Trading Strategies and Risk Management Insights

If you look at this kind of a cheat entry, a slower lower handle below the just below the 50 day, the volume profile is not that bad. You can see increased volume. We're again drying up the volume in that handle, coming in good volume back up. However, there was a 13% risk. So there was no way for me to enter a name if we open somewhere towards the low of the range. And what happened next day was the name opened inside and started coming through that handle. So what I did, I entered basically as it was crossing the previous day highs. Free rolling basically means de-risking. You can move your stops, you can stagger your stops, and you can take some profits off. You can shift off some profits. Basically, if you get stopped out, you break even. If you look at it, it's a perfect volatility contraction characteristics. You have this gap up here. You start going into this base here. It's kind of a time. If you look at it, it's a little bit time compressed here. It's maybe just four weeks kind of wedged up. action not really a nice bass what i really like here is the shake out shake out and at this area which is less than there will be the it's some buying here so we had some weekends that we got rid of but bought it here from this picture perfect handle on the top of this major the main supply resistance area as again the supply completely drenched here followed by a powerful breakout increased volume i guess it was maybe 40 above average maybe also the important thing is track your numbers and not everybody's doing it and i think is the key aspect of the trading you have to know your game where you stand uh i think uh there's no shortcut for work and if you do your screening you will eventually we will eventually discover these patterns being it either technical theme meaning if you look at your watch list and what names are working are those proper cup with handles are those pullbacks are those high tide flags what's working and of course also groups and sectors would i maybe advise the traders or what kind of i discover i guess maybe during the us icl so it's kind of a trying to self-discover myself and focus on the best version of myself as a trader we all aspire to you know be like our heroes like mark minervini and david ryan and so on And we're incredibly grateful for all the support. If you're looking for a free, quick, and easy way to give back to us and show us some goodwill, please double check that you're subscribed down below. And if you aren't, go ahead and click that button. This helps us out in two ways. First, it lets YouTube know that this is a valuable resource and it'll push it to a wider audience of traders. And two, it allows us to reach out to bigger and better guests in the future. So thank you so much for your support in advance. Also go ahead and click the like button if you haven't already. And if you have any suggestions for traders you'd like us to bring on the show, Also, let us know down below in the comment section. And with that said, thanks again for your support. And sit back, relax, and enjoy. All right, welcome back, everybody, to the Trading Lab Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Moglen. This is brought to you by The Ultimate Trading Guide and DeepView. You can check out those resources down below. Joining us today for the second time is someone who I really enjoy chatting about the markets with, Leo Smokoka. He's a top performer in the U.S. Investing Championship. He finished last year with a 409% return. And today we're going to dive through a lot of his trades from the past year, what made the difference, his strategy, his key setups, and talk about some key principles for achieving triple digit returns. So, Laosh, thank you so much for your time again. This is going to be a lot of fun, and we're going to show a lot of specifics too, which I think is really important. But it's great to have you back. Welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Richard. It's an honor to be back after all those amazing traders you've had in the past year. So I'm grateful to be back. Yeah, perfect. Well, I think I'll learn a ton from today's session. I think everybody watching will as well. So let's go ahead and dive right in. And I know there's probably some traders who maybe didn't watch our previous interview, where you went in depth into your background. But maybe if you don't mind giving a high level overview, just to just to give a touch on that. And then if they want to learn more, they can, of course, watch the previous interview, which will be linked down below. Absolutely. So me personally, I've been trading now about eight years, going into a ninth year. Traditionally, I'm coming from a classical, I would say, O'Neill style. canceling methodology which i kind of refined uh over the years also influenced a lot by mark minervini life sorate and so on and i'll describe myself i think when i talked to christian flanders recently i think he had a good term you know that we're kind of boom and bust traders we had lots of ups and downs in the years so went through also several drawdowns kind of build up the stayed back and was just keeping on improving this uh i've never really deviated from my style so i was stuck to this canceling kind of methodology which was kind of my base which i refined over the years and yeah last year decided to join the usic and i think it's gonna be a main topic of today so you Yeah, perfect. Well, obviously, you finished extremely well. Before we started recording, you said to me you'd be happy. You would have been happy with a top 20 finish. Obviously, you did quite a bit better than that. But I think it'll be really cool to see the trades and opportunities that led into that. So yeah. So let's go ahead, if you don't mind sharing your screen, and we can dive right into those and talk through everything. And I like the chart markups you did where you kind of... take a step-by-step to the trade because you're 100% right. We don't want to be just, you know, hindsight analyzing. We want to kind of be talking through what you saw in the moment, you know, what made you decide to execute, how you manage risk, all of that. So yeah, feel free to share whenever you'd like to. Exactly. It's going to be, yeah, I have a lot of charts prepared from winners, losers to also, there might be some questions. A lot of people recently reached out and they asked about, you know, the trading ground positions or like aggressively managing the shorter timeframes. so we'll we'll see where we get uh when we touch on that and as you sector correctly we don't do hindsight trading so try to prepare it a little bit more closer to real time so just give me a second and i'll share it all right leo so we're gonna start with it looks like uh um arm uh for from the ipo uh phase so uh yeah let's go ahead and dive right in talk through you know why you're watching this name and and what you're watching as it formed this this base yeah so arm was one of the the biggest winners i had that year and i actually started already trading it as you can see it was in a 23 so basically what we're looking at here is this perfect uh ipo base where what i was looking like you know the found some bottom found some food and get a s4650 and just jumped right into this overhead supply. So I started watching it as the names coming into this resistance and starts draining the supply as you can see. And these contractions around the resistance getting kind of lower to allow the name to go into this acceptable risk that I would have for reposition, which would be somewhere anywhere between let's say 3% to 7% ideally. risk would be a little bit larger. I would be thinking about maybe stacking the stops, but ideally we want to aim for as low risk as possible, which kind of presented me at this time. If you can look at that volume action also, we're having an increased volume going to that resistance and that volume really drenches here. And as this last day before the breakout, the whole handle is about four to five risk. We have some overhead here, but it's not much of a concern. It's one day IPO. We have a lot of cushion. Next day, going into breakout, perfect breakout, opened inside, which is even better what we were looking for. Allowed me to very quickly de-risk the position to move the stop to about 1.5%. So now we're looking at a huge R multiples. Naturally, I'll be looking for a handle here in that area somewhere. then question is where it is actually so as long as we're getting this increased volume coming in we're more or less free rolling one and a half percent right so what happened after as you can see that progress through the trade so what i would start doing uh the handle i was talking about suddenly we're signing it surprise seeing a handle in a base near near highs a reasonable handle too i think you could be entering here again on the pullback maybe even even a bit aggressive from this spot yeah from this 10 day 10 day moving average pullback uh what allowed me to do is basically just keep moving the stops the risk in the trade so here we're talking plus one hour further bounces the risk in 2R. First profits I took was somewhere here in this strange day here, and then really open inside, dropped directly down, taking the first profits, maybe talking about 3R, progressing through it. It looks very climatic here, already breaking this horizontal line, taking another profit there. And then what happened here was very, I would say, expert buy or a bit unusual buy for me. But what was happening at that point, I saw a lot of names on my watch list were doing the same thing. They're dropping, finding the support along the technical areas, being it moving averages or maybe some low of the base and so on. So what I tried to do as the name. dropped down and was coming back through these lows, I started a position with about 1% risk. There's a high probability, maybe 75% of the time I can get knocked out. But if we get on 1% risk, if we get 4% profit, I can do it four or five times over and I would still be profitable on name. And somehow it paid off. So it's continuing to hold it further. Maybe some of them misstated. I did not take any profits here, but still, again, almost free rolling the trade. Reduced a little bit of the position on not very nice action. And what's happening here, we were coming into earnings. All of those positions, I have about 3R plus a little bit more what I added. So comfortable cushion to hold into earnings. And those earnings, as we can see, just, yeah, it was just, what was it, like 50%, 50% gap on the earnings. So I was immediately starting like reducing, reducing, reducing and into this climax, close the position. So a very quick velocity IPO, IPO play. One of the. one of the largest winners. I left a little bit of the name to go through the basing, but this very volatile action just knocked me out. But what I would start doing is moving the stops along the key points. So as you can see, a 10 day moving average breakdown, close the down there, 20 day moving average breakdown, close the whole position. Yeah, perfect. Can you step back? to the IPO base slide where you marked up kind of your initial entries. I've got a few questions there. But you know, this markup is awesome. Yeah, one or two more, maybe if you don't mind, Leosh. Yeah. Yeah, cool. So your your initial buy here, obviously, you've got those two tight days right below that key resistance level. That's what you're looking for. How much of your portfolio are you looking to position in a name like Arm? And does it being a recent IPO change things or do you kind of treat it the same as a typical position? It would depend on my recent portfolio traction, right? So the position size is not necessarily driven by whether it's an IPO or whether it's a long-term name. The position size is driven by what is the entry, how much risk. can I put into the entry? Here we see about 5%, which is a traditional stop. So I'll be even aiming, if I have a traction for my full positions, it would be ideally 25% of my whole account. Naturally, if my watch list is not acting perfect, or if the whole market conditions are not favorable and I haven't had recent tractions, then I'll be scaling down the positions to, maybe if I'm starting from cash, I would start maybe. for a position which would be maybe six percent of my account right based only on the recent traction i would be adding more yeah perfect do you remember how much of your account this one was or yeah i think it was 25 percent yeah 25 perfect and then you talked about free rolling the trade a few times here can you maybe explain that concept and and it seems like it was heavily influenced by mark minervini he's a big advocate of of that process but maybe discuss how you kind of You think about that and then also what you actually do in order to accomplish that. Yeah, so free rolling basically means de-risking. A lot of people, when they hear de-risk... they might be thinking only stops, but you might be risking the name multiple ways. If the name breaks out, like we saw here, you have a leverage, what you will do with the name. You can move your stops, you can stagger your stops, and you can take some profits off. You can shave off some profits. If you shave off some profits and move your stop a little bit higher, basically, if you get stopped out, you break even. Right. You're free rolling the trade now. So of course it depends on the magnitude of the action. Sometimes you can do both. You can take a little bit off, move your stop. Sometimes you can be just trailing along these technical areas, what I like to prefer to do in some powerful names to allow it a little more space. Yeah, no, that's super helpful. And this one acted perfectly from that initial breakout. And like you said, form that handle. uh just below highs um and i like how you pointed out the potential uh additional entry area through that inside day um would you have considered you know obviously this is this is a hindsight training question but would you have considered you know added um adding through that or you already had enough in the trade that uh you know you're just letting it work i think if i remember correctly i didn't have so much traction i had already some other positions at the time so i was not interested in adding so much are getting very heavy in one single name so again uh kind of yes and no answer but again yeah depending on the