to become a consistent trader, not someone who just wants to get rich quick. Viewing my DVD will not make you an overnight millionaire, but, hopefully, it will help guide you to becoming a part of the 10% that succeed.

From the time I became a consistently successful trader, the idea of a DVD has always been in the back of my mind. I wanted to teach my strategies, yet, I kept putting it off for a few reasons. Most importantly, I didn't want to sell ANYTHING that I wasn't 100% sure was a quality product. I knew it would take a tremendous amount of time and energy to put something together that met my standards, and until recently, I had neither of those things.

While moving to Colorado in 2014 meant waking up earlier and dealing with a 7:30 a.m. market open, it also meant that I was finished at 2:00 p.m. every day, giving me plenty of time after-hours to undertake this massive project. So, for the past six months, I have spent multiple hours per day constructing a product that I knew I could be proud of. From the most basic of concepts to advanced explanations of live trades, I have packed my DVD with all of the information I could think of that might be helpful to aspiring traders. The result is over 15 hours of content, including 35 live trades, designed to help you become a better trader. Below, I have listed the twelve chapters that will be covered:

Chapter 1 - Introduction and History
Chapter 2 - Important Beginner Basics
Chapter 3 - Basics to My Trading Strategies
Chapter 4 - Educational Services and Daily Preparation
Chapter 5 - Buying New Stock Promotions
Chapter 6 - Buying OTC Multiday Breakouts
Chapter 7 - OTC Short Setups
Chapter 8 - Buying Major Daily Breakouts
Chapter 9 - Shorting Lower Highs into Spikes
Chapter 10 - Shorting into Daily Resistance
Chapter 11 - Shorting Overextended Gap Downs
Chapter 12 - Shorting into Bounces

While the first four chapters lay the groundwork for everything that goes into my preparation before I even make a trade, the last eight chapters are where I dive into the specific strategies I use daily. Each chapter teaches a different setup that I play, including live trade examples of each strategy! You will see my entries, my exits, my successes, and my failures. But, most importantly, you will see the core strategies that allow me to be consistently profitable.

I am eagerly anticipating the release of this DVD and look forward to your feedback! I hope you will all find it useful and enjoy it very much!

Quick Recap of my PBMD Debacle

Blog posts about large losses are usually the best ones to learn from, so it's a good thing for all of you that I have another to share!

From the time I took a loss on LAKE, as well as a large NDRM loss early in 2015, I've been very good about avoiding the frontside of large runners. I was letting stocks spike, exhaust themselves, and THEN I would strike. This spring, VLTC was one of the most ridiculous short squeezes we've seen in quite a while, and I managed not to twist myself badly on that one at all! I was incredibly proud of myself.

Then, in the last couple of weeks, my habits began to change again for the worse. I had an early short on VGGL that I chose to get stubborn with, but my stubbornness was rewarded as I came away with a nice gain instead of the loss I deserved (I was down $40k at one point.) I can't remember the other example, but I know that I was stubborn on another and was rewarded with a nice win. Point being, I fell back into bad habits, and those bad habits were reinforced, unfortunately.

The other factor that set the stage for my recent loss was boredom. I've been on a very nice run the last six weeks, finally feeling back in my groove. This week started out SLOW. I spent most of each day staring at the screen looking for plays, and I could find nothing major that I liked. So, naturally, I became impatient. I tried to manufacture my own plays. This is where my problems started on PBMD.

Above is the daily chart for PBMD. Most of this move occurred on a straight up spike into close on good news. The volume was nothing special. I believed I saw resistance on the daily chart in the 1.90s, so I started in short 21,000 shares at a 1.67 average. I figured this would be like so many other low-volume runners I'd seen recently and gap down the next morning. This is where I broke my first rule, not to short the frontside of a move, ESPECIALLY day 1. I was gambling that the gap would go in my favor, and if it gapped up, I figured that I could just add a little playing off of the 1.90 area.

Unfortunately, it never occurred to me that PBMD might gap up HUGE. Above, you can see the PBMD chart after hours Tuesday and premarket Wednesday. I was watching PBMD after hours spike into the 2s, and knew I was in trouble. My position was at Centerpoint. Unfortunately, Centerpoint does not allow GTC orders. So I was unable to cover premarket Wednesday into the large dip because I couldn't have an order sitting there. I actually did try, but as I expected, the order was cancelled. THIS IS 100% MY FAULT, I KNEW THIS GOING IN. I just didn't care. I still had the nonchalant, "I can always average up if I don't get covered" attitude. 

