Ten Rules From Thirteen Years — Seven Hold Up, Two Need a Condition, One Is Backwards
Key takeaway
- Start small is the load-bearing rule. If you cannot make $10 in a day, the problem is not your size — and a $100,000 account does not skip the rung, it just prices the mistakes higher.
- Track results per setup, not per day. Two setups averaged together can hide an 80% winner and a 20% loser behind one mediocre number.
- The rule to drop: moving your stop to break even "95% of the time." It scratches the trades that were going to work and leaves your losers at full size.
Learning pathExecuting the plan when it hurtsStep 14 of 14
Read before this:Your Best Ideas Are Not the Problem
Based on a clip by Day Trading Addict (@DayTradingAddict) — YouTube
The ten rules, sorted
Most of this list is what an experienced trader would tell a beginner for free. The value is in knowing which item to treat as literal.
The two amber ones are not wrong, they are unfalsifiable. "Don't give up" is excellent advice for someone with an edge and terrible advice for someone without one — and the video's own story is eight years of not giving up, which is a long time to fund a mistake. "Understand market structure" is real, but naming it is not the same as teaching it.
Start small is the one to take literally
"If you can't make ten dollars in one day, why do you think you can actually make a thousand?" That is a testable claim, and it is the most useful sentence in the video.
He is explicit that account size does not exempt you: "your account could be 100k, it doesn't matter." A large account does not let you skip the ladder. It just means each rung is climbed with more money on the step.
Track results per setup, not per day
A daily P&L tells you what happened. A per-setup record tells you what to stop doing.
His example is concrete: pin bars at a moving average versus double tops at the same moving average. Same location, same session, completely different outcomes — and averaged together they look like a mediocre system rather than one good rule and one bad one.
The one that is backwards: break-even stops, 95% of the time
Moving your stop to break even as soon as price comes back to entry does not remove risk. It removes the trades that were about to work.
Look at what the change does to the two sides of the trade. Your winners get truncated whenever the market breathes. Your losers are untouched — they still run the full distance to the original stop. You have made the good outcome smaller and left the bad one alone.
What it feels like
- A free trade
- No way to lose now
- Protecting profit
What it does to the numbers
- Cuts your average winner
- Leaves your average loser unchanged
- Adds scratches, which look like discipline in a journal
Winners bigger than losers — his arithmetic is right
He does the sum on camera: three losses of $10, then one winner at 5R. Down $30, up $50, net +$20 on a 25% win rate.
This is the same idea as R-multiples and expectancy, stated without the vocabulary. It is also why the break-even rule above matters so much: a rule that shrinks the 5R winner into a 0R scratch attacks the exact term this arithmetic depends on.
The honest part: it took him eight years
"It took me eight years… I was stubborn, I was trying to do things on my own." That admission is more useful than any of the ten rules.
He names the cause himself — no feedback from anyone else, no shortcut taken. Two of his rules, tracking results and practising in replay mode, are direct attempts to shorten that for you. Whether they compress eight years into two is untested. That they compress it at all is believable, because both replace guessing with a record.
Try this week
- Add one column to your trade log: the name of the setup. Nothing else changes.
- After 30 trades, sort by that column and compare win rates. Delete the worst one for a month.
- Pick a daily amount small enough to be boring. Hit it ten sessions in a row before increasing size.
- If you use break-even stops, count how many of last month's scratches went on to reach the target.
Common questions
Should I move my stop loss to break even?
Only when the chart has given you a reason — a new higher low in an uptrend, or a broken level that has been reclaimed. Moving it automatically whenever price returns to your entry shortens your winners without shortening your losers, so it lowers your average win while leaving your average loss the same. That is the opposite of the trade-off you want.
How much should a beginner aim to make per day trading?
Start at an amount small enough that the money is irrelevant — ten or twenty dollars is a common starting rung — and treat hitting it repeatedly as the goal rather than the amount itself. The reason is that a small target is achievable without changing your position size, so the only thing being tested is whether your setup works and whether you can follow it.
Can you be profitable with a 25% win rate?
Yes, provided your winners are large enough relative to your losers. Three losses of one unit against one win of five units nets two units, which is a losing record and a rising account at the same time. It only works if your losers really are capped at one unit, so the rule that protects a low win rate is the stop, not the entry.
Why should I track trades by setup instead of by day?
Because a daily total averages your setups together and hides the split. Two setups traded at the same location can run at eighty per cent and twenty per cent while the account shows a flat fifty, and no amount of staring at daily P&L will separate them. One extra column naming the setup turns the same trades into a decision about which one to stop taking.
How long does it take to become a consistently profitable trader?
There is no reliable figure, and anyone quoting one precisely is guessing. What the accounts from experienced traders have in common is that the years before profitability were spent without a written record, and the change came when they started measuring their own decisions rather than collecting new methods. Keeping that record from the start is the only lever you actually control.