traction that's that's trading there's gonna be a lot of yes and no question and no answer so no problem at all um I think this is a really good example about selling into strength and I think that's a question that a lot of traders watching this are still kind of thinking for themselves how they do that um And we can see kind of where you reduced here on that one day, which broke the low after a nice breakout. And then also when it got climactic, could you kind of talk about, you know, from a high level, what situations would you look to reduce a position that's trending well and, you know, just to take some profits and also lock in maybe, you know, parts of the trade, parts of the position? So kind of when do you decide to sell into strength? So. Selling into strength, I have a few basic rules. First thing you want to do is to reach at least two multiples of your risk of your initial stop, ideally. Of course, it's again not black and white answer. If I would be entering maybe from more aggressive entry, which we can show further. And then it would be maybe running into some overhead supply. I'll be looking also in those technical areas and potentially if I would be even like 1R, 1.5R, I would be maybe peeling a little bit off again to kind of minimize the downside, kind of improve that worst case scenario. So if maybe my initial risk would be 5% by reducing it to 1.5R and moving stuff maybe to 3%, I would increase this worst case scenario. to a little better. Similarly, if the names, as you correctly said, is breaking some climatic rounds, I would be looking to, again, to peel off a little bit there because there's, again, with each day like that, there's an increased probability that you're going to get some pullback. You might be waiting for a new entry. So it also comes with a factor, like a time factor, right? Yeah. perfect and this one um that last cell climactic action were you completely out of the name at that point or did you still have some position on i still had i tried to hold it for uh the basing period afterwards uh but again that isn't yeah that base that was shaping afterwards it just shook me out out of those areas actually i meant the the first climactic action so uh on that previous slide i don't know here Yeah. No, no. Here I just reduced the position and I had these stops there along this 20 day moving average. Gotcha. Yeah. Perfect. And let's see, what did I want to ask? Yeah. So, so this one you, you ended up pulling through earnings and it acted tremendously well after earnings. What's kind of your rule for, you know, what profit cushion you need to have in order to hold a portion through that kind of binary event? So for earnings, you can always look at an option market and what is implied move of the name. Currently, you also have certain services that you don't even have to calculate it necessarily by yourself, but you can very easily find it available online. So kind of it's a good habit to look at this implied volatility through the earnings. And if you judge that you might have a sufficient cushion, let's say implied move is 8%, you have 6%, 10%, 15%. I would be willing. to hold at least a portion again it's not a 100 or zero you can always just reduce some and maybe leave a little small portion to uh through the earnings yeah excellent all right can you step through towards the end of the trade i just want to see if there's anything else i wanted to ask there if you go just basically to the last slide there yeah perfect yeah nice yeah what a move this is a great ipo based to study and and and all of that Let's see here. No, I think I think this is pretty clear. And oh, one actual question I wanted to ask was on on a climactic type action or just a sell to strength. How much typically of your original position are you selling into strength? Or is it, you know, 25%, 10% each time? Does it depend on the situation? How do you kind of decide how much to reduce? It also depends where we're coming from. If it's a if it's a climatic run like this, that we've already had a decent run up, I would be at that point, it's most likely have already peeled some off. Now we basically reducing portions, typically 25, 33% piece by piece until I am very bad in getting rid of everything, as you can see here. So very often I will leave, maybe even maybe two or 3% position just kind of not to lose the touch with the name. which very often then stops me out eventually yep well this this was a great trade and and uh like i said a really good uh ipo base for people to look back and study uh from from this past year so uh perfect thanks for thanks for sharing that and yeah let's let's run through uh the next one so next what we can look at is uh i'm not gonna jump into it i have a gev ready which is also ipo and just a little bit different character so we can look at it maybe further but what i'll jump to is uh smr uh example of uh bit aggressive trading died it perfect at some point during the year so if you look at smr you can see it's a extremely wild wild base. You have almost 50% decline, which is very often no-go. I would not be willing so often to trade names like that. But what kind of made me to try to enter his name was actually GEV. It was this nuclear theme coming up with many other names holding up like those VST, GEV. couple other names. And while I was holding GEB, which was rocking all time highs, I saw SMR setting up as well. What was unfortunate though, if you look at this kind of a cheat entry, lower handle, just below the 50 day, the volume profile is not that bad. You can see increased volume. we're again drying up the volume in that handle, coming in good volume back up. However, there was a 13% risk, so there was no way for me to enter a name if we opened somewhere towards the low of the range. But what happened next day was the name opened inside and started coming through that handle. So what I did, I entered basically as it was crossing the previous day highs. right here and putting a very tight stop of about five percent uh i had to reduce the size here so maybe if 25 is my original size i would reduce it to maybe half like 12 and a half percent because there's a high probability i'm gonna get knocked out right just maybe intraday move can easily knock me out what happened next day as you can see there's absolutely no check back the names follow through right after that. And at this point, again, when we talked about the risking, what it allows me to do is again, start moving my stops a little bit. So as you can see here, what I started doing here, I started basically trailing. I moved it first here a little bit. And then very soon after I started trailing this 10 day moving average, which already it's maybe because we're looking at a big move. It might not look like much, but I was here already at like one and a half hour, two hour and so on. Reduced first profits here. Or as we talked before again. For the potential handle area, you have the same pattern here. You're coming into the base, eventually you might have a higher handle, which is very typical in a cup base, which we get here, a little bit of shakeout. I try to enter here on this 10-day moving average, this is the first touch of the 10-day when we are starting to shape the handle, similar strategy. Was lucky enough not to get knocked out. And what I started then doing into all those first pops, I would always reduce and eventually close out the position on a backstop. I completely missed this further up climatic move, but good enough. Yeah, this was a killer trade. And I think what's key here is that you had identified the theme, right? the theme that SMR was a part of. What do you kind of typically do to try to stay on top of what themes are setting up? You know, last year, we had quantum computing also as a theme, the nuclear theme, the AI semi theme, of course, what do you do to kind of keep an eye on, you know, what, what themes could produce moves like this? Is it something that you do by screening or just kind of watching the stocks themselves? That's what, what tips you off about, you know, what themes potentially are in play? I think there's no shortcut for work. If you do your screening, you will eventually discover these patterns, being it either a technical theme, meaning if you look at your watch list and what names are working, are those proper cup-weight handles, are those pullbacks, are those high-tight flags, what's working, and of course also groups and sectors. At this point, it was nuclear name and other... point of time might have been AI and so on. Also, you could see last year a lot of this constant rotation underneath the surface. What I would be careful though is a style drift. You still want to keep those watch lists limit to your style of competence. You don't want to be creating, because if you start creating watch lists for value investing and swing trading and scalping, then eventually you're going to be all over the place and you're going to miss those. themes that you have to look with a kind of microscopy view a little bit more underneath the surface yeah perfect and one other question i had for this one and maybe all the names were we're looking at today um do you have a sense of which trades uh had the greatest impact on your year your performance which had the greatest uh equity contribution um because i would be curious to see if uh you know was it you know a few trades that really propelled propelled your account higher or was it just kind of pretty consistent over a spread of trades that led to the strong performance? So if you saw my distribution curve, we can look at my stats, which I have prepared. Maybe I can. Yeah, that'd be great. So this is the statistics. I don't have the distribution curve here, but if you saw my distribution curve, I had maybe three, four big winners, which were maybe like 40% plus. And there have been maybe intense 20s of maybe like 10 20 but most of my gains came also from a lot of overweight positions in the range of maybe zero to four percent gains uh and so this you don't necessarily need a huge minister of a huge year it's kind of like in a boxing if you just keep you know stabbing those small jabs eventually you're gonna have this space for this one you huge winning uppercut that will move the needle but as long as the i guess the main thing is to you know everybody repeats it the risk control risk control and risk control yeah perfect and looking at uh this table here were there any other key takeaways that you think might be helpful for for traders watching this so what you can see i know a little bit that hidden pattern i guess because the i guess the average are pretty clear you can make the head about it. Maybe also the important thing is track your numbers and not everybody's doing it and I think is the key aspect of the trading. You have to know your game, where you stand. If you look at that average loss, the betting average is coming a lot from, as I said, sometimes when I would be stepping on the gas and going very heavy, I would be much more nimble and much less willing to take even any losses. So I would be even cutting it for very small gains. That's how I racked this large betting average. And as you can see, it's kind of this hidden thing that the smaller positions. are going to have a smaller betting average. What it kind of hides is you can see that the thing when your portfolio is acting the best is the time to start pressing the gas. And also on the other side, immediately as you see something not acting right, it's time to start pulling the brake and pulling the brake with the full power, as you might be getting into some periods where you might have so much success. So it's like both. trading your best with the heaviest size and trading your worst with the smallest size possible. Yeah, perfect. And for that, you're looking at your recent trades to determine whether you're trading at your best or your worst, or is it the setups that you're seeing in the market, or is it kind of a combination? It's a combination of both. Ideally, if I see both traction of my portfolio and I see my watch list acting well, it means names are finding the support they are following through and so i'll be much more willing to go on the margin and really start pressing the gas very heavy whereas like for example now we might have a some success some breakouts now in january 25 however overall tape is not very premium and you have to be still i would say quite small if you're heavy very nimble very fast to knock it out perfect yeah please yeah Also one thing, it's kind of what I picked up from Leif maybe. Sometimes I would not have really a problem of going quite big intraday, but then it's a matter of also evaluating where you stand towards the end of the day. So sometimes I would have no problem ramping it up intraday to 1.5x margin just to close the day, maybe even 30% invested. Yeah, so staying nimble. that was key. Yeah. Perfect. And that that's kind of touching on what I wanted to ask you next, which, which was, you know, you talk about, you know, the, these stocks, which obviously are pretty volatile, manage your risk, all of that, but also trading aggressive at the same time. So how, how do you kind of balance trading very aggressive with managing your risk to make sure that, you know, you're not suffering too large drawdowns, all of that. And, you know, overall, you're, you're, you're making a lot of progress in your account. It all, maybe first thing, it depends how you define aggressive, because you can be having, we can also look then later on one other trade. If you're entering from aggressive pivots, aggressive entries, like maybe some lower entries where you're running into a lot of overhead, you have a high chance of some implied volatility in the name. Or if you mean aggressive that you're entering a name with wider stops, that With the wider stops, I would kind of do what's a very counterintuitive thing, the larger the volatility, less space you want to give on the downside. So I would be maybe willing even to try it a couple of times, three, four times, but really keep the risk to a minimum. And the third type of aggressive is going aggressive on your whole equity, on your whole portfolio. It's coming back to the thing, evaluating towards the close. If your names are acting, and if I would see both the traction in my portfolio and the watch list acting great, then I would be more willing to hold this overweight account through multiple