In the beginner stage, around nine-ten years ago, the things I focused on were volume, indicators, and price action.
I was day trading forex on smaller time frames.
I had multiple indicators on the chart during those times to confirm different things.
During this time, the money I made was zero.
But since I started with the minimum account size the broker allowed, I don’t think the money I lost during this time was more than 500 dollars.
My losses in the learning stage were really small.
To give you an idea, the account size I traded with was around $10.
I only added more money into the account after I had grown that $10 properly.
Even after losing $10 back-to-back multiple times, I only lost a few hundred dollars over a long period.
That rule actually helped me survive in the market and avoid going bankrupt right away.
In stage one, I tried many things and had a really complicated trading system, but it lost money, and nothing really worked.
I thought most things trading gurus say are complete nonsense and that trading indicators are a lie.
So, in stage two, I stopped using indicators completely and only used price action.
I was still day trading forex on small time frames like the one-minute, two-minute, and five-minute charts.
I got good at reading price movement and seeing how the market actually moves.
I got good at reading candlestick patterns and things like that.
Price action also included support and resistance, which was one of my main strategies.
I was buying at support and selling at resistance.
The most important part of this stage was trading on the smaller time frames.
Smaller time frames give a lot of different price action setups very quickly.
If you look at a chart and then come back after an hour, it looks completely different, and you can draw price action all over again.
This fast feedback loop gave me a lot of price action experience very quickly.
Because of that fast practice, I got really good at drawing support and resistance.
During these first two stages, I was also trading all day long.
I was all in, and spent eight or more hours trading every single day.
In these first two stages, I gained the most experience and spent the most time in front of the charts.
Even so, I still did not make real profits.
I was mostly breaking even, but overall that was a clear sign of progress.
Once I started breaking even, I knew I was doing better than 90% of traders because around 90% lose money in trading.
I knew I was doing something right.
Still, breaking even was not enough reason to put a lot of money into the account.
So, my account size stayed below $1,000 at this point.
I was still only adding money into the account after making a good profit on the previous balance.
In stage one, I tried to do too many things at once.
In stage two, I did fewer things, but I did them much more often.
I traded one single strategy many times, which helped me master that specific approach.
But as I got better and my account reached around $1,000, I started to realize that the market conditions I was trading were not very good.
Earlier on, I did not understand what market noise was, so I thought every win or loss was entirely because of my own actions.
Later, I learned that the smaller time frame itself contains a lot of random moves.
Forex doesn’t really have clean movements on very small time frames.
So, in stage three, I shifted my focus to higher time frames.
I started looking for markets and time frames that naturally had clean movements.
Higher time frames have less noise and produce much better trends.
Because I had practiced on hard mode on smaller time frames for hundreds and hundreds of hours, I had become pretty good at a few things.
But my main problem before was the garbage timeframe I was trading in.
So, once I removed that problem, my win rate improved right away.
I didn’t change anything else, I still traded support resistance and simple price action strategies.
Then I also started exploring the stock market.
The interesting thing is that stocks actually move very well on smaller time frames.
It usually has cleaner price action on lower time frames than forex does.
Many of the small time frame price action strategies I practiced in forex worked much better when applied to the stock market.
Now I had higher time frames working well, and smaller time frames in the stock market were working well too.
With all the previous price action practice, the confidence in trading finally went up.
I was still spending eight or more hours a day trading both higher time frame forex and the stock market.
Because of these changes, my account stopped losing money and began to slowly climb upward.
I was doing better than just breaking even, which gave me even more confidence to put more money.
Since I got better at price action by trading it too much, I thought maybe indicators worked too, and it didn’t work before because I suck at using them.
So, during stage two and stage three, I started testing many different strategies and indicators to see if they truly had an edge.
Through all this testing, I realized that many indicators actually do work well, and the real issue before was that I simply did not know how and when to use them properly.
So, I slowly started adding indicators back into my trading system.
Since I was mainly day trading during this time, I started using fast moving averages.
I also started using one of my absolute favorite indicators, which made good profits: the VWAP indicator in the stock market.
Once I traded stocks and saw that smaller time frames moved cleanly, adding VWAP took my trading to the next level.
VWAP is like a moving average, but it also includes volume data in its calculation.
I have shared detailed videos about this indicator and the exact strategies on the Trading Rush channel before.
When I looked for candlestick entry patterns near the VWAP line, my win rate jumped significantly.
The VWAP line basically acts like a dynamic support and resistance level on the chart.
Basically, imagine a blue line on your chart that represents the VWAP indicator.
My main strategy was waiting for a stock price to move up strongly, then wait for a pullback down to the VWAP line, and then enter a buy trade when a strong bullish candlestick entry pattern formed.
This VWAP strategy made very good profits for me throughout stage three.
In stage four, I stopped trading forex and focused mainly on day trading stocks using VWAP and candlestick patterns.
I did not see any reason to stay in forex when the stock market allowed me to trade clean setups with indicators so effectively.
By this point, after testing so many strategies and indicators, I knew what indicators worked when applied to the right market.
Since the stock market is only open for a few hours a day, and I only traded during the first two hours after the market opened, my daily trading time dropped to just about two hours a day during this period.
Because everything in the system was working smoothly, I made very good money in stage four.
