[0:00]I trade for about two hours each day and can make anywhere between $3 to $5,000 per day. But that wasn't always the case, eight years ago when I started trading, I was feeling lost, confused, frustrated, losing money in this process. It wasn't until I built a simple trading strategy where I could risk $25 to $50, learn the process, and then scale it to actually become a profitable trader using this simple process. Okay, most traders when they're starting out don't realize that you can actually start with $100 or less, learn the right strategy, the right process, how to make it repeatable and then focus on scaling it up over time. So in this video, I'm going to share the full strategy and process of starting trading with $100 or less, so that it's simple, repeatable, and can be done with one to two hours of work per day. Okay, so the goal is by the end of the day to show you how to start trading with only $100, even less if you want, and be able to focus on this in a systematic way. Only have to do this for one hours per day. Obviously, if you want to do more, you can. Sometimes I'm trading for a good part of the day, other times I'm done in 15 minutes. I'm going to show you exactly how that's the case, but overall, this can be packaged into that one to two hour mark consistently and repeatably. But first, I'm going to cover what instrument it makes sense for you to trade, depending on the starting capital and what you're looking to do. Then we're going to get into step number two, which is the simple repeatable trading strategy that is the framework of what I do every single day, and I'm going to show you what I've been able to do over the past couple months. And then step three, how to actually apply this daily to be able to start growing your account. The goal is to keep this simple and repeatable. I can't emphasize that enough. The more you can focus there, the more you can add once it actually is working to be able to get to where you want to be. But if you start jumping around or doing too many crazy things in the beginning, it's going to be too hard for you to be able to get to that point at all. So we're going to start there. Okay, and with this framework that I'm going to be sharing with you, I've been able to have really good consistency and results in my trading. By focusing on a simple rule-based system, by keeping all of my losses really small and tight, and allowing my winners to be more open-ended. And you can see, I've done this where I'm wrong about half the time on my ideas. And you're going to understand as you get into trading, it has almost nothing to do with being right versus wrong, and how you can capitalize when you're right, and how you can protect yourself when you're wrong. And there's a lot of traders out there that are, you know, showing themselves making millions of dollars a month. To me, I don't know if that's really going on or not. I'm just a normal guy, I'm on my own journey at my own pace, and I encourage that from you guys too, is to not draw so much comparison, and just focus on like I'm going to show you in this video, being able to start small, and then letting yourself scale at your own pace, in your own lane, on your own timeline. Comparison is the thief of joy. Remember that everyone's on their own journey. But I basically just want to share what's helped me, because in the beginning, this looked much different. Okay, I spent three years of my life basically wasting time because I didn't understand it could be way more simple starting off. But that's just something that you have to learn over time. And that's why I'm going to be showing you in this video, cuz for a long time, my trading was very inconsistent, and it would ultimately just lead to me burning cash and wasting time. And that's why I'm going to show you, knowing what I know now, what would I do basically starting from zero. Okay, but first step is figuring out what is the best market to trade for you. So the major ones for trading are going to be stocks, futures, forex, and crypto. Okay, stocks are very well regulated and very liquid, meaning it's easy to get in and out of markets. But the bad side about stocks is there is a really high capital requirement for you to be able to make your trading account. You need a ton of upstart capital because there's limited amount of leverage, and you're limited only from 9:30 to 4:00 Japanese Eastern Standard Time, five days a week. So you're a little bit limited in those hours where, you know, some people are working, etc. Futures, on the other hand, allow for substantially better leverage. You're basically trading very similar instruments to stocks, basically almost the same exact thing. There's a few gaps in the sessions where you're forced to take a break, but basically you can trade it 24/5, which opens up a little bit more availability depending on your schedule. It allows for leverage, not really ideal for long-term holding, but we can use different things to do that. Okay, that's a bit of a separate discussion. Forex, on the other hand, is a large market, also 24/5, low capital to start. However, it's very new sensitive, and it's hard to find an edge because you have to understand geopolitics really well, and why different countries' currencies are going to