Before I started day trading, I didn't know what I wanted to do. Guess you could say I was a little lost. But I did know one thing that I didn't want to live a life of worrying like I spent the first 20 years of my life doing. I had a single mom, a dad in prison who was eventually shot and killed. And I knew that if I set my mind to something that my effort and my actions would dictate my income, that I could eventually retire from that. I could find freedom with that. And I knew I had people counting on me. A mom that struggled my whole life to raise me and my two siblings, my little sister and my little brother. And a grandma who sacrificed everything to house us and to keep us comfortable when my mom we almost went homeless. My mom was struggling to keep a roof over our head as a student straight out of nursing school who had no savings, no trust fund, and who spent every last dollar of hers to keep her kids fed and housed. And so I knew that I had to find a skill and a way to make money to break the cycle. the cycle that so many people go through but very few end up truly breaking for their family and to bring generational wealth into their bloodline for years to come. So first I look at real estate. The first skill that I actually started to learn I'm going to sit down was real estate and I went to a seminar out in California was a house flipping seminar. I'm not going to name names but it was not very valuable and at the time respectfully I wasn't in a spot where I should have been flipping houses. So, I did some more searching and after looking around YouTube for a while, I saw several people. One was a trader you may know, Umar Ash. And I saw that he made $50,000 in a day. And when I seen that, I just remember eight years ago, not nine years ago now, thinking to myself, if this man can make 50,000 in a day, 40,000 in a day, whatever it was, I can do that, too. And I looked at trading in a sense from the right lens at the time, but in a lot of ways the wrong lens. I started out with a mindset that isn't the same mindset I have now. I looked at that mindset of I can make 50,000 in a day or 40,000 in a day. And I wanted to do it soon. Well, soon after starting 9 years ago, I was humbled by a lot of things. I found out very quickly that it was not get-richqu. It was not a hobby. It was not a side hustle. It was something that was going to take every ounce of effort, every ounce of adaptability in my blood and bones to change. and every ounce of willingness to recognize my own faults, my own insecurities, my own vices, and to really adapt my mind into the trader that I've became today. Because it's not easy. I am not the same person that I was 9 years ago. I'm almost 30 years old. I've made over $3 million doing this, more if you count crypto. And what I can tell you from myself scaling starting with just $5,000 years ago to having a multiple seven figure portfolio and consistently making one two three four $5,000 plus a day consistently might I add with very minimal losses is that this is all came with the right structure of discipline and scalability. And to be completely honest I think I was a little naive at first. I saw the $50,000 day and then of course I start exploring. I start looking around and I see that nearly every trader on social media is making 10, 20, $30,000 a day. And it came to that realization that a lot of these people are full of crap. And I did doubt for a while that these massive results or even consistent results for that matter because I don't I don't preach massive results. I know there's a lot of teachers and gurus and such that preach you have to make 10K a day or you're not going to be a successful trader. That's not me. I look at trading from a freedom lens. And that's what really developed over my years was I wanted to make a sustainable income. Call it 1K a day. If you can average 1K a day, that's an extra $250,000 a year. And I looked at it from a lens of realistic expectations because I went through the phase of, man, I'm never going to have consistent 10 or 20 or 30k days. I had the days where I made 10K 2, three days in a row, and the next few days I'd give it back. And the biggest learning curve that I really had to swallow and adapt to was that it's about base hits. It's about staying disciplined. It's about choosing discipline over dopamine every single day. Because your strategy isn't the problem. Your strategy is not the problem. I'm going to repeat that. It's your discipline, your execution, and your lack of ability to follow a plan. At least that was my issue. I was not a disciplined person. I was very impulsive and I couldn't follow a plan. And when I did a complete trading audit of my brain, of my systems, and how I operated on a day-to-day basis as a trader, that's when things really started to click. When I worked in those things, I became accountable of those. And I dug deep in here, and I said, "Jacob, if you want to make this a long-term career, if you want to make the millions of dollars that you know that you can doing this over the next 5, 10, 15 years, you got to change some [ __ ] You got to really lock in. You got to take accountability." And so, I did just that. I took accountability. And a moment that I will never forget is when I had my first six-figure month, my first $100,000 month of pure profit trading in January of 2023. I started off 2023 making over $100,000 of real money in a real account in real time. And when I made that $100,000, now mind you, I'd made a lot of money prior to that. It really sunk in further that I came in as a as a kid, as a 20-year-old making $50 a day. I still have my journals from when I was making just $50 a day, scaled to a 100, then 200, then 300, then 500, and eventually to now making over $3 million. And what that showed me was that beyond what the videos say, beyond what gurus preaching massive results say, I saw in a screen in front of me, in front of my own two eyes, $100,000 in one month trading my system. And that was a moment that I'll really never forget. And speaking of moments that changed my life forever, I'll never forget when I was 20 years old and