days. Yeah, and I think that's a key question that a lot of people have watching the interviews from traders like yourself from the USIC is, you know, how did they use margin throughout the year to achieve these triple digit returns? And kind of what you're saying is... you're using your margin but you're using it selectively when the market warrants it when the trades that you're doing warrant it when end of day you're in a position that warrants the use of margin where it's proving to yourself that it's worth the risk to take additional size basically um that's kind of my observation was there anything kind of you want to add about how you think about using margin and and in your trading i think you summarize it perfectly you just have to be very very cognizant, very mindful of the total drawdown that's there because the margin is a double-edged sword. So once you stop respecting all your rules, if you have them at the first place, then it can really lead to almost a disaster. perfect well uh let's get back to smr this this is super helpful and i think uh it's great to see the stats uh to support that uh but getting into smr here um let's see uh for for you was there any kind of key takeaways with this particular trade that stands out or things that um you know concepts that you think would be good for for traders to understand um and one thing that stands out maybe is that breakout through 16.91 that one big extension day Was that after earnings or was that just a typical breakout? It was just a breakout. It just continued running. What was a very interesting or nice takeaway for me is because often I'll be watching not just price, but price and volume. And if you forget that the volatility in this name, which was kind of very high, if you look at what's happening, both from the price and volume combination. you have a picture perfect behavior here. You would be running, you would have here the breakout, you'll be running from lows where the selling pressure here diminished almost into this right side of the, if you look here, into this right side here, then we are continuing with the burst into the base. continuing follow through increased volume increased volume increased volume when we are coming into pivots both being it here supply diminishes same kind of a little bit elevated but still okay still decreased volume into the handle area we have the shake out there breakout again look at that volume 40 million shares traded in one day right and continued also actually even gold maybe i was bit premature selling here because if you look at that that action here you have follow through buying follow through buying again decrease volume a little bit follow through buying some action here the tennis ball action decreased selling increased buying picture perfect yeah for sure and and one thing that you said you know this this is a stock that intraday can have pretty wide ranges is there an average 80 percent that you prefer? I know some people who really trade these high momentum names, you know, like 4% plus 5% plus, is there a number that comes to mind? Honestly, I don't really look at it. I mean, I started looking recently because I followed some few traders that kind of hinted, you know, looking at the ADR, but I've never really looked at the exact numbers. I kind of, I look at it, I kind of know what it is, but I don't have like a requirement that I would require a certain ADR. Gotcha. Perfect. Yeah. Any key takeaways from this one or we can push on to the next trade? I think we can push on next trade. Maybe last thing, maybe I forgot here. If you look at it, actually, here we're just starting the stage two uptrend. If you would look at the weekly chart, if you look at the weekly chart, we were not that far away. So this is just the... Also, there will be one thing to kind of hinting to me to hold maybe a little bit longer. We were just starting this trend. 200 day moved up, the 50 day flattened out. This is the first kind of area where they were stuck. And here we're rocking the stage two upturn from here. Yeah. And one thing that stands out here on the weekly is kind of the overall pattern. It obviously pulled back and had a big neglect period around, you know, two and a half dollars a share, had a big momentum up move, set back up, had a big momentum move and then set back up. And then that's that's where you were placing the trade there. Sure. Do you look at that at all? You know, how many momentum moves it's had off the lows? Because you're kind of trading the third wave up. I don't know if you think about that at all. I would definitely look at it. And you kind of want to see that trend moving into your direction. So I would not be trying to bottom fish when we have a 200-day trending down, 50-day moving average trending down. You want to see that the trend turned up. Ideally. three, four, five months, maybe go as early as maybe two months, but still you want to have the trend in your favor. Yeah, perfect. And I love how you pointed out here, the low volume, those four weeks into the lows of the base before you started focusing on the name. I think that's key. Perfect. And one other question I had for you is this name in particular is a pretty low price stock. Is there any consideration to that or it's all about just the setup and overall liquidity maybe? It is definitely a factor. I mean, in my general screening, I'll be screening $12 and above. And again, here it was kind of an exception with all other factors, right? So it's not all set in stone, but with the theme coming up, the names not necessarily acting okay only on X feet, but also in my actual portfolio. So this kind of prompted me to also look elsewhere. Yep. perfect all right let's move on to the next one here so maybe what i can uh show is it was not a very big winner but to highlight when we talked about being aggressive and being nimble what can also happen and sometimes people can understand so i have here the lumn trade yeah which i traded from these this very aggressive entry of a 50-day moving average. And here again, why I would be prompted to trade it much quicker is several factors. The base is not very perfect, even though if you look at the volume compared to the prior uptrend, we can see also a nice profile. But the overall base, I cannot see really much defined. pattern here it's not any proper handles and so on if you look at the the price again we're talking very low price name at the bottom range of my really what i would touch maybe like below six i wouldn't even touch it but i think here if i remember correctly there was some huge news coming into into this name so a lot of interest in i think some microsoft also getting interested or getting involved in here so What I tried to do here is to try to trade it off this first, second 50-day touch as it was coming into a base because what I was expecting here, what could happen against the name could break out, start building some low handle or handle and continued basic continued upside. Of course, I was very wrong on that, but what happened here, I would take the position about 6% initial risk. Already on that first day, popped about 6%, so I would already de-risk it a little bit. So now when we're talking, if I take 30% off, so now we're talking maybe 4% if I get stopped all the way here. Next day, continued further solely for almost a 3 hour, reduced a little bit. And then it started reversing intraday. When you see a reversal like that, Depending on your risk tolerance, you might decide what you want to do with it. For me, if it reverses, maybe even 12% intraday, it's kind of a big number. So I just close it all the way here. It's like two days straight for pretty good gain. Yeah. Was it a news catalyst on that day? I forget why it gapped up, but I remember this happening. I don't think so. I think that news started coming here, then the news came. came or there was some delayed reaction because i remember it was like some news coming in and the name was not acting at all and suddenly from nothing it started started breaking out so yeah we'll see yeah this one uh yeah definitely uh an example of the type of reversal that you can see in these lower price names that you have to be you have to be pretty aggressive with that selling when it does it does happen but uh yeah definitely a good example of a nimble trade yeah And then I can highlight maybe last one, so people don't think I trade only these crazy volatile price names. Let me bring in PHA, which was extremely nice. I like what Pat Walker says, clean and simple base. It was unfortunately also very quick trade because we were having earnings coming up and i didn't have really much cushion and so on but if you look at it it's a perfect volatility contraction characteristics you have this gap up here you start going into this this base here it's kind of a time if you look at it it's a little bit time compressed here still i didn't have it's maybe just a four weeks kind of wedged up action not really a nice base proves with a pivot failure Continuous basing further. What I really like here is the shake out, shake out and at this area, which is flat, there are a bit of some buying here. So we had some weak hands that we got rid of. And now we're starting setting up the proper pivots in a very nice symmetrical base left, right. If you draw the line here, here you have this nice symmetry in a base and you start having this natural pivot. So this progresses against some lower sheet handle. here a proper handle so i actually didn't buy it here i missed it for some reason maybe was not even looking at it but bought it here from this picture perfect handle on the top of this major the main supply resistance area as again the supply completely drenched here followed by a powerful breakout increased volume I guess it was maybe 40% above average, fish day moving average. And this allowed me to trade it with an extremely tight stop. The added handle was about 2%. As it moved further, again, moved the stop to about 1.3%. So you're talking now on the upside of very quick risk multiples. I reduced a little bit as we were. As we moved through this mini high handle, if you want to call it like that, unfortunately got shaken out on the 10-day moving average break for a portion. And then this remaining portion, unfortunately, I had maybe, I guess it was maybe 4% into earnings. So it was not enough cushion for me. So I just closed it. Unfortunately, kept up, could have had better profits, but it's all hindsight. It's part of the game. part of the game yeah perfect yeah um those those cheat areas are really well formed in this one i think it's a good example of uh of those pivots there um yeah i i don't think i have too many follow-up questions here i think it's a good example and you get to see uh you're not just trading those uh sub ten dollar names you you you'll you'll trade wherever the opportunities are so that's perfect all right So should we also jump so we don't talk about only winning trades? We can also look at some of the few losers. Let's do it. Yep. So first I'm going to bring, I think it's my, if we talk about the technical action and the decisions, I think it was the worst trade of the whole year. Even the percentage wise, it was not very pleasant. What I mentioned. highlight here that you know if you if you start doing mistakes very often those mistakes can lead to some hesitation when eventually it can lead to kind of a paralysis and prevent you from doing some other smart decisions so that's why I would advise stick to all your rules don't break even single one because breaking one rule leads to breaking under rules and what I did here first It was really like over trading, I guess, maybe I was starting having a good traction. I was kind of loosening my criteria. If you look at this pivot forming here, the pivot itself is 13% and you have this large overhead area all the way here. It has quite a lot of selling volume still even up to this point. Even here we have this one. two days. Those weeks, yeah. So I try to do what, you know, again, cut down the volatility a little bit by entering, I would say, quite prematurely, already trying to, as it's coming into those big areas of that pullback with the staggered stops, 3% and 9%, which I would say is a big mistake. at least for me personally because as i mentioned here you're loosening stuff you have an imperfect entry so you want to again cut down the volatility cut down the risk because you have a high chance you're going to get stopped out i did the opposite loosen it even to a nine percent uh what's even worse than we have here the wedged up entry you don't have any nice sideways or down drift action we're just wedging up as you can see here this line here which is wedging up which is met by again some upper wicks going into that up action. I even added here instead of taking some profits which I would have booked out, I actually added even a little bit more. And then it's just an avalanche of other mistakes. Next day, surprise, almost kind of a gap down. I didn't really react on it. I think I was not even watching the name really closely. So I just got naturally stopped out. So with the slippage, it was maybe at 3%, then other like 8% stop. And of course, the traditional thinking is going to come back. I'll just say it when it comes to break even. So on that last remaining portion, another awful wedged up action. I continued holding through it, hoping for a miracle. then boom next day gap down with the slippage stop for another 12 percent so yeah it obviously happens um yeah were there any key takeaways from here obviously follow the cell rules but anything else uh i would say there is multiple multiple points it's exactly opposite of what we're looking for before you don't have a as we mentioned here instead of having a having a pivot that you would have a you know going like down drift action or side wave action you're wedging up here which is met by the selling if you look at the volume profile you have actually yeah here increased volume on those selling areas met by decreased volume on the buying so complete opposite of we were showing before we had the relative strength lagging uh the volatility also didn't have enough time it's quite time compressed and have enough time to to work out work out that volatility and that of course so i said not respecting the rules yeah hoping stuck in a in the thinking yeah perfect well i think everybody watching this can can relate to some placing