move around the way they do. It's very volatile, very unpredictable. Okay, and then you have crypto, which is open 24/7, so it never closes. A low capital start, you can basically start with any amount of capital. And as long as you understand how to gain access to capital, alright, you can start with a very small amount and make it very effective. Okay, so what we're going to be primarily focusing on is futures and crypto for the reasons that it doesn't require a lot of startup capital, and it's more predictable than something like forex. You can trade this with any of these, but these are why I focused on these two things, specifically crypto. And the reason that we're focusing on these two groups of assets primarily is because we're able to find opportunities immediately in the day. Sometimes it happened fairly quickly. They're going to give us really good opportunity, that are going to allow us to play into edges in the market to be able to position ourselves to make a large amount of profit. Okay, so if we're able to enter out of the New York Open into our gap with our other criteria being hit, then we're able to set our position up to hold the profit, keep our risk contained down here underneath a sweep low. This is a real trade setup that I took. And I'll show you me taking this in real time. Once again, you can see I was able to provide me this opportunity. Okay, so once again, I'm going to show you how this works, so don't worry if you don't understand what I'm saying. I'm going to get into that a little bit. But right now, we need to focus on as a trader, whether you're going to be using stocks, futures, or crypto. Okay, it really boils down to, number one, how much capital do we need? And number two, how much are we looking to make each time we're placing a trade, and in each individual trading session? Okay, so if we were to try to take this position, so this opportunity that I took just a few days ago, even risking $100 using stocks, basically what I'm doing when I'm calculating positions is figuring out where we're entering, where we're setting our risk, if we're wrong about the trade, and price ends up moving down here before coming up here. And then we're taking the dollar amount that we want to risk. Say in this case, it is 100 over the difference of these two values.
[6:15]Okay, and that's going to give me 555 units, or 555 individual slices of that stock to even be able to enter into this trade in the first place. So if we're entering in at 85.15 with that many individual units, the capital requirement on this trade if we were to be trading with stocks, is $47,813, only to try to make $573, risking $100 on the downside. This is if we're just using the stock market. Sometimes the broker will give you, say for example, two X in form of what's called margin, which can drop your capital requirement for the trade down to say $23,000. But if you're using $23,000 to try to make $500 with $100 worth of risk, it's really hard to start with a small amount of capital and make it actually count at all. Okay, so you really just need a lot of upfront capital with stocks. If we look at something like futures, it operates a little bit differently. Okay, so let's take an equivalent scenario. Once again, if we are entering in on a position here, we set up our risk amount. We're calculating this value minus this value to get our stop loss value. We have our profit target value from our entry up to a high, and when you're trading futures, when you buy a contract, you're basically paying to maintain control of a contract that can either gain value or lose value. Okay, and if each one of these values is a point, each contract is going to be worth $5 either gain or loss per point traveled. So if we're calculating the risk by subtracting these two, we get 5.75 points, which times the $5 amount is going to put us approximately at $28.75 worth of risk per contract that we hold. And what we're trying to do on the profit side is 5.78 times our risk, which would equal that 166.25. Now, with future contracts, you can't buy fractional contracts, you have to either round down or round up. But say, in this example, if you were able to hold about four contracts, now if you operate those contracts, based off of where you're trading, usually it's about $50 of what's called margin that you need to keep per contract that you're operating. Say you had about $400 worth of capital in your account, and you wanted to operate four contracts, that would mean you need to maintain a $200 margin buffer. And if you have a $100 stop loss, approximately, that means that if your total position of four of these contracts dropped down to your stop loss, your account buffer would only go to 300, in which case, you're above that $200 worth of margin to be able to operate those contracts. In which case, you can see, now the capital requirement is substantially lower. Pretty similarly with crypto, if we take this trade example where we're entering right here, looking for price to come up, we set our risk down here. And say in order, okay, this should say 15, sorry about that. Okay, so if we're calculating, once again, 86, 12, minus 85, 94 to figure out how many units we're going to need, that's going to give us 0.81. If we want to risk, say for example, $100 