I made one of the dumbest financial decisions that I've ever made in my life. I was around $40,000, a little over in debt, and I filed for bankruptcy. $40,000, not even half of my biggest day ever as a trader. And in the end, I take accountability. I blame myself because I wasn't educated on financial literacy growing up. I didn't know. I didn't have a dad to teach me that stuff. And quite frankly, they don't really teach it in schools. And I didn't care to listen to what they were saying. And so for me, when I filed bankruptcy at 20, I made a decision that I was going to learn how to manage money. I was going to learn how to make a lot of money. And I was going to learn how to keep that money because I've seen both sides of the spectrum. I've been a very poor man. And I'm currently a very rich man. Not just in money, but in skills, in discipline, in my mindset, in my work ethic, and my confidence. I'm rich in every category. now that I was very poor in as a kid and that came through years of work through focus through self- auditing through self-actualization and through what it boils down to is guys is just putting in the work. you have to put in the work every single day and stop looking at it through a lens of why is God doing this to me and instead say what is God trying to teach me and that was a huge mindset shift from being at my all-time lows 19 going on 20 losing everything being in debt and hitting rock bottom at bankruptcy it was that moment where everything really started to shift I learned how to trade it took me a few years and now it's a skill that I'll never lose and it's money. You go on Google and you type in what percent of day traders make it. And the reality is only 1 to 2% will truly make it. One to two out of every hundred of you watching this will make it and will make a lot of money doing it. The other 98% won't. The other 98% will take it as a hobby, will quit while they're down, or won't follow through with what they plan for themselves. And I looked at that. I looked at those numbers and I said to myself, if even half of a percentage of people make it and say there's a million traders in the world, there's far more than that. I'm going to be a small part of those few thousand that do make it because I'm going to systemize my day-to-day processes. I won't quit. You can knock me down. You can put hard market conditions in front of me. You can change trends, bullish or bearish, it doesn't matter, bro. I'm not going to quit. I'm that guy that will keep going until I make it. And that's what got me to where I am and why day trading became an efficient way to wealth because I was willing to do whatever it took to become that 1%. Because as long as it's possible, there's a way. I know day trading catches a lot of slack from people who have failed once or don't see the vision or can't see something unkempt income working out because it has to be a scam. But I'll tell you, I'm the guy that's going to tell you it's hard. I'll tell you straight to your face, this is not going to be an easy journey. But the path to wealth and freedom is there. No matter how many sticks and stones and thorns are in the way, there is a path. Even if you come from as messed up as a path as I did, you can find a way. You just got to dig deep in your heart to find it. And a question I get asked a lot is, should you trade prop firms? Should you trade your live capital? And what strategy should you use? And to answer question one, I do both. I trade my own capital and I owned a prop firm. I saw the internal data of over 12,000 traders. And I also have gotten paid out from prop firms. Mind you, on my first try ever, I got paid out from Tradeify. This isn't because I know a magic strategy. And it's not because I'm an all-nose guru. It's because I know how to manage risk. I know how to control my emotions and I stay disciplined in every trade that I take. Now, when it comes to you choosing which is best for you, I think it goes both ways. But I will always advocate if you can find a trusted prop firm. There's a few out there that you can scale your trading and you can stomach losses as long as you're treating that capital as real money. You have to treat your properform capital as real money because the problem people run into is they treat the capital in their prop firm accounts or their evals or their funds like it's monopoly money. They gamble with it. They don't respect it. It's the same argument as people see when they're paper trading to practice. They don't treat the paper trading money with the respect they do for their live capital. So if you can find that respect for your risk, for your capital, and for your growth as a trader, then prop firms are great. You can scale your trading, follow the rules, and get paid. Now, another argument that people tell me is, "Well, Jay Dunn, prop firm has rules. I don't want rules, so I want to trade my own live capital." Brother, if you're trading your own live capital, you have to have rules for yourself. You have to self-regulate yourself, which can be even tougher than having a prop firm do it for you. As a trader of options or futures or equity, you have to have a set of risk rules, a set of non-negotiables, and a set of daily practices that you do, you execute, and you focus on every single day, no matter what. No matter what, you can't break those because it takes one day of tilt, one day of discipline to wipe out months, weeks, or heck, even years worth of work. So, when it comes to choosing what you're going to trade, it breaks down to a few questions. Can you manage your emotions? Can you stick to a risk plan? Are you trading options or futures? Do you have the capability to set rules for yourself? A prop firm might be a great place to start. If you find yourself not finding your trading edge or your system working with their rules, try a different prop firm. If you find that you don't have an edge at all with prop firms, start your own personal account, but use very minimal capital. The best way to start as a trader, whether you're worth 50 million or $50, is to start small, prove you can trade with less money, and