some bad trades and bad execution and obviously you ended up having a fantastic year so um There's always a little bit of bad with the good. And next one we can look at is dollar-wise. It was, I think, my worst trade. It was during that December of drawdown, which I had, where I kind of threw all my rules out the window and was trying to revenge trade every single name into a few last days, where I did the exact opposite of it. what you should do when you start having losses, decreasing the size, sorry, increasing the size, which led to a disaster. And if you look at this, it was, I think when I was entering MSTR, I already had a couple of losses. So I was trying to, of course, get it back up into one single trade. And of course, getting it back up, meaning entering here. If you look at this here, first of all, you have here 40% in four days. It's awful action. You would really need a lot of weeks for that base to be repaired. And personally, when I entered here, I could have even booked some profits. If you look at it relatively, it might have been maybe like 10%. But of course, stuck in that thinking that I have to make up all the trades, just thinking, okay, I have to leave it to go to 500 because I'm going to... make up all my losses in the last couple of days. So instead of doing that, kind of got stuck with the name, the name Squatted, holding through the squat on this violation, which normally I would immediately sell into. If I see breakout like that not working, what's the reason to hold overnight? You can easily enter next day. You don't necessarily... you know be stuck with it or even you can always also reduce the name maybe just hold it with small portion we want to but you don't necessarily have to hold the whole initial position which i did and of course and the third action continued here unfortunately i didn't get stopped so instead of being knocked for the day i continued holding it to the next open And I remember it was the first few minutes, we kind of started plummeting down, kind of sell it for 12%. Being on overweight position, it was 65% position, it means Now, totally, we multiply this 8% of the whole account in one, two, three days. Yeah. And if you look at it again, if you want to take some key takeaways from it, I think it's quite obvious to see what you see here is a sea of red, no virtual, no buying, just institutions exiting by large. I have here 100 million trading. trading volume that's you know that's not the retail traders exiting the position yeah and that was a huge reversal down that day obviously um talk me through uh you know that period where you marked revenge trading and then also the end of the year uh because i think there's some good lessons there for for everybody um i i'm sure it must be a little bit painful to talk about it for sure but um i think that'd be really helpful yeah absolutely i mean I already mentioned it to a couple of people and it's like if you start chasing, focusing on your process and you start chasing the returns or the money, then the ego can be like your worst enemy. Once you start battling with yourself and it doesn't matter if you're shooting, if I was shooting from 960% to 1000% or if you have a $1,000 account. and you want to have a you know 100 000 in one year just stick to your principles and compound the the good things even you know if you take a loss it's still a good thing so you know celebrate those things and it's gonna have a this compounding effect in the positive side the same thing like on the on negative side once you start breaking your rules you will focus on the ones you don't respect your stop you will start focusing on revenge trading when you revenge trade you will start closely watching the position So it compounds also on the negative side. And for me personally, it wasn't... Luckily, I respected all the stops. Otherwise, I could have blown my account. So it was maybe about six, seven revenge trades. But after this MSTR, I have even one sharp repair of SE. I don't know if you want to show it, but what I did there, I just took a 4% or 3.5% loss of 2X account. so it's another seven percent of the the portfolio so it wasn't that many trades yeah it can happen quickly and um like like you've pointed out you know you're kind of doing the opposite of what the principles you know tell you to do you're sizing larger than than typically you're widening the stops not respecting the stops uh you know fully um obviously you eventually close these all these but um yeah it's it's the little things that you you want to you want to stay on top of your rules especially when you're having a really good year and trading well that's when it can all turn around pretty quickly when you're trying to chase performance versus you know playing the hand that's dealt to you so um no i think this is important to talk about so thank you for sharing no problem it's a key for this triple digit returns if you if you stay above water or maybe just a little bit on water then eventually those better days are gonna come so If you think 100%, it's a 6% a month compound over 12 months. So you don't necessarily need to have 100% months to achieve that. So if you stay safe during those bad periods and just guess it when the going is good, then there you have a triple digit. Yeah, perfect. Yeah, do you want to bring up that SE chart or was there another trade you wanted to walk through first? I can bring it and I think we'll be running into... all i have perfect yeah se it's quite quite simple it's not much talk about it's few days uh the actual entry wasn't that bad if you look at it if you if you think there is this gap up which unfortunately closed down so it closed that it filled that gap but found the founder support on the on the 10th day right around the demand area, the support continued up from there and started shaping this nice this mini formation, you want to call it like that, or this natural reaction of about maybe about three weeks so that entry is not necessarily that bad. So what I tried to do of course, MSTR at that point not working for me, I say it's... you know it's i'm in a drawdown there so what i'm gonna do i'm gonna size it up even more because this is a previous leader it has pretty nice setup so why not to you know take a chance on this one uh so it took it here uh on this entry as it did his um it's not necessarily shake out but continue this this formation here uh with the complete here again volume volume dry up and started finding support on this 20-day moving average so i was thinking pretty good risk reward about three and a half percent uh took a chance there double my account uh next day not very nice open continue down stop seven percent of the account yeah it's tough Yeah. Yeah. Like you said, you know, the overall setup, the overall execution outside of position size is pretty typical. And, you know, we're taking it. Yeah. Maybe if like if you look at the character of the SE, it was kind of acting that way. Like the first thing what it did also didn't provide you a proper nice handler. It just continued above, just started setting up, started setting up on top of that. a similar we saw a similar thing here i started setting up on the from that from that formation here so it wasn't that unusual for also for the se we're looking at the character how the name was acting before yeah for sure yeah uh i i think um you know the key things you talked about earlier apply here as well the mistakes you're making because of you know what's what else is going on with your drawdown and and the mental side of things um you know thinking back on that period and and moving forward were there any key takeaways that uh or rules or things that you're applying so in the future um you know stuff like this can't happen or you'll kind of minimize uh the impact if if you start uh you know trading like this as well trying to get back to where you were and all that so i would say overall I want to be even more stringent on the risk side. I think there is still, I had during the year, even though those throwdowns were not that big, I think I could have been even more stricter on the risk. And also like starting focusing on my emotional and mindset side of the trading, because maybe the technical side is, I would say maybe pretty decent level, but the trading... similar like working out bodybuilding they say you know 80 80 percent diet 20 working out right i think the same applies to trading you have a 80 mindset side and 20 technical or execution side so and i think like what would i would maybe advise the traders or what kind of i discover i guess maybe during the usic also it's kind of a trying to kind of self-discover myself and focus on the best version of myself as a trader of course we all want to or we all aspire to you know be like our heroes like mark minervini and david dry and so on but at the end it comes down to defining your own style of trading yeah perfect i think that's well said uh were there any other charts that you want to share was this the the last one leo yeah so there are cpng i traded twice again comes down for you know with also trading in the around the position uh first uh was uh i wouldn't say a bad entry it was a first first uh support on the 50 day 50 even though we have good amount of the the overhead here but again it comes down to the thing if if it opens like cpng did with the insider here i can be immediate moving my risk. So that breakout was pretty nice, I would say. Unfortunately, what happened, CPNG being Korean name, I think the next day there was some news that came in. I was not even watching the market to take my stop, so came back to my computer and I saw 5.5% stop. So it was unfortunate, but it can happen too. But what I wanted to highlight here is again that how you can minimize your loss even if you have gap downs with reducing your size. If you look at the second time that I traded the CPNG, again traded from a pullback of this second day, second time, 20-day touch. If you could look at the candlesticks, you would see these very nice, I would call inverted hammers. And this area is founded support. Next day, it started following through. from that support level with about a 3% risk in a trade, thinking, again, it can set up maybe some, it can pause a little bit here around that area, around those highs. So I took a little bit profit as it was also a little bit wedging up. You can see here, this big here kind of wedging up into the highs. I reduced a little bit of my position. Then we were coming into earnings. It was actually a really nice day going into earnings. So I was thinking, okay, maybe there's something, Korean name. There might be something that I don't know. I reduced it twice, left a little bit portion, calculated into earnings, gap down, 9% stop. But because we already took profits before, the total loss was very manageable, 1%. 1%. Yeah, I think this is a good example of how selling at this strength can lock into profits and overall reduce your worst case scenario, like you've said a few times. And yeah, yeah, perfect. Leo, this has been excellent. It's so good to walk through the trades, both the good and the bad, and you've been so open with that. So thank you for walking through those. An overarching theme that I want to talk with you that you've already kind of touched on is... you know, the key principles to achieve triple digit returns, you know, like you did last year. And I think what you said about, you know, just 6% compounded each month, you know, ends up being a triple digit year. You don't have to stretch yourself too much. But, you know, apart from that, and just following a process, are there any other keys that, you know, you've adopted personally that, you know, you've learned from other people, or just from your own experience you've come to realize to really achieve really good super performance? I think one principle is also have your game plan ready and stay true to your game plan. Don't try to come up with ideas, you know, intraday and try to do some nonsense stuff during the days that you're trading. So it somehow should be all premeditated and set in stone. So it will also, you know, protect you from this paralysis of not. knowing what to do during the when the market's open yeah so for me personally i got caught a couple times during the during the year that i kind of didn't know what to do so i just basically closed whole whole my account and just started entering the next day because i didn't have the game plan in place so it's you know stick to your rules again stick you know control emotion and again risk control multiplied by three yeah there you go um Other than that, any other bits of advice that you'd like to leave everybody with, everybody who's watching? I would also say, we talked about 6% compounding, but don't be so harsh on yourself. You're not going to have a premium market like the last year was. So if you're achieving 10, 15, 20% a year, it's still a magnificent result. Yep. Perfect. Yeah. 2024. you know, I was, I was building a model book from the last year and there were so many opportunities and I didn't even include all the ones that you, you pretty much included today. So there are, there are a lot of strong movers and strong themes to take advantage of 2024. And that's not always the case. Every year is going to be different in terms of, you know, what, what, what opportunities exist. So I think that's important to remember. Um, but it was, this has been great. Uh, where can people, uh, connect with you if they'd like to get in touch or. You know, I'll have the link to your Twitter down below. Is that the best place for people to reach out? It's the best place to reach out. It's my last name and the first letter of my first name. So M-I-K-U-L-K-A-L Mikul Kal. That's my extra name. Perfect. Yeah, I'll put that down below. Thank you for watching. I hope you guys enjoyed immensely. I know I had so many important key takeaways. I think the free rolling, the trade, managing your risk. with risk multiples um you know that's that's one of the most important things for me but i'm sure you guys have your own thoughts and if you uh would like to go ahead and share them down below in the comment section uh check out uh leo down below his twitter and uh thanks so much for your time leave a like down below if you enjoyed uh subscribe if you need the channel and want to see more of interviews just like this one and we'll see you guys in future videos take care