divided by 0.81, that's going to give us a requirement to purchase at this level 555 units. Now, what's different about crypto is that even if I'm risking, or aiming to risk this $100, technically my capital requirement is this amount to attempt to make the $578, if I'm right about the trade outcome. I'm basically able to use something called leverage. Okay, and basically, leverage is the exchange allowing you to use multiples, usually ranging between 1 and 50, or even 100 of the capital that you're using, which is effectively dividing the value required for you to actually enter into the position. So if we're using 10x leverage, that would bring our capital requirement all the way from up here down to a much more manageable amount. And then if we say go use something like 100x leverage, now our capital requirement in order to risk $100 is about $473 opposed to almost 50 grand. Okay, and there is some nuance to that, I'm going to explain how leverage works here in a second. But basically, if we wanted to start with $100, and take this same exact trade example, yes, we can't go in, and if we want to start with $100, we're not going to risk $100 on the first trade. But if we have proof of concept of a strategy, and say we want to risk something like $20 on a trade, even though that's still a lot, that would now require 111 units, which would require about $9,500 in order to make $115 with 100x leverage, would bring the capital requirement down to about $100. Now, I'm not saying that this is a good idea. You can start a lot smaller. If you wanted to start with $10, $5, or put a couple hundred dollars into an account, say $300, and you're able to start with, you know, $10, it's a lot more manageable. Okay, it's always going to come down to what the individual is comfortable with. Okay, but leverage is going to give us better access to capital, and that's what futures and crypto both offer. Okay, and mastering this access to capital is going to allow you to be able to start with smaller amounts and be able to actually make the trades count once you know your process is solid. Okay, so there's two main ways that traders can do this and get access to larger amounts of capital. So the first is through something called prop firms, which I'll explain, and then the second is what we just discussed with leverage, but I'm going to go into a little bit more detail explaining how this works. So, starting with prop firms, basically what prop firms are, are their companies that allow you to use a theoretical, say $50,000, $100,000, $200,000 account, and as long as you're following their risk, you can pay, say $50 to $100 depending on the prop firm, and as long as you're following all of those rules, and you're able to get to your profit target, you can now be in a funded state to the point where any profit that you make over here within their rules, you're now able to take either all of it, or a profit share of it. So it's going to allow you to trade with a bit more size if you know your strategy works without needing a ton of upfront capital. And if you end up failing, you're not liable for the capital here. All you're liable for is the fee that you paid to start this evaluation. Sometimes there's a reset fee in order to re-attempt it, but it keeps this upfront capital requirement very, very small in order to try to scale once you know your system and strategy actually works. Leverage works a little bit differently, but also gives you similar capabilities. Say if we're starting with theoretically $1,000 in an account, if you were to just buy something and hold it, in order for you to lose that total $1,000, price would have to come all the way down and go to zero for you to be liquidated. What leverage is basically allowing you to do is move this liquidation up to higher levels. So this is the easiest way for me to explain how leverage works. A lot of people think that leverage automatically is risky. Okay, but it actually doesn't really matter that much if you understand how to use it in terms of trading, which is what I'm going to try to explain to you today. Okay, say I wanted to buy something with 4x leverage. All it's doing is taking this liquidation level and moving it up four X. So if this is our 50% point, this is our 75%. Okay, so now in order for you to lose your entire investment, price only needs to travel down by this amount versus needing to travel down the entire amount. But now you're able to use four X the size. So if we look back at an example like this, as long as that liquidation value is outside of where your stop loss is going to be triggered. You're not adding any more or less risk. All leverage is doing is allowing you to use less amount of money in order to get more size to take the specific trade. But as long as you're calculating your risk with this, the $100 risk is $100, whether you're using $10,000, $50,000 in an account or if you're using $1,000. Okay, so we can see, as an example, say I wanted to enter in here. Okay, in order for us to risk $100, that would require me to enter with 384 units, which you can see would cost $32,000. If I change this, say up to 50, now the capital requirement is $679. You can see once again, if I go up to 100, now that capital requirement is $357. Okay, and in order