build your way up the ladder. And it's funny that I'm sitting here making this video, because at heart, I'm an introvert. That's part of a big reason why I started trading. I didn't want to have to go to work, rely on a boss, or go out and talk to people if I didn't want to. And the funny part about making this video and being on social media as a whole is I never planned on teaching trading ever. I was making $500 to $1,000 a day. And at one point, one of my friends asked me, he said, "Hey, Jayden, you're making good money doing this. You're you're posting about it here and there. I had like a hundred Instagram followers. I just thought it was cool that I was making money trading." And he asked if I could teach him. So, I said, "Sure, I guess." He started getting value. He told another friend. And it came to a point where I was teaching six of my friends how to trade, mind you, for free. Just just doing it because I wanted to see them win. And that turned into me making a social media account, teaching what I know. People got a lot of value from what I knew, so my pages grew, and now I'm here. But the fact of the matter is is that if I didn't have a calling to help people learn the right way to trade, I'd be enjoying my lowprofile life, investing in the real estate that I do, far away from social media, making a few thousand a day trading. My biggest year ever is $843,000, maybe having a million dollar year if I decide to scale up. But that's my choice. I dictate the scale and the speed at which my business goes that I call trading. And so for myself as a core introvert, I actually consider myself an ambervert because I'm not completely introverted. But I do enjoy my peace. I enjoy my alone time. I enjoy the flexibility in my own schedule deciding if I work, who I talk to, who I don't talk to, etc. And that's one of the beauties of trading is having that choice. And it's funny, as I sit in my office, I get down there every morning, drink my cup of coffee, and start trading. I just smile sometimes because the market we've had this year is not normal. It's extremely volatile. But what you have to understand is that with volatility comes opportunity if you have the discipline and the system to handle it. Now, a few tips that have really helped me this year. Make well over $100,000, closer to $200,000 so far this year trading both payouts, futures, and options. is that I always have a hard stop-loss and I always manage risk prior to taking the trade. Whenever I take a trade first, the first thing I'm thinking about is risk. Where is my risk? What is my potential exposure on this trade? And how can I optimize my potential gains within that risk? And when volatility is rampant, when you're pushing up and down aggressively, hundreds of points, you must understand that you can have a piece of that. You don't need the whole pie. You don't even need a slice. If you can take crumbs from each of those 100 point moves up and down, that's going to equate to a lot of money made in short amounts of time. And for me, it's all about discipline. Some days I don't take a trade for at least an hour. Some days I trade the first after the first 15 minutes. Some days I don't trade at all. It boils down to when I get my entries, when my system fires, and making sure that my mental is on A+ at all times while I'm taking those trades. Now, one of the most beautiful things about trading is the scalability aspect because it's uncapped. Your limit is the sky. But there's a wrong way to scale and there's a right way to scale. The wrong way to scale is you scale too fast. You double or triple your size overnight or in too short of a time frame. You expect massive results quicker, which is usually ego-driven. And you don't earn the size that you're trying to put on. All of those factors almost always end up in losses over time. I'd say 99.9% of the time, if not 100% of the time, if you scale up too fast, you will lose your ass. Now, the right way to scale comes from systemization. It comes from discipline. It comes from looking at your trading from a business perspective. As an entrepreneur, if your business is selling a certain product, you need more of it, but you don't want to get too much of it, otherwise it won't sell. You might be stuck with leftovers. And in trading, leftovers mean blown accounts, means we went too heavy. So instead, as traders, we look at it through a lens. Business is doing well for a month, we add one more contract. We add a little more exposure. If we prove that we can handle that for another month, we might add another one. And even if you're only adding one contract a month, even one micro a month, if you're a futures trader, over time, over the next six years, that's an extra 72 micro contracts, which in turn is seven mini contracts. That's a lot of potential money. Every trade that you take with seven minis, you are making or losing $140. Think about that. If you can catch 10 points a day, that is $1,000 a day. If you can catch 20 points a day, that's over $2,000 a day. Well over. Equate that to a year, that's 500,000 extra a year. And you might be able to scale faster than that. I'm not saying that's how fast you have to scale, but what I'm saying is that you have to earn your size and systemize your size up. If you can systemize your size up, keep accountability on every aspect of your trading, the sky's is the limit for you as a trader. You can scale as much as you want to and as you have the ability to. And trust me, guys, I get it. We talk about scalability. We talk about how much money you can make. We talk about all the positive outcomes, but what you have to understand is that trading comes with ups and downs similar to a roller coaster. You're going to have good months. You're going to have bad months. And I get that inconsistency can be really scary. I get it. That's why it is so important when you start trading and when you continue trading to trade with money that you're not relying on to pay your rent, to pay your mortgage, to pay your car note, to pay your insurance. This has to be money set aside that is your business's income. You are you