I should also mention how my profit expectations changed over time.
In my early days of trading, my profit expectations were unrealistically high, like wanting to make 200% in a single month.
In stage two, my expectations were still very high, hoping for huge monthly percentage returns.
By stage three, my target came down to making around 100% in a year instead of each month.
In stage four, because my VWAP strategy was working so well, aiming for 100% in a year still felt achievable.
One of the rules I followed was only allowing myself a maximum of two losing trades in total in a single day.
If I lost two trades in a day or 2% in total, I stopped trading immediately.
If I made a good profit on my first trade, I also stopped trading for the day.
Because I only needed one good winning trade per day, I automatically focused on the highest quality trade setups.
The quality of my trades went up, and as a result, my win rate went up too.
Because of that high quality focus, I got some long winning streaks.
Multiple times I made around 30% profit in a single month.
That high profit did not last across the entire year, but having multiple strong months made 100% profit a year feel more reachable, and I actually achieved it on a bigger account size of that time.
Everything was running smoothly until I reached stage five.
You see, stage five started around the 2022 market crash, along with wars, rising interest rates, inflation, and big news events.
When the market crashed, the technical strategies that had worked so well before suddenly became very risky.
During stage four, as I grew more experienced, I had also started trading advanced things like stock options and index options.
In stage five, when the market crashed and price started moving with huge overnight gaps, option trading became extremely dangerous.
My stock option strategies on small time frames became way too risky to trade safely.
Stocks were opening with huge gaps up or down, which could easily wipe out an account very quickly.
When the market entered that crash phase, standard stop losses of 1% or 2% were useless because stocks would gap right past them by 5% or 10% at the open.
I stopped using my old day trading strategies during the crash and used that time to study fundamental analysis instead.
Because the entire market was reacting to interest rate decisions and economic data, I focused on learning how those things impact the prices.
I still kept an eye on technicals for high quality setups, but my primary focus shifted to fundamentals.
A lot of time and growth happened between stage four and stage five.
Because I had been more profitable since stage three, my trading capital was now at a very comfortable size.
Having a large account size created a brand new challenge.
With a large account, I could no longer day trade on one-minute or two-minute stock options charts like I used to.
Orders started taking longer to get filled and getting in and out of trades quickly became difficult.
Combined with the dangerous price swings caused by news and world events, old trading style was no longer worth the risk.
So I moved to higher time frames because higher time frames are far less affected by sudden news spikes and gap opens.
On higher time frames, stop losses are wider, position sizing is smaller, and you do not have to stress over every single news headline.
My technical setups were struggling anyway because prices were moving on big news events rather than chart patterns.
Luckily, the market crash created incredible long-term buying opportunities across stocks and major market index.
Since I was experienced with technical levels like support and resistance, and was now learning fundamentals like interest rate and economic forecasts and other things, I started combining technicals with fundamentals.
Buy combining news events with momentum indicators such as M-A-CD, and strong support resistance, I took some of the best trades of my entire trading journey.
During those deep market pullbacks, I even took leveraged long positions on major indexes and specific sector ETFs.
When the market recovered, I made the largest profit of my entire 10-year trading journey.
This pushed my total account size up significantly.
My overall win rate stayed relatively high throughout this period because I refused to take low-quality technical setups during messy market conditions.
My win rate only dipped briefly while I was learning to adapt to the new market conditions.
In stage five, my system became mostly fundamentals with technicals used only for entry points.
With a taste of highest profit on higher timeframe, I got attracted to it.
After that, I took some trades using options-selling on the stock market index.
Back in stage four, I once lost about 30% of my account in around 15 minutes because I bought options without a hard stop loss right before a sudden news move.
After that painful lesson, I stopped buying options and switched entirely to option selling, mostly on major market indexes.
But then, the US elections happened, there was crazy tariff moves, then another war, and more news reaction price movements everywhere.
The market did not crash deeply this time, so I did not get the same huge leveraged buying opportunity as before. But it brought some crazy volatility and uncertainty.
New news moves also gave fundamental learning opportunities live.
But even though I have taken fundamental reason trades recently, I am still a technical trader first with over 10,000 hours of live market experience across 10 years.
I have only learned fundamentals for about last four years, so my knowledge there is still beginner level.
When random headlines about tariffs, oil prices, or politics move the market, I don’t really understand much.
So, instead of guessing, I simply lower my risk.
If you are a Patreon supporter and have seen my trading style live over the last two years, you might have noticed that I take far fewer technical trades now.
I reduced my trading frequency and kept most of my unused capital in long-term investing style positions.
This is a temporary defensive approach until market conditions become less risky to trade, at least for the strategies I know work.
I refuse to risk hard-earned money and years of growth on random market moves driven by daily political news nonsense.
One of the most important lessons I learned from 10 years of trading is that if we do not understand the current market, we should simply stay on the sidelines.
But here is the most interesting part of this whole journey: by trading less, I actually made the highest profit.
That happened because of 10 years of compounding and getting better at identifying and stepping back from bad market conditions.
Another unexpected thing happened when I stepped back and moved the unused account size into investing style positions.
You see, back in stage one, I remember watching a trader who lived completely off the dividends paid by his stock portfolio.
He made a full-time living simply by investing in dividend stocks and collecting their regular payouts.
Back