As I watched PBMD gap up premarket and then open, I could see that I wasn't going to get my pullback for break even. So I decided to dig in my heels and fight. I was going to add big into spikes and then cover up into pullbacks to let myself out. If I was early on my adds, I would simply cut the losses on key high of day breaks. Through managing my position this way, I was sure I'd come out okay. After all, how high could it possibly go? It was already up from the $0.50 area!

Above is the first hour-and-a-half of market action on PBMD. Volume was absolutely massive now, so adding size wasn't difficult at all. Around 10:06, I added 40,000 shares at about $2.70, a bit early. The $2.95 high of day rejected though, so I was happy to hold on to my adds. As I watched PBMD fade back and fight in the mid $2s, I could see that there was a lot of support. It even briefly cracked the $2.60 area, yet no large breakdown occurred as I expected. I covered about 29,000 of my adds in the mid 2.60s before the next large perk up. To my dismay, the high of day $2.95 broke, as well as $3.00. I didn't want to take off the rest of my adds for a loss though! So I decided to dig in my heels again. I now was riding 32,000 shares from just over a $2.00 average. My unrealized loss was getting ugly.

I managed to sit on my hands until the perk and fail through $4, around 11:40 a.m. After the low $4s rejected, I once again tried adding large size into a lower high. I believe I brought my total size up to about 80,000 shares at this point. The $4.08 high didn't hold for long, though, and I was forced to cut my adds. Unfortunately, I made ANOTHER mistake here, once again only cutting partial size. I now had over 50,000 shares as PBMD continued to rip higher.

PBMD was quickly through $5 before I knew what had happened, and my unrealized loss was ballooning. After topping out at $5.48 and having a hard pullback under $5.00, I decided to try one more time into the rebound. I added large once again, risking off of the $5.50 area. Once again, PBMD ripped to new highs. At this point, I was mentally done. I cut everything into the strength, quite poorly, as I didn't even get out at $5.50. My covers were closer to the $5.80 area.

When all was said and done, I had a $188,000 loss on PBMD. I managed to recover a little bit of those losses before close, but below, you can see the end-of-day damage:

I actually had quite a few nice short entries into pops over $6.00 the last few hours of the day, but I fell into a homerun mentality and wouldn't pay myself into dips! I had a chance to minimize the damage, but I failed.

To recap, here are the mistakes I made:

1. Shorted on Day 1 of a runner into close
2. Decided to average up and fight rather than cut the loss after large gap up
3. Ignored massive volume
4. Made assumptions about how high it could or couldn't go
5. Refused to cut entire losses on adds that didn't work
6. Went for the "Homerun" and revenge on late day trades

Amazingly, I feel totally okay mentally after this loss. I'm more annoyed with my poor discipline than anything else. But I'm super excited to attack PBMD again going forward when the trend is finally on my side!

Stubbornness KILLS. I really hope you don't have to learn that lesson the hard way multiple times like I did. For all of the times it works out in your favor, the PBMDs, LAKEs, NDRMs, VLTCs, will wipe those gains out AND THEN SOME. Stay safe out there. Good luck the rest of the way with this ticker!!!

Some 2015 Updates

Since we're entering a new year, I figured it would beneficial to do a quick post updating some information that may be out of date or not clearly stated on my blog. I hope everyone finds this beneficial and it answers some questions!

Brokers I am using:

• Centerpoint Securities (ETC)
• Centerpoint Securities (Wedbush)
• Speedtrader

Other brokers I have used and liked (for various reasons):

• http://tradetheticker.blogspot.com/2014/02/question-what-brokers-do-you.html
• http://tradetheticker.blogspot.com/2014/04/question-which-broker-is-best-for-me.html

Trading platforms I use:

• DAS Trader (Provided by Speedtrader)
• Sterling Trader Pro (Provided by Centerpoint)
• ThinkorSwim by TD Ameritrade (For free charting only)

Stock scanner I use:

• "StockstoTrade"

Similar scanners I have used and liked:

• Equityfeed
• Interactive Brokers scanner (found on their TWS Platform)

Free scanners (with less features):

• http://finviz.com/screener.ashx
• ThinkorSwim by TD Ameritrade scanner

Stock promoters I follow closely:

• http://tradetheticker.blogspot.com/p/stock-promoters.html

Trading rules I think are most important:

• http://tradetheticker.blogspot.com/2014/02/some-tips-for-new-traders-from-old-blog.html

Any questions not answered here can be found on my FAQ page:

• http://tradetheticker.blogspot.com/p/list-of-faq.html

A Basic Example of Spreadsheet Building

In my 2014 Vegas presentation, one topic I covered was how I use spreadsheets to track specific setups and try to find a statistical edge. There seemed to be a lot of interest in this process, so I'm going to go through an example of building a spreadsheet. As my example, I'll use tracking afternoon breakouts on listed stocks, but keep in mind you can do this for any setup you want to track. One important thing to note is that differing market conditions can definitely affect how different setups work. This example will use a VERY small sample size, which I would not consider statistically significant. So the more data you have, the better.

Part 1: What to Track?

The first step in this whole process is figuring out the setup you want to track and any criteria that may go along with it. What area do you want to focus on? Do you already have an idea of some set "Rules" that you may have for this setup? Or are you just starting fresh and seeing what you can discover?

We will be tracking afternoon breakouts on listed stocks. Obviously, there are many stocks in the market that have afternoon breakouts every day. I choose some very specific criteria to help narrow the scope and, hopefully, focus me in on the best opportunities. Here are the criteria that matter to me:

• % Change >= 10%
• Reasoning: I want to buy afternoon breakouts for stocks that are already up STRONGLY on the day. Also, if the stock is up 10%+ already, that means there is volatility. I'm not interested in stocks that will break out and only move a couple percent at most because they have no intraday range
• Method: I use a market scanner to find stocks that meet this criteria

• Well above-average trading volume
• Reasoning: I want a stock that is clearly drawing more interest than usual
• Method: Either a scanner filter, or I just look at the daily volume on a one-year chart to get an idea of how today compares

• At least one hour of consolidation from previous high
• Reasoning: The stock needs time to set up for the next leg up
• Method: I look at intraday charts to determine this; there isn't a scanner filter that I know of

• Breakout after 2:30 EST
• Reasoning: These are "afternoon" breakouts after all, and in my experience, later afternoon is more reliable
• Method: Look at a clock

• No Key Resistance Levels Close Overhead
• Reasoning: I don't want to buy an afternoon breakout if there's a major resistance level nearby that could stuff it
• Method: Look at a daily chart - see if there are any significant overhead levels nearby

It's very important to note that just because the above criteria are what I use, that doesn't mean it's the "right" way. You could have different ideas of what you're looking for, and you can adjust your criteria to fit with your goals. For example, maybe you want to track breakouts after 1:00 EST. That's absolutely fine! Track what is right for YOU from setup to setup; you can always adjust as you go. That being said, I don't recommend using hindsight to "data-mine" and make the results look good. Forward tracking is the best way to see if a setup is working, not adding/removing criteria from previous data to find what was successful in hindsight.

Part 2: Tracking Results

We now know what the criteria are for a stock to make our "Afternoon Breakout" list. So the next question we have to ask ourselves is, what are the results? Did the breakout succeed or fail? What factors determine this? Well, let's think about what would matter to us if we were in the trade. Here are some results that I DEFINITELY would want to track:

• After the breakout occurred, what was the low?
• Reasoning: I want to get an idea of how often the stock dips below the breakout point and how severe that dip might be

• After the breakout occurred, what was the high?
• Reasoning: I want to know how far the stock ran after the breakout, which should have been an important catalyst.

• Where did the stock close?
• Reasoning: I want to know how often these close ABOVE breakout levels.

• Where did the stock open the next morning?
• Reasoning: I want to know if the stock gapped up or down. How often and how strong these tend to gap up will influence my decision as to whether I want to hold overnight or not

• What were other key price points the following day?
• Reasoning: Next day highs and lows will help give me an idea of how well afternoon breakouts run into the next day

Below is an image of what your tracking page might look like:

Part 3: Putting it All Together

For the sake of this example, I'm going to use some old data to fill in the spreadsheet and give you an idea of how everything comes together. First, here is an image with only the basic data filled in, the information that you would manually input at the end of the day based off of the chart:

Now this is where this post gets a bit tricky. I could get into all of the formulas I use, but I don't want to turn this into a lesson on Excel. I think the best solution is to post a link to this spreadsheet so you can see for yourselves how the rest of the sheet fills out and the formulas I use to gather specific data. Feel free to ask questions in the comments section if something is unclear and I'll do my best to address it. Here is the link to view my sample spreadsheet.