for me to get liquidated off of just $972 that is in this example account, price would need to travel all the way down to 81.80 in order for me to lose the entire amount. And so as long as I'm calculating my risk off of my position, it doesn't matter whether I'm using this much of my own money, or at 10x if I'm using 3200, or if I'm paying the whole amount, we're still risking only $100. Okay, most people don't understand this about leverage. Alright, so now that we've covered how to evaluate what instrument is right for you, we're going to move on to step number two, which is going over the simple repeatable day trading strategy. I use this framework almost every single day, and the goal is, once again, repeatable, simple, keep the losses small and let the winners run. Okay, so first I'm going to show you the model with diagrams, and then I'm going to go over real applications of where this is happening, and how repeatable it really is every single day. We're going to go over all the past days, and you're going to be able to see how often this is going to appear, and if you're framing it properly, how repeatable it can be in multiple markets. Okay, so the first step, we're going to be waiting for 9:30 AM. That's when the New York Stock Exchange, which is right down there, opens. And what that's going to do is that's going to increase market participation. That's where a lot of people start buying and selling, institutions are placing their orders. There's a lot of movement, a lot of opportunity if we can position ourselves correctly. So we're waiting for 9:30, and what I'm looking for is something called a change of character. And what a change of character is, is basically where we see a trend developing where we have price moving down, up, down, up, producing a low. And then that price is now rejecting off of that low, and actually coming up and moving above this recent swing period. Okay, so you're going to see we have a downtrend over here, price is coming up, comes down to this low. We have a high here, and then you can see we have a push in a close above this level. Okay, this gray level is right where the 9:30 open happens. And we're doing all of this on a one minute time frame, which means that each one of these candles is showing me one minute worth of price movement. Okay, the next step of this process is now I'm waiting for something called a fair value gap to appear. Now a fair value gap is basically where we have a sequence of one, two, three candles where the wick of the high candle does not overlap with the wick of the third candle, and it leaves a space in here, which is called a fair value gap. And there can be bullish or bearish fair value gaps. So the same thing in the opposite direction, if we have one, two, three bearish candles, in which case my black candles, the first wick and the third wick have an overlap space, which is now a bearish fair value gap. So we can trade this in both directions. Okay, and step three, what I'm doing now is I'm waiting for the midpoint of this fair value gap to develop. What this is going to do is allow me to enter right at the 50% of this fair value gap after we have this change of character level. Because often times what's going to happen is price is going to come into this midpoint, and if it responds off of it, it's going to close above this level and then continue to make highs. Otherwise, it's going to absorb all of the orders in this area and continue to move lower. Now, the reason fair value gaps are important is because basically, this is showing us an area of momentum. And often times when there's momentum, there's an excess of people making a decision in one place for whatever reason, and there's additional orders that may have been skipped through where price is going to want to seek equilibrium at. Come down, fill that inefficiency, and then continue displacing in that direction once those orders have been filled up. Okay, it's basically showing us high impact areas where the market is going to be drawn to, but also, considering we just changed into a new direction, that could be the last stop that price moves before making a new high. And that's why we're trying to target these areas. Now, this alone isn't going to give you everything that you need, but being able to evaluate simple rules and play into these key areas and position yourself accordingly based off of the way the market's moving is what I try to do. Basically, this can get more and more advanced as you go, and that's how we can get to a professional level by making it better and better over time. The next step, like I said, we're going to be waiting for price to come into this midpoint, and we're going to be setting up our entry right here. Now, there's a few key things that we need to focus on. Okay, so the first thing is going to be where we're going to be placing our stop loss. So what I'm doing is I'm looking at this fair value gap producing candle, and all I'm doing is trying to place my stop loss outside of high important areas, but at least comfortably outside of the fair value gap producing candle. Now, I'm going to show you some nuances and some things in our real examples where we have to use common sense based off of trading information to place this. But overall, we're