Please click on this LINK for a Twitter post complete with P/L charts and stats which accompany this blog post.

 

Disclosure: I am not a new trader. I started in Timothy Sykes Millionaire Challenge in November 2017. I took big losses and blew up a few accounts and I quit a few times for several months at a time. I had accumulated losses of about -$30,000 prior to coming back to the Challenge in December 2020 after a year-long hiatus. My $100,000 in profits do not reflect the -$30,000 in losses that I took in previous years. It only covers my results since January 1, 2021, until yesterday, February 9, 2021.

My results are after-commissions and in US dollars. I am not subject to the PDT rule because I am Canadian and I use a Canada-based broker called Questrade. Not being under PDT has allowed me to grow my account much faster than others who may be under PDT.

This blog post is best read together with my prior three blog posts in order to follow my journey into profitability in "real-time".

 

Lesson 1: You are much closer to success than you think. Don't give up like I did many times!

I have lost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in opportunity by quitting right before I "got it". After coming back to trading after quitting for a year, I reached profitability in three weeks.

Don't do what I did, which was quit after each bad trade, averaging down with every penny in my account and unwilling to take a huge loss and then bagholding a big loss until it hopefully comes back to breakeven. Twice I broke even after months of holding. Two other times I sold for 90%+ losses. The wasted time was worth WAY more than the money I was trying to save by waiting to break even.

This week, I made back those first three years of losses in two days. Time is worth so much more than money.

Cutting those four bad trades relatively quickly, even for big losses, would have been the most profitable trades of my career. That would have prevented me from quitting and losing months and years of development. I firmly believe that I could have reached this point in my career 1-3 years ago.

 

Lesson 2: You are just like any successful trader. The only difference is that you haven't failed enough times to have learned the right lessons and enforce some new self-imposed discipline yet.

I used to think that the top traders in the Challenge chatroom were super geniuses or incredibly gifted people. I would be in awe of their accomplishments and I would be frustrated at my lack of results.

The biggest differences are that they have more screen time than you, more blown up accounts, more crushing defeats, more battle scars and lessons learned than you, more risk management and discipline by virtue of screwing up so bad, and a bigger account size now to show for it all.

 

Lesson 3: Success will happen all of a sudden and when you least expect it, but only after you have earned it by enough failures and hard lessons.

I started to "get it" after I lost half my small account in two weeks. I was pissed off at my results and I studied so hard and learned from the blog posts, video lessons, webinars, YouTube videos, of other top students. I learned little things along the way, learned how their trading processes were different from mine, and I began to tinker with my trading system. 

Literally ALL OF A SUDDEN my results changed. Fewer losses, much smaller losses, and bigger winners. My account finally started to grow, and so my average trading profit started to grow. I finally achieved compounding!

That was only 7 or 8 weeks ago.

 

In summary, you need to not give up, because you are closer than you think to success. You need to stop putting top traders on a pedestal because they are just like you, only they have more screen time and hard lessons that inform their trading. And lastly, you need to care enough about your trading to relentlessly seek out the answers to questions you didn't know that you had from the experiences of others who are on the path that you want to be on. Learn everything you can. Add that to your trading process. Get rid of everything else.

 

I hope this helps you. I wish I had blog posts available to read, specifically from traders who are at this unique and very short period of time, which is the days, weeks and months of just starting to "get it".

 

Regards,

Sean Lacap