Goals: New Year New Me ✨- January 2025

I will be a profitable trader in 2025. Come hell or high water!

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Before reading, this post may give you more context on my journey so far:

Goals: The Future... - September 2024

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Market First Approach

I had an “AHA” moment in December. I realized that in all of my looking at the markets, the SPY (general market) should always come first. No matter what! Even when intraday trading (just not low floater gappers though)! The context is so important and that is why so many traders get cut to death. And that’s why I have had huge wins, usually when the market was hot and then small losses that eroded my profits, usually when the market was choppy.

It’s funny because this revelation only occurred after I started reading the Wiki of r/RealDayTrading on Reddit. It’s like when your parents tell you invaluable information when you were a child and you kind of brush it off because, well… you are a child and you don’t know better. And when you get into adulthood, you realize, OH SH*T they were right!

It’s like that. So, for every piece of information, I read on understanding the “context” of the market and the market-first approach, I brushed it off, wanting to be more right in my stock pick rather than following what the market is telling me.

And that was a BIG mistake! At least it’s better having that realization now.

Strategy Mixing

Currently, I am all over the place. Originally, I started swing trading using Kristjan Kullamägi’s (Qullamaggie) approach with some success but because the markets were choppy (and I didn’t understand TRULY what the market context was), all my profits disappeared. I started looking into more intraday plays on low-float stocks through earnings but couldn’t find much. This led me to look at intraday morning plays on the long side for low floaters that gapped up. I think there is something there, but I need to collect more data and refine it.

Now in 2025, I think I need to solidify my methodology and build towards being consistently profitable. I realized that the approach of home run trading, where you swinging for very high risk to reward (+3 and great RR) with a less than 50% win rate is to hard mentally on me. Because of the low win rate, the lossing streaks drain me mentally and that is why I want to merge the swing trading approach of Qullamaggie with the intraday trading. This way I have consistent green days and less big swings in PnL. It will also help me mentally as I will understand what is working and what is not faster.

An example of an intraday setup I am talking about would be something ZIM 0.00%↑ on Dec 24, 2024

$SPY & $ZIM - Daily / 5M Chart

First starting from a market context perspective. I understand what the market is doing. On Dec 24, the market was recovering from a massive dip as market participants did not like what J.Powell had to say on Dec 18. The market recovering from that dip had strong buying pressure with the intraday (on Dec 24) being strong bullish.

Looking at ZIM there was a clear buying pressure the day before and broke above its SMA. Intraday the stock respected the VWAP and EMAs with clean price action. And this would be an example of an intraday play that I started tracking. There is way more context to this but as a quick example I think this picture gets the point across.

Strategy Refinement

I am still paper trading until I am confident to shift back to my live account. Until I have a feel for the market and I am consistently profitable, with a high level of confidence in my abilities, I will move back to my live account.

Current Setups:

• Intraday setups using relative strength & relative weakness

• Theme-based swing setups using relative strength & relative weakness

Setups Considering:

• Long intraday low float gappers → Still need more data (which I am posting about) before building a strategy

Thoughts for 2025

1. I will be profitable by the end of 2025!

2. I will not give up!

3. I will do this!

Short but sweet. I know I have posted this press conference of Derrick Rose before but I think it’s relevant. 2024 has had a lot of ups and downs. A lot of doubt and realizations. But this video always motivates me and reactivates the realization that I want to trade for a career. This is what I want to do and I will do it.

Happy Trading!

-F4VS

Stick around and chat

If you have any thoughts on the post, please leave a comment. If you just want to say Hi, you can do that too! 😊

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