placing our stop loss just outside of the fair value gap producing candle, and placing our entry here. The next thing that I'm looking to do is make sure that once I have a candle close, so as soon as a candle opens and closes, past this level, which is the push up before a pull back down into our fair value gap. You can see we didn't have a close here. We pushed up, moved up beyond it, but we didn't close past it, and then price came back down right to our entry. You're going to see why that's important in a second. What I want to do is as soon as we get this close, whereas we're having a change of character here, if we have a new close in the current trend direction, that is something called a break of structure. So as soon as we get a close over this high, that is where I'm taking my stop loss, and I'm reducing my stop loss perfectly to my entry level. So now I have a risk-free trade because I have confirmation of a new high moving up in this trend. Okay, you'll notice had we have done it only when we got a temporary move over this high, we would have reduced our risk too early, and price would have stopped us out for break even before then moving fully in our direction. And what I'm doing for my target is I'm basically starting it at about a one to three or one to four. I have different ways of trailing it depending on market conditions and depending on data, it all depends on your modeling, and that's a little bit too advanced for this video. But I'm just going to show you a simple way to do this to start off, and that's to set it at a one to four take profit, meaning that once you set up your risk, your reward, you want it to be four X. Okay, and you can see right here, this would have yielded us in this case three. So this would have given us $300 worth of gain while risking $100. Okay, so first example is going to be on the S&P 500, which is a futures pair. So right here on my chart, you can see this gray area. This is the New York Stock Exchange open, starting from 8:00 AM pre-market to 9:30 Eastern Standard Time for the New York Stock Market open. And you can see immediately we have our overall downward structure here. Right as the open happens, we have price push slightly above this area, but we finally have a close here, which is giving us our confirmed change of character. Okay, and you can see this is our most recent fair value gap right here. So if I set up my fair value gap, okay, this candle moved into it and then moved out of it pretty quickly. Okay, so I can set up my position here. Okay, you can see in this case, if we set our stop loss right underneath this candle, it's going to be a little too tight, so what I like to do is just give it a little bit of space, and I'm going to set up my one to four. So you'll see this position is in order for us to risk $100 is going to take a quantity of 10 contracts. Which means we would need a total of 10 contracts. So we wanted to risk something like $30. Okay, this would bring us down to about three contracts, which we could do with between $1 to $200, and risking $30. Okay, you can see price comes beautifully down into that exact zone after the confirmation of this high. This is the level we're waiting for in order to break even. Okay, so you can see we're not quite doing it yet. And then you can see price reacts off of that area perfectly, and then comes up right out of the open to get us our one to four. That only took a few minutes right out of the open, in and out, catching that momentum, and then even though the market is moving all around, we really don't care. We're just trying to play into momentum if it works out and let it play out into our favor. Okay, let's go to the previous day now. And we'll just scroll back. We're not like cherry picking dates, we're just going back to the next available date. So we have 9:30 open. You can see we have our structure here, candle pushes down, gives us that change of character. In this case, we have our bearish gap. We can set entry inside of here. Comfortably outside this candle, set take profit at one to four. See price comes in and fills that exact level, comes down, closes below that low. On this candle, we can reduce our stop loss to break even. So now we have a risk-free trade. Okay, in this case, price comes back up and stops us out for break even before coming down to take profit, which is also going to happen a lot. That's why we're reducing risk on these trades. Okay, if we go to the next day back, you can see this would be our area. Price came up really, really close to that area before moving away from it, which would have been an amazing trade. We weren't able to catch that. If we go to the next day back, you can see we have our downward structure here. We have our New York open. Price barely closes above this swing point, okay, which gives us our bullish gap. Place stop loss outside that candle low, set one to four. Price comes into that level, closes above this low, we bring stop loss to break even, then price comes down again, so break even trade. Play this forward. We have a close over this swing point high here, as we're breaking out of this structure, which gives us our change of character. Entry setup here, stop loss placed outside the candle, price comes down into that zone. Comes up to this