And what happened next day was the name opened inside and started coming through that handle. So what I did, I entered basically as it was crossing the previous day highs. Free rolling basically means de-risking. You can move your stops, you can stagger your stops, and you can take some profits off.

You can shift off some profits. Basically, if you get stopped out, you break even. If you look at it, it's a perfect volatility contraction characteristics.

You have this gap up here. You start going into this base here. It's kind of a time.

If you look at it, it's a little bit time compressed here. It's maybe just four weeks kind of wedged up. action not really a nice bass what i really like here is the shake out shake out and at this area which is less than there will be the it's some buying here so we had some weekends that we got rid of but bought it here from this picture perfect handle on the top of this major the main supply resistance area as again the supply completely drenched here followed by a powerful breakout increased volume i guess it was maybe 40 above average maybe also the important thing is track your numbers and not everybody's doing it and i think is the key aspect of the trading you have to know your game where you stand uh i think uh there's no shortcut for work and if you do your screening you will eventually we will eventually discover these patterns being it either technical theme meaning if you look at your watch list and what names are working are those proper cup with handles are those pullbacks are those high tide flags what's working and of course also groups and sectors would i maybe advise the traders or what kind of i discover i guess maybe during the us icl so it's kind of a trying to self-discover myself and focus on the best version of myself as a trader we all aspire to you know be like our heroes like mark minervini and david ryan and so on And we're incredibly grateful for all the support. If you're looking for a free, quick, and easy way to give back to us and show us some goodwill, please double check that you're subscribed down below.

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All right, welcome back, everybody, to the Trading Lab Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Moglen. This is brought to you by The Ultimate Trading Guide and DeepView. You can check out those resources down below. Joining us today for the second time is someone who I really enjoy chatting about the markets with, Leo Smokoka.

He's a top performer in the U.S. Investing Championship. He finished last year with a 409% return.

And today we're going to dive through a lot of his trades from the past year, what made the difference, his strategy, his key setups, and talk about some key principles for achieving triple digit returns. So, Laosh, thank you so much for your time again. This is going to be a lot of fun, and we're going to show a lot of specifics too, which I think is really important. But it's great to have you back. Welcome.

Thank you. Thanks for having me, Richard. It's an honor to be back after all those amazing traders you've had in the past year. So I'm grateful to be back. Yeah, perfect.

Well, I think I'll learn a ton from today's session. I think everybody watching will as well. So let's go ahead and dive right in. And I know there's probably some traders who maybe didn't watch our previous interview, where you went in depth into your background.

But maybe if you don't mind giving a high level overview, just to just to give a touch on that. And then if they want to learn more, they can, of course, watch the previous interview, which will be linked down below. Absolutely.

So me personally, I've been trading now about eight years, going into a ninth year. Traditionally, I'm coming from a classical, I would say, O'Neill style. canceling methodology which i kind of refined uh over the years also influenced a lot by mark minervini life sorate and so on and i'll describe myself i think when i talked to christian flanders recently i think he had a good term you know that we're kind of boom and bust traders we had lots of ups and downs in the years so went through also several drawdowns kind of build up the stayed back and was just keeping on improving this uh i've never really deviated from my style so i was stuck to this canceling kind of methodology which was kind of my base which i refined over the years and yeah last year decided to join the usic and i think it's gonna be a main topic of today so you Yeah, perfect.

Well, obviously, you finished extremely well. Before we started recording, you said to me you'd be happy. You would have been happy with a top 20 finish. Obviously, you did quite a bit better than that.

But I think it'll be really cool to see the trades and opportunities that led into that. So yeah. So let's go ahead, if you don't mind sharing your screen, and we can dive right into those and talk through everything.

And I like the chart markups you did where you kind of... take a step-by-step to the trade because you're 100% right. We don't want to be just, you know, hindsight analyzing.

We want to kind of be talking through what you saw in the moment, you know, what made you decide to execute, how you manage risk, all of that. So yeah, feel free to share whenever you'd like to. Exactly. It's going to be, yeah, I have a lot of charts prepared from winners, losers to also, there might be some questions.

A lot of people recently reached out and they asked about, you know, the trading ground positions or like aggressively managing the shorter timeframes. so we'll we'll see where we get uh when we touch on that and as you sector correctly we don't do hindsight trading so try to prepare it a little bit more closer to real time so just give me a second and i'll share it all right leo so we're gonna start with it looks like uh um arm uh for from the ipo uh phase so uh yeah let's go ahead and dive right in talk through you know why you're watching this name and and what you're watching as it formed this this base yeah so arm was one of the the biggest winners i had that year and i actually started already trading it as you can see it was in a 23 so basically what we're looking at here is this perfect uh ipo base where what i was looking like you know the found some bottom found some food and get a s4650 and just jumped right into this overhead supply. So I started watching it as the names coming into this resistance and starts draining the supply as you can see. And these contractions around the resistance getting kind of lower to allow the name to go into this acceptable risk that I would have for reposition, which would be somewhere anywhere between let's say 3% to 7% ideally.

risk would be a little bit larger. I would be thinking about maybe stacking the stops, but ideally we want to aim for as low risk as possible, which kind of presented me at this time. If you can look at that volume action also, we're having an increased volume going to that resistance and that volume really drenches here. And as this last day before the breakout, the whole handle is about four to five risk.

We have some overhead here, but it's not much of a concern. It's one day IPO. We have a lot of cushion.

Next day, going into breakout, perfect breakout, opened inside, which is even better what we were looking for. Allowed me to very quickly de-risk the position to move the stop to about 1.5%. So now we're looking at a huge R multiples.

Naturally, I'll be looking for a handle here in that area somewhere. then question is where it is actually so as long as we're getting this increased volume coming in we're more or less free rolling one and a half percent right so what happened after as you can see that progress through the trade so what i would start doing uh the handle i was talking about suddenly we're signing it surprise seeing a handle in a base near near highs a reasonable handle too i think you could be entering here again on the pullback maybe even even a bit aggressive from this spot yeah from this 10 day 10 day moving average pullback uh what allowed me to do is basically just keep moving the stops the risk in the trade so here we're talking plus one hour further bounces the risk in 2R. First profits I took was somewhere here in this strange day here, and then really open inside, dropped directly down, taking the first profits, maybe talking about 3R, progressing through it.

It looks very climatic here, already breaking this horizontal line, taking another profit there. And then what happened here was very, I would say, expert buy or a bit unusual buy for me. But what was happening at that point, I saw a lot of names on my watch list were doing the same thing.

They're dropping, finding the support along the technical areas, being it moving averages or maybe some low of the base and so on. So what I tried to do as the name. dropped down and was coming back through these lows, I started a position with about 1% risk.

There's a high probability, maybe 75% of the time I can get knocked out. But if we get on 1% risk, if we get 4% profit, I can do it four or five times over and I would still be profitable on name. And somehow it paid off. So it's continuing to hold it further.

Maybe some of them misstated. I did not take any profits here, but still, again, almost free rolling the trade. Reduced a little bit of the position on not very nice action. And what's happening here, we were coming into earnings.

All of those positions, I have about 3R plus a little bit more what I added. So comfortable cushion to hold into earnings. And those earnings, as we can see, just, yeah, it was just, what was it, like 50%, 50% gap on the earnings.

So I was immediately starting like reducing, reducing, reducing and into this climax, close the position. So a very quick velocity IPO, IPO play. One of the. one of the largest winners. I left a little bit of the name to go through the basing, but this very volatile action just knocked me out.

But what I would start doing is moving the stops along the key points. So as you can see, a 10 day moving average breakdown, close the down there, 20 day moving average breakdown, close the whole position. Yeah, perfect. Can you step back? to the IPO base slide where you marked up kind of your initial entries.

I've got a few questions there. But you know, this markup is awesome. Yeah, one or two more, maybe if you don't mind, Leosh. Yeah.

Yeah, cool. So your your initial buy here, obviously, you've got those two tight days right below that key resistance level. That's what you're looking for. How much of your portfolio are you looking to position in a name like Arm?

And does it being a recent IPO change things or do you kind of treat it the same as a typical position? It would depend on my recent portfolio traction, right? So the position size is not necessarily driven by whether it's an IPO or whether it's a long-term name.

The position size is driven by what is the entry, how much risk. can I put into the entry? Here we see about 5%, which is a traditional stop.

So I'll be even aiming, if I have a traction for my full positions, it would be ideally 25% of my whole account. Naturally, if my watch list is not acting perfect, or if the whole market conditions are not favorable and I haven't had recent tractions, then I'll be scaling down the positions to, maybe if I'm starting from cash, I would start maybe. for a position which would be maybe six percent of my account right based only on the recent traction i would be adding more yeah perfect do you remember how much of your account this one was or yeah i think it was 25 percent yeah 25 perfect and then you talked about free rolling the trade a few times here can you maybe explain that concept and and it seems like it was heavily influenced by mark minervini he's a big advocate of of that process but maybe discuss how you kind of You think about that and then also what you actually do in order to accomplish that. Yeah, so free rolling basically means de-risking.

A lot of people, when they hear de-risk... they might be thinking only stops, but you might be risking the name multiple ways. If the name breaks out, like we saw here, you have a leverage, what you will do with the name.

You can move your stops, you can stagger your stops, and you can take some profits off. You can shave off some profits. If you shave off some profits and move your stop a little bit higher, basically, if you get stopped out, you break even. Right.

You're free rolling the trade now. So of course it depends on the magnitude of the action. Sometimes you can do both. You can take a little bit off, move your stop.

Sometimes you can be just trailing along these technical areas, what I like to prefer to do in some powerful names to allow it a little more space. Yeah, no, that's super helpful. And this one acted perfectly from that initial breakout. And like you said, form that handle. uh just below highs um and i like how you pointed out the potential uh additional entry area through that inside day um would you have considered you know obviously this is this is a hindsight training question but would you have considered you know added um adding through that or you already had enough in the trade that uh you know you're just letting it work i think if i remember correctly i didn't have so much traction i had already some other positions at the time so i was not interested in adding so much are getting very heavy in one single name so again uh kind of yes and no answer but again yeah depending on the traction that's that's trading there's gonna be a lot of yes and no question and no answer so no problem at all um I think this is a really good example about selling into strength and I think that's a question that a lot of traders watching this are still kind of thinking for themselves how they do that um And we can see kind of where you reduced here on that one day, which broke the low after a nice breakout.

And then also when it got climactic, could you kind of talk about, you know, from a high level, what situations would you look to reduce a position that's trending well and, you know, just to take some profits and also lock in maybe, you know, parts of the trade, parts of the position? So kind of when do you decide to sell into strength? So.

Selling into strength, I have a few basic rules. First thing you want to do is to reach at least two multiples of your risk of your initial stop, ideally. Of course, it's again not black and white answer. If I would be entering maybe from more aggressive entry, which we can show further. And then it would be maybe running into some overhead supply.

I'll be looking also in those technical areas and potentially if I would be even like 1R, 1.5R, I would be maybe peeling a little bit off again to kind of minimize the downside, kind of improve that worst case scenario. So if maybe my initial risk would be 5% by reducing it to 1.5R and moving stuff maybe to 3%, I would increase this worst case scenario. to a little better. Similarly, if the names, as you correctly said, is breaking some climatic rounds, I would be looking to, again, to peel off a little bit there because there's, again, with each day like that, there's an increased probability that you're going to get some pullback. You might be waiting for a new entry.

So it also comes with a factor, like a time factor, right? Yeah. perfect and this one um that last cell climactic action were you completely out of the name at that point or did you still have some position on i still had i tried to hold it for uh the basing period afterwards uh but again that isn't yeah that base that was shaping afterwards it just shook me out out of those areas actually i meant the the first climactic action so uh on that previous slide i don't know here Yeah. No, no. Here I just reduced the position and I had these stops there along this 20 day moving average.

Gotcha. Yeah. Perfect. And let's see, what did I want to ask? Yeah.

So, so this one you, you ended up pulling through earnings and it acted tremendously well after earnings. What's kind of your rule for, you know, what profit cushion you need to have in order to hold a portion through that kind of binary event? So for earnings, you can always look at an option market and what is implied move of the name. Currently, you also have certain services that you don't even have to calculate it necessarily by yourself, but you can very easily find it available online.

So kind of it's a good habit to look at this implied volatility through the earnings. And if you judge that you might have a sufficient cushion, let's say implied move is 8%, you have 6%, 10%, 15%. I would be willing.

to hold at least a portion again it's not a 100 or zero you can always just reduce some and maybe leave a little small portion to uh through the earnings yeah excellent all right can you step through towards the end of the trade i just want to see if there's anything else i wanted to ask there if you go just basically to the last slide there yeah perfect yeah nice yeah what a move this is a great ipo based to study and and and all of that Let's see here. No, I think I think this is pretty clear. And oh, one actual question I wanted to ask was on on a climactic type action or just a sell to strength. How much typically of your original position are you selling into strength?

Or is it, you know, 25%, 10% each time? Does it depend on the situation? How do you kind of decide how much to reduce?

It also depends where we're coming from. If it's a if it's a climatic run like this, that we've already had a decent run up, I would be at that point, it's most likely have already peeled some off. Now we basically reducing portions, typically 25, 33% piece by piece until I am very bad in getting rid of everything, as you can see here.

So very often I will leave, maybe even maybe two or 3% position just kind of not to lose the touch with the name. which very often then stops me out eventually yep well this this was a great trade and and uh like i said a really good uh ipo base for people to look back and study uh from from this past year so uh perfect thanks for thanks for sharing that and yeah let's let's run through uh the next one so next what we can look at is uh i'm not gonna jump into it i have a gev ready which is also ipo and just a little bit different character so we can look at it maybe further but what i'll jump to is uh smr uh example of uh bit aggressive trading died it perfect at some point during the year so if you look at smr you can see it's a extremely wild wild base. You have almost 50% decline, which is very often no-go. I would not be willing so often to trade names like that.

But what kind of made me to try to enter his name was actually GEV. It was this nuclear theme coming up with many other names holding up like those VST, GEV. couple other names.

And while I was holding GEB, which was rocking all time highs, I saw SMR setting up as well. What was unfortunate though, if you look at this kind of a cheat entry, lower handle, just below the 50 day, the volume profile is not that bad. You can see increased volume. we're again drying up the volume in that handle, coming in good volume back up. However, there was a 13% risk, so there was no way for me to enter a name if we opened somewhere towards the low of the range.

But what happened next day was the name opened inside and started coming through that handle. So what I did, I entered basically as it was crossing the previous day highs. right here and putting a very tight stop of about five percent uh i had to reduce the size here so maybe if 25 is my original size i would reduce it to maybe half like 12 and a half percent because there's a high probability i'm gonna get knocked out right just maybe intraday move can easily knock me out what happened next day as you can see there's absolutely no check back the names follow through right after that.

And at this point, again, when we talked about the risking, what it allows me to do is again, start moving my stops a little bit. So as you can see here, what I started doing here, I started basically trailing. I moved it first here a little bit.

And then very soon after I started trailing this 10 day moving average, which already it's maybe because we're looking at a big move. It might not look like much, but I was here already at like one and a half hour, two hour and so on. Reduced first profits here. Or as we talked before again. For the potential handle area, you have the same pattern here.

You're coming into the base, eventually you might have a higher handle, which is very typical in a cup base, which we get here, a little bit of shakeout. I try to enter here on this 10-day moving average, this is the first touch of the 10-day when we are starting to shape the handle, similar strategy. Was lucky enough not to get knocked out. And what I started then doing into all those first pops, I would always reduce and eventually close out the position on a backstop. I completely missed this further up climatic move, but good enough.

Yeah, this was a killer trade. And I think what's key here is that you had identified the theme, right? the theme that SMR was a part of. What do you kind of typically do to try to stay on top of what themes are setting up?

You know, last year, we had quantum computing also as a theme, the nuclear theme, the AI semi theme, of course, what do you do to kind of keep an eye on, you know, what, what themes could produce moves like this? Is it something that you do by screening or just kind of watching the stocks themselves? That's what, what tips you off about, you know, what themes potentially are in play?

I think there's no shortcut for work. If you do your screening, you will eventually discover these patterns, being it either a technical theme, meaning if you look at your watch list and what names are working, are those proper cup-weight handles, are those pullbacks, are those high-tight flags, what's working, and of course also groups and sectors. At this point, it was nuclear name and other... point of time might have been AI and so on. Also, you could see last year a lot of this constant rotation underneath the surface.

What I would be careful though is a style drift. You still want to keep those watch lists limit to your style of competence. You don't want to be creating, because if you start creating watch lists for value investing and swing trading and scalping, then eventually you're going to be all over the place and you're going to miss those. themes that you have to look with a kind of microscopy view a little bit more underneath the surface yeah perfect and one other question i had for this one and maybe all the names were we're looking at today um do you have a sense of which trades uh had the greatest impact on your year your performance which had the greatest uh equity contribution um because i would be curious to see if uh you know was it you know a few trades that really propelled propelled your account higher or was it just kind of pretty consistent over a spread of trades that led to the strong performance? So if you saw my distribution curve, we can look at my stats, which I have prepared.

Maybe I can. Yeah, that'd be great. So this is the statistics.

I don't have the distribution curve here, but if you saw my distribution curve, I had maybe three, four big winners, which were maybe like 40% plus. And there have been maybe intense 20s of maybe like 10 20 but most of my gains came also from a lot of overweight positions in the range of maybe zero to four percent gains uh and so this you don't necessarily need a huge minister of a huge year it's kind of like in a boxing if you just keep you know stabbing those small jabs eventually you're gonna have this space for this one you huge winning uppercut that will move the needle but as long as the i guess the main thing is to you know everybody repeats it the risk control risk control and risk control yeah perfect and looking at uh this table here were there any other key takeaways that you think might be helpful for for traders watching this so what you can see i know a little bit that hidden pattern i guess because the i guess the average are pretty clear you can make the head about it. Maybe also the important thing is track your numbers and not everybody's doing it and I think is the key aspect of the trading. You have to know your game, where you stand.

If you look at that average loss, the betting average is coming a lot from, as I said, sometimes when I would be stepping on the gas and going very heavy, I would be much more nimble and much less willing to take even any losses. So I would be even cutting it for very small gains. That's how I racked this large betting average.

And as you can see, it's kind of this hidden thing that the smaller positions. are going to have a smaller betting average. What it kind of hides is you can see that the thing when your portfolio is acting the best is the time to start pressing the gas. And also on the other side, immediately as you see something not acting right, it's time to start pulling the brake and pulling the brake with the full power, as you might be getting into some periods where you might have so much success. So it's like both.

trading your best with the heaviest size and trading your worst with the smallest size possible. Yeah, perfect. And for that, you're looking at your recent trades to determine whether you're trading at your best or your worst, or is it the setups that you're seeing in the market, or is it kind of a combination? It's a combination of both. Ideally, if I see both traction of my portfolio and I see my watch list acting well, it means names are finding the support they are following through and so i'll be much more willing to go on the margin and really start pressing the gas very heavy whereas like for example now we might have a some success some breakouts now in january 25 however overall tape is not very premium and you have to be still i would say quite small if you're heavy very nimble very fast to knock it out perfect yeah please yeah Also one thing, it's kind of what I picked up from Leif maybe.

Sometimes I would not have really a problem of going quite big intraday, but then it's a matter of also evaluating where you stand towards the end of the day. So sometimes I would have no problem ramping it up intraday to 1.5x margin just to close the day, maybe even 30% invested. Yeah, so staying nimble. that was key. Yeah.

Perfect. And that that's kind of touching on what I wanted to ask you next, which, which was, you know, you talk about, you know, the, these stocks, which obviously are pretty volatile, manage your risk, all of that, but also trading aggressive at the same time. So how, how do you kind of balance trading very aggressive with managing your risk to make sure that, you know, you're not suffering too large drawdowns, all of that.

And, you know, overall, you're, you're, you're making a lot of progress in your account. It all, maybe first thing, it depends how you define aggressive, because you can be having, we can also look then later on one other trade. If you're entering from aggressive pivots, aggressive entries, like maybe some lower entries where you're running into a lot of overhead, you have a high chance of some implied volatility in the name.

Or if you mean aggressive that you're entering a name with wider stops, that With the wider stops, I would kind of do what's a very counterintuitive thing, the larger the volatility, less space you want to give on the downside. So I would be maybe willing even to try it a couple of times, three, four times, but really keep the risk to a minimum. And the third type of aggressive is going aggressive on your whole equity, on your whole portfolio.

It's coming back to the thing, evaluating towards the close. If your names are acting, and if I would see both the traction in my portfolio and the watch list acting great, then I would be more willing to hold this overweight account through multiple days. Yeah, and I think that's a key question that a lot of people have watching the interviews from traders like yourself from the USIC is, you know, how did they use margin throughout the year to achieve these triple digit returns?

And kind of what you're saying is... you're using your margin but you're using it selectively when the market warrants it when the trades that you're doing warrant it when end of day you're in a position that warrants the use of margin where it's proving to yourself that it's worth the risk to take additional size basically um that's kind of my observation was there anything kind of you want to add about how you think about using margin and and in your trading i think you summarize it perfectly you just have to be very very cognizant, very mindful of the total drawdown that's there because the margin is a double-edged sword. So once you stop respecting all your rules, if you have them at the first place, then it can really lead to almost a disaster.

perfect well uh let's get back to smr this this is super helpful and i think uh it's great to see the stats uh to support that uh but getting into smr here um let's see uh for for you was there any kind of key takeaways with this particular trade that stands out or things that um you know concepts that you think would be good for for traders to understand um and one thing that stands out maybe is that breakout through 16.91 that one big extension day Was that after earnings or was that just a typical breakout? It was just a breakout. It just continued running.

What was a very interesting or nice takeaway for me is because often I'll be watching not just price, but price and volume. And if you forget that the volatility in this name, which was kind of very high, if you look at what's happening, both from the price and volume combination. you have a picture perfect behavior here. You would be running, you would have here the breakout, you'll be running from lows where the selling pressure here diminished almost into this right side of the, if you look here, into this right side here, then we are continuing with the burst into the base. continuing follow through increased volume increased volume increased volume when we are coming into pivots both being it here supply diminishes same kind of a little bit elevated but still okay still decreased volume into the handle area we have the shake out there breakout again look at that volume 40 million shares traded in one day right and continued also actually even gold maybe i was bit premature selling here because if you look at that that action here you have follow through buying follow through buying again decrease volume a little bit follow through buying some action here the tennis ball action decreased selling increased buying picture perfect yeah for sure and and one thing that you said you know this this is a stock that intraday can have pretty wide ranges is there an average 80 percent that you prefer?

I know some people who really trade these high momentum names, you know, like 4% plus 5% plus, is there a number that comes to mind? Honestly, I don't really look at it. I mean, I started looking recently because I followed some few traders that kind of hinted, you know, looking at the ADR, but I've never really looked at the exact numbers.

I kind of, I look at it, I kind of know what it is, but I don't have like a requirement that I would require a certain ADR. Gotcha. Perfect.

Yeah. Any key takeaways from this one or we can push on to the next trade? I think we can push on next trade.

Maybe last thing, maybe I forgot here. If you look at it, actually, here we're just starting the stage two uptrend. If you would look at the weekly chart, if you look at the weekly chart, we were not that far away. So this is just the...

Also, there will be one thing to kind of hinting to me to hold maybe a little bit longer. We were just starting this trend. 200 day moved up, the 50 day flattened out.

This is the first kind of area where they were stuck. And here we're rocking the stage two upturn from here. Yeah. And one thing that stands out here on the weekly is kind of the overall pattern.

It obviously pulled back and had a big neglect period around, you know, two and a half dollars a share, had a big momentum up move, set back up, had a big momentum move and then set back up. And then that's that's where you were placing the trade there. Sure. Do you look at that at all? You know, how many momentum moves it's had off the lows?

Because you're kind of trading the third wave up. I don't know if you think about that at all. I would definitely look at it. And you kind of want to see that trend moving into your direction. So I would not be trying to bottom fish when we have a 200-day trending down, 50-day moving average trending down.

You want to see that the trend turned up. Ideally. three, four, five months, maybe go as early as maybe two months, but still you want to have the trend in your favor.

Yeah, perfect. And I love how you pointed out here, the low volume, those four weeks into the lows of the base before you started focusing on the name. I think that's key. Perfect. And one other question I had for you is this name in particular is a pretty low price stock.

Is there any consideration to that or it's all about just the setup and overall liquidity maybe? It is definitely a factor. I mean, in my general screening, I'll be screening $12 and above.

And again, here it was kind of an exception with all other factors, right? So it's not all set in stone, but with the theme coming up, the names not necessarily acting okay only on X feet, but also in my actual portfolio. So this kind of prompted me to also look elsewhere.

Yep. perfect all right let's move on to the next one here so maybe what i can uh show is it was not a very big winner but to highlight when we talked about being aggressive and being nimble what can also happen and sometimes people can understand so i have here the lumn trade yeah which i traded from these this very aggressive entry of a 50-day moving average. And here again, why I would be prompted to trade it much quicker is several factors. The base is not very perfect, even though if you look at the volume compared to the prior uptrend, we can see also a nice profile.

But the overall base, I cannot see really much defined. pattern here it's not any proper handles and so on if you look at the the price again we're talking very low price name at the bottom range of my really what i would touch maybe like below six i wouldn't even touch it but i think here if i remember correctly there was some huge news coming into into this name so a lot of interest in i think some microsoft also getting interested or getting involved in here so What I tried to do here is to try to trade it off this first, second 50-day touch as it was coming into a base because what I was expecting here, what could happen against the name could break out, start building some low handle or handle and continued basic continued upside. Of course, I was very wrong on that, but what happened here, I would take the position about 6% initial risk.

Already on that first day, popped about 6%, so I would already de-risk it a little bit. So now when we're talking, if I take 30% off, so now we're talking maybe 4% if I get stopped all the way here. Next day, continued further solely for almost a 3 hour, reduced a little bit. And then it started reversing intraday. When you see a reversal like that, Depending on your risk tolerance, you might decide what you want to do with it.

For me, if it reverses, maybe even 12% intraday, it's kind of a big number. So I just close it all the way here. It's like two days straight for pretty good gain. Yeah. Was it a news catalyst on that day?

I forget why it gapped up, but I remember this happening. I don't think so. I think that news started coming here, then the news came. came or there was some delayed reaction because i remember it was like some news coming in and the name was not acting at all and suddenly from nothing it started started breaking out so yeah we'll see yeah this one uh yeah definitely uh an example of the type of reversal that you can see in these lower price names that you have to be you have to be pretty aggressive with that selling when it does it does happen but uh yeah definitely a good example of a nimble trade yeah And then I can highlight maybe last one, so people don't think I trade only these crazy volatile price names. Let me bring in PHA, which was extremely nice.

I like what Pat Walker says, clean and simple base. It was unfortunately also very quick trade because we were having earnings coming up and i didn't have really much cushion and so on but if you look at it it's a perfect volatility contraction characteristics you have this gap up here you start going into this this base here it's kind of a time if you look at it it's a little bit time compressed here still i didn't have it's maybe just a four weeks kind of wedged up action not really a nice base proves with a pivot failure Continuous basing further. What I really like here is the shake out, shake out and at this area, which is flat, there are a bit of some buying here.

So we had some weak hands that we got rid of. And now we're starting setting up the proper pivots in a very nice symmetrical base left, right. If you draw the line here, here you have this nice symmetry in a base and you start having this natural pivot. So this progresses against some lower sheet handle.

here a proper handle so i actually didn't buy it here i missed it for some reason maybe was not even looking at it but bought it here from this picture perfect handle on the top of this major the main supply resistance area as again the supply completely drenched here followed by a powerful breakout increased volume I guess it was maybe 40% above average, fish day moving average. And this allowed me to trade it with an extremely tight stop. The added handle was about 2%.

As it moved further, again, moved the stop to about 1.3%. So you're talking now on the upside of very quick risk multiples. I reduced a little bit as we were.

As we moved through this mini high handle, if you want to call it like that, unfortunately got shaken out on the 10-day moving average break for a portion. And then this remaining portion, unfortunately, I had maybe, I guess it was maybe 4% into earnings. So it was not enough cushion for me. So I just closed it. Unfortunately, kept up, could have had better profits, but it's all hindsight.

It's part of the game. part of the game yeah perfect yeah um those those cheat areas are really well formed in this one i think it's a good example of uh of those pivots there um yeah i i don't think i have too many follow-up questions here i think it's a good example and you get to see uh you're not just trading those uh sub ten dollar names you you you'll you'll trade wherever the opportunities are so that's perfect all right So should we also jump so we don't talk about only winning trades? We can also look at some of the few losers.

Let's do it. Yep. So first I'm going to bring, I think it's my, if we talk about the technical action and the decisions, I think it was the worst trade of the whole year. Even the percentage wise, it was not very pleasant.

What I mentioned. highlight here that you know if you if you start doing mistakes very often those mistakes can lead to some hesitation when eventually it can lead to kind of a paralysis and prevent you from doing some other smart decisions so that's why I would advise stick to all your rules don't break even single one because breaking one rule leads to breaking under rules and what I did here first It was really like over trading, I guess, maybe I was starting having a good traction. I was kind of loosening my criteria. If you look at this pivot forming here, the pivot itself is 13% and you have this large overhead area all the way here. It has quite a lot of selling volume still even up to this point.

Even here we have this one. two days. Those weeks, yeah.

So I try to do what, you know, again, cut down the volatility a little bit by entering, I would say, quite prematurely, already trying to, as it's coming into those big areas of that pullback with the staggered stops, 3% and 9%, which I would say is a big mistake. at least for me personally because as i mentioned here you're loosening stuff you have an imperfect entry so you want to again cut down the volatility cut down the risk because you have a high chance you're going to get stopped out i did the opposite loosen it even to a nine percent uh what's even worse than we have here the wedged up entry you don't have any nice sideways or down drift action we're just wedging up as you can see here this line here which is wedging up which is met by again some upper wicks going into that up action. I even added here instead of taking some profits which I would have booked out, I actually added even a little bit more. And then it's just an avalanche of other mistakes.

Next day, surprise, almost kind of a gap down. I didn't really react on it. I think I was not even watching the name really closely. So I just got naturally stopped out. So with the slippage, it was maybe at 3%, then other like 8% stop.

And of course, the traditional thinking is going to come back. I'll just say it when it comes to break even. So on that last remaining portion, another awful wedged up action. I continued holding through it, hoping for a miracle.

then boom next day gap down with the slippage stop for another 12 percent so yeah it obviously happens um yeah were there any key takeaways from here obviously follow the cell rules but anything else uh i would say there is multiple multiple points it's exactly opposite of what we're looking for before you don't have a as we mentioned here instead of having a having a pivot that you would have a you know going like down drift action or side wave action you're wedging up here which is met by the selling if you look at the volume profile you have actually yeah here increased volume on those selling areas met by decreased volume on the buying so complete opposite of we were showing before we had the relative strength lagging uh the volatility also didn't have enough time it's quite time compressed and have enough time to to work out work out that volatility and that of course so i said not respecting the rules yeah hoping stuck in a in the thinking yeah perfect well i think everybody watching this can can relate to some placing some bad trades and bad execution and obviously you ended up having a fantastic year so um There's always a little bit of bad with the good. And next one we can look at is dollar-wise. It was, I think, my worst trade. It was during that December of drawdown, which I had, where I kind of threw all my rules out the window and was trying to revenge trade every single name into a few last days, where I did the exact opposite of it.

what you should do when you start having losses, decreasing the size, sorry, increasing the size, which led to a disaster. And if you look at this, it was, I think when I was entering MSTR, I already had a couple of losses. So I was trying to, of course, get it back up into one single trade.

And of course, getting it back up, meaning entering here. If you look at this here, first of all, you have here 40% in four days. It's awful action. You would really need a lot of weeks for that base to be repaired. And personally, when I entered here, I could have even booked some profits.

If you look at it relatively, it might have been maybe like 10%. But of course, stuck in that thinking that I have to make up all the trades, just thinking, okay, I have to leave it to go to 500 because I'm going to... make up all my losses in the last couple of days. So instead of doing that, kind of got stuck with the name, the name Squatted, holding through the squat on this violation, which normally I would immediately sell into. If I see breakout like that not working, what's the reason to hold overnight?

You can easily enter next day. You don't necessarily... you know be stuck with it or even you can always also reduce the name maybe just hold it with small portion we want to but you don't necessarily have to hold the whole initial position which i did and of course and the third action continued here unfortunately i didn't get stopped so instead of being knocked for the day i continued holding it to the next open And I remember it was the first few minutes, we kind of started plummeting down, kind of sell it for 12%.

Being on overweight position, it was 65% position, it means Now, totally, we multiply this 8% of the whole account in one, two, three days. Yeah. And if you look at it again, if you want to take some key takeaways from it, I think it's quite obvious to see what you see here is a sea of red, no virtual, no buying, just institutions exiting by large.

I have here 100 million trading. trading volume that's you know that's not the retail traders exiting the position yeah and that was a huge reversal down that day obviously um talk me through uh you know that period where you marked revenge trading and then also the end of the year uh because i think there's some good lessons there for for everybody um i i'm sure it must be a little bit painful to talk about it for sure but um i think that'd be really helpful yeah absolutely i mean I already mentioned it to a couple of people and it's like if you start chasing, focusing on your process and you start chasing the returns or the money, then the ego can be like your worst enemy. Once you start battling with yourself and it doesn't matter if you're shooting, if I was shooting from 960% to 1000% or if you have a $1,000 account. and you want to have a you know 100 000 in one year just stick to your principles and compound the the good things even you know if you take a loss it's still a good thing so you know celebrate those things and it's gonna have a this compounding effect in the positive side the same thing like on the on negative side once you start breaking your rules you will focus on the ones you don't respect your stop you will start focusing on revenge trading when you revenge trade you will start closely watching the position So it compounds also on the negative side. And for me personally, it wasn't...

Luckily, I respected all the stops. Otherwise, I could have blown my account. So it was maybe about six, seven revenge trades.

But after this MSTR, I have even one sharp repair of SE. I don't know if you want to show it, but what I did there, I just took a 4% or 3.5% loss of 2X account. so it's another seven percent of the the portfolio so it wasn't that many trades yeah it can happen quickly and um like like you've pointed out you know you're kind of doing the opposite of what the principles you know tell you to do you're sizing larger than than typically you're widening the stops not respecting the stops uh you know fully um obviously you eventually close these all these but um yeah it's it's the little things that you you want to you want to stay on top of your rules especially when you're having a really good year and trading well that's when it can all turn around pretty quickly when you're trying to chase performance versus you know playing the hand that's dealt to you so um no i think this is important to talk about so thank you for sharing no problem it's a key for this triple digit returns if you if you stay above water or maybe just a little bit on water then eventually those better days are gonna come so If you think 100%, it's a 6% a month compound over 12 months. So you don't necessarily need to have 100% months to achieve that. So if you stay safe during those bad periods and just guess it when the going is good, then there you have a triple digit.

Yeah, perfect. Yeah, do you want to bring up that SE chart or was there another trade you wanted to walk through first? I can bring it and I think we'll be running into... all i have perfect yeah se it's quite quite simple it's not much talk about it's few days uh the actual entry wasn't that bad if you look at it if you if you think there is this gap up which unfortunately closed down so it closed that it filled that gap but found the founder support on the on the 10th day right around the demand area, the support continued up from there and started shaping this nice this mini formation, you want to call it like that, or this natural reaction of about maybe about three weeks so that entry is not necessarily that bad. So what I tried to do of course, MSTR at that point not working for me, I say it's...

you know it's i'm in a drawdown there so what i'm gonna do i'm gonna size it up even more because this is a previous leader it has pretty nice setup so why not to you know take a chance on this one uh so it took it here uh on this entry as it did his um it's not necessarily shake out but continue this this formation here uh with the complete here again volume volume dry up and started finding support on this 20-day moving average so i was thinking pretty good risk reward about three and a half percent uh took a chance there double my account uh next day not very nice open continue down stop seven percent of the account yeah it's tough Yeah. Yeah. Like you said, you know, the overall setup, the overall execution outside of position size is pretty typical. And, you know, we're taking it.

Yeah. Maybe if like if you look at the character of the SE, it was kind of acting that way. Like the first thing what it did also didn't provide you a proper nice handler. It just continued above, just started setting up, started setting up on top of that. a similar we saw a similar thing here i started setting up on the from that from that formation here so it wasn't that unusual for also for the se we're looking at the character how the name was acting before yeah for sure yeah uh i i think um you know the key things you talked about earlier apply here as well the mistakes you're making because of you know what's what else is going on with your drawdown and and the mental side of things um you know thinking back on that period and and moving forward were there any key takeaways that uh or rules or things that you're applying so in the future um you know stuff like this can't happen or you'll kind of minimize uh the impact if if you start uh you know trading like this as well trying to get back to where you were and all that so i would say overall I want to be even more stringent on the risk side.

I think there is still, I had during the year, even though those throwdowns were not that big, I think I could have been even more stricter on the risk. And also like starting focusing on my emotional and mindset side of the trading, because maybe the technical side is, I would say maybe pretty decent level, but the trading... similar like working out bodybuilding they say you know 80 80 percent diet 20 working out right i think the same applies to trading you have a 80 mindset side and 20 technical or execution side so and i think like what would i would maybe advise the traders or what kind of i discover i guess maybe during the usic also it's kind of a trying to kind of self-discover myself and focus on the best version of myself as a trader of course we all want to or we all aspire to you know be like our heroes like mark minervini and david dry and so on but at the end it comes down to defining your own style of trading yeah perfect i think that's well said uh were there any other charts that you want to share was this the the last one leo yeah so there are cpng i traded twice again comes down for you know with also trading in the around the position uh first uh was uh i wouldn't say a bad entry it was a first first uh support on the 50 day 50 even though we have good amount of the the overhead here but again it comes down to the thing if if it opens like cpng did with the insider here i can be immediate moving my risk.

So that breakout was pretty nice, I would say. Unfortunately, what happened, CPNG being Korean name, I think the next day there was some news that came in. I was not even watching the market to take my stop, so came back to my computer and I saw 5.5% stop.

So it was unfortunate, but it can happen too. But what I wanted to highlight here is again that how you can minimize your loss even if you have gap downs with reducing your size. If you look at the second time that I traded the CPNG, again traded from a pullback of this second day, second time, 20-day touch.

If you could look at the candlesticks, you would see these very nice, I would call inverted hammers. And this area is founded support. Next day, it started following through. from that support level with about a 3% risk in a trade, thinking, again, it can set up maybe some, it can pause a little bit here around that area, around those highs.

So I took a little bit profit as it was also a little bit wedging up. You can see here, this big here kind of wedging up into the highs. I reduced a little bit of my position. Then we were coming into earnings.

It was actually a really nice day going into earnings. So I was thinking, okay, maybe there's something, Korean name. There might be something that I don't know. I reduced it twice, left a little bit portion, calculated into earnings, gap down, 9% stop. But because we already took profits before, the total loss was very manageable, 1%.

1%. Yeah, I think this is a good example of how selling at this strength can lock into profits and overall reduce your worst case scenario, like you've said a few times. And yeah, yeah, perfect. Leo, this has been excellent.

It's so good to walk through the trades, both the good and the bad, and you've been so open with that. So thank you for walking through those. An overarching theme that I want to talk with you that you've already kind of touched on is... you know, the key principles to achieve triple digit returns, you know, like you did last year. And I think what you said about, you know, just 6% compounded each month, you know, ends up being a triple digit year.

You don't have to stretch yourself too much. But, you know, apart from that, and just following a process, are there any other keys that, you know, you've adopted personally that, you know, you've learned from other people, or just from your own experience you've come to realize to really achieve really good super performance? I think one principle is also have your game plan ready and stay true to your game plan.

Don't try to come up with ideas, you know, intraday and try to do some nonsense stuff during the days that you're trading. So it somehow should be all premeditated and set in stone. So it will also, you know, protect you from this paralysis of not.

knowing what to do during the when the market's open yeah so for me personally i got caught a couple times during the during the year that i kind of didn't know what to do so i just basically closed whole whole my account and just started entering the next day because i didn't have the game plan in place so it's you know stick to your rules again stick you know control emotion and again risk control multiplied by three yeah there you go um Other than that, any other bits of advice that you'd like to leave everybody with, everybody who's watching? I would also say, we talked about 6% compounding, but don't be so harsh on yourself. You're not going to have a premium market like the last year was. So if you're achieving 10, 15, 20% a year, it's still a magnificent result. Yep.

Perfect. Yeah. 2024. you know, I was, I was building a model book from the last year and there were so many opportunities and I didn't even include all the ones that you, you pretty much included today. So there are, there are a lot of strong movers and strong themes to take advantage of 2024. And that's not always the case.

Every year is going to be different in terms of, you know, what, what, what opportunities exist. So I think that's important to remember. Um, but it was, this has been great. Uh, where can people, uh, connect with you if they'd like to get in touch or.

You know, I'll have the link to your Twitter down below. Is that the best place for people to reach out? It's the best place to reach out.

It's my last name and the first letter of my first name. So M-I-K-U-L-K-A-L Mikul Kal. That's my extra name. Perfect. Yeah, I'll put that down below.

Thank you for watching. I hope you guys enjoyed immensely. I know I had so many important key takeaways.

I think the free rolling, the trade, managing your risk. with risk multiples um you know that's that's one of the most important things for me but i'm sure you guys have your own thoughts and if you uh would like to go ahead and share them down below in the comment section uh check out uh leo down below his twitter and uh thanks so much for your time leave a like down below if you enjoyed uh subscribe if you need the channel and want to see more of interviews just like this one and we'll see you guys in future videos take care

Transcript for:Trading Strategies and Risk Management Insights

Transcript for:
Trading Strategies and Risk Management Insights