trading as your business. So, as your business owner, you need to make sure that the business has what it needs to survive and you're not constantly relying on the one business that needs its funds to survive to keep your life paid for. You have to learn how to separate the two because the second that you start relying on making five winning trades to pay your rent and your car and feed your dogs and go on dates, that's when emotions start to kick in and that's when you get in big trouble as a trader. Tilt comes in. Overleveraging comes in. Lack of self-regulation in your trades comes in. All those things add up to making you trade outside your process and unfortunately end up losing you profits. And this concept is exactly why the money I make from day trading, I put to work for me. I've made over seven figures in real estate just using money that I made day trading. I invested it in house flips, hard money lending, and other commercial investment projects. If it weren't for investing that money, I genuinely don't think I would have the trading performance that I do because it gives me cushion. It gives me sense of peace knowing that I'm putting the money I'm making to work for me while I'm actively working to make more money day trading. Day trading isn't a get-rich quick. It's a wealth tool if you use it the right way. You take the money you make day trading and you put that money to work for you. Perhaps that's high interest savings, four, five, 6%. Perhaps that's real estate. Perhaps it's small business investments. Whatever it may be, your main objective with day trading is to take that money and put it into a potential retirement for you sooner than later. That's the key. And the golden question people ask me is Jaydon, how long does it take to become a profitable trader? The honest answer to that question is it depends on you. If you're putting in 5 10 hours a day if you're dedicating everything you have inside you to be a quick learner to give it all you got, you could be there in a year. You could be there in two years. It might take you three. But what I can tell you is you'll never get there. and you'll be 3, four, 5 years ahead of the next guy that's taking it lightly, that's taking it as a hobby, that's not journaling, that's not putting in the work, and not putting their all into it. This is truly a career and a money-making, wealth generating path that what you put into it, you get out. So, if you're ready to take that to the next level, you put in the work every day. You don't take days off. You don't go into any morning without a plan. You don't skip days following risk management. You don't skip days journaling your trades. You don't skip days choosing and living a disciplined life outside of the markets. You got to stay accountable. You got to stay focused. And that was the biggest edge increase that I experienced was I became a machine. I truly believe in the most non-errogant way that I am the most disciplined trader. I live a robotic life and it's why I make money nearly every single day in the market. And what you really need to understand is it's all fun and games until [ __ ] gets hard. And it will get hard. You're motivated right now. You're going to become a profitable trader. You're feeling good. It's going to be easy. You're going to master the strategy. But you got to be ready for when that market punches you in the mouth. It's punched me in the mouth over and over and over. And I know it hurts. I've felt it. But what you need to understand is that when that motivation slides, when it gets tough, that's when you're trading psychology. That's when the master mindset we're building. That's when your discipline is going to kick in. That's when the daily practices of following your promises, following your routine, having a strong mindset is going to keep you going. Cuz it is so damn hard some days. I don't have enough fingers and toes to tell you how many times I wanted to quit. It was a lot. It had me at my lowest points time after time after time. And you're going to go through draw downs. You're going to have times in your trading where you feel like your strategy doesn't work anymore. You feel like you might not be cut out for it. But you got to become that person in the room, that one out of 99 other people that says, "No, [ __ ] that. I'm not quitting. I don't care what this market puts me through. I don't care how bad I feel. I don't care how upset I am, how emotional I am. I will not be labeled a quitter." Because if you don't quit, you can't fail. It's the same thing as going to a gym over and over for six months straight, doing what you're supposed to do, eating the right foods, following the right workout routine, following the right time regimen. you're going to see the results eventually. You might plateau at times. Got to adapt and change things up. It's the same with your trading. And I can tell you from experience, I've experienced the lows of lows and the highs of highs. But what's gotten me through the lows is thinking to myself and acknowledging, imagine the story you're going to tell one day. Imagine the story you're going to tell your kids when you have time to go to their basketball games, their soccer games, their chess tournaments, whatever extracurricular activity they're doing. you have the time to go because you took trading seriously and you survived that draw down. That's what I thought to myself is that I will not be labeled a quitter. I won't quit for myself. I won't quit for my family. I won't quit for my kids. I won't quit for the people that look down on me. And I sure as hell won't quit for the people that look up to me. That's the mindset it takes during the tough times of trading. So, look, here's the truth. Trading is hard. And you have two options. You can take this journey by yourself, keep piecing together videos, keep trying to learn, or you can get hands-on help from someone with a proven track record, proven results of students, and a proven will to help people win. And fasttrack your path to retirement with my free training below. Click the link down below if you want help with your journey.