area, we reduce risk to break even, and then comes up and smashes that full take profit. So that's another four X of what we're risking. Okay, so you can see here, reducing risk in case you're wrong quickly, and the momentum is not there, then allowing those winners to run. I'm going to show you on a few more examples here how I can really let these winners run and get like really, really big R. Okay, so now we're doing a crypto example. Once again, we have the 9:30 open. I have my downward structure here. Price is moving around. Basically, we can't do anything until we either break this level or break underneath this level. So while everyone else is trying to trade this crap, figuring out which direction it's going, I'm basically just waiting until we get a decisive move that is going to allow me to pick a direction. So you can see right here, we're coming up to that area. We don't quite break it. Right there, you can see we break it fully, so there's my confirmed change of character. We're going to the first fair value gap, which is right here. Stop loss outside of that candle, take profit at one to four. Price comes just down and barely misses that and then comes up and touches that exact one to four. Okay, so the trade idea was almost perfect. Okay, so if we go to the next day, you can see we have this structure here. Change of character break over this high. This is a little bit of a unique situation. This is the trade that I took a few days ago. We have a gap right here right out of the open. So once again, change of character, stop loss comfortably outside of this candle. Okay, and you can see right out of the gate, we immediately get a response. There's your one to four right away, but let's say even if we were just waiting and we didn't take it on that first opening candle, we can see we broke out of this structure. Price is moving up, no fair value gaps yet. We have a fair value gap here, but nothing moved into it. We have a gap here. Okay, we have this level. Stop loss placed a few ticks outside of this candle low here. This is kind of already broken into its own range. This is a change of character on the high side. So it's a little open to interpretation as to whether or not this would be an entry, but just to kind of showcase. Price comes down, in this case, it came really close to our stop loss level, so maybe we would have gotten stopped out. Okay, price comes down, test that level, and comes up to that one to four. Okay, because with this model, the goal is to not be right every single time. This is going to have a lot of losers, sometimes consecutive back-to-back-to-back losers, full days of losses, but the point is, is that if we're able to get at least a one to four, sometimes I'm able to get one to seven, one to eight, and we're able to do that at least 20% of the time. So out of 10 trades, are we able to hit two of those? Okay, even in that case, we are going to be able to be pretty much break even. So then the goal now turns into how can we be a little bit more selective and truly find the best trade setups to get between this 30 and 40% range. Which you'll see is going to put us into, once again, that profitable territory. And that's all we're really trying to do is just make sure that we're on this side of this curve and not on the other side. So if you look at one of my weeks, for example, even not trading every single day, just allowing myself to let the winners run. I do have losing days as well, but on good weeks, I can end up, say eight total R, sometimes even more. Right now I have a little higher than a 50% win rate, but usually it's around high 30s to 40s. It's still early in the year, but even with this week, with $100 worth of risk, it puts you inside this capability, or with $20 risk, puts you in this capability. And obviously not every day you're going to have a good day. Some days you'll have losers, some days you won't find trades at all. But just steering in this direction, you can see even if we can achieve in this threshold of being right, that's going to put you into, once again, that profitable stage. Okay, so I wanted to provide this model to you guys on YouTube to be able to get started with this infrastructure. But as you get into professional trading, there's a whole lot more things we can do to be more selective, find better setups, let trades run, to be able to scale accounts and know the whole inner workings, and that's what we focus on on the private side of our team. You can see Kevin was able to have an amazing month. Okay, you can also see Eli executing and using that as well. Because you really don't need that much capital to get started with the process to be able to see if it's going to work for you. And then you have avenues to be able to take it more seriously, scale it, only once you see the proof of concept, and that's what I always like to do on this channel. If you like the video, make sure you hit the like button. Okay, you can subscribe here if you want to know when I put other videos out. If you're interested in watching me do this live, I'll put some videos here. If you're interested in our team and taking this further, I'll also put the link on the screen right here and in the description. But until next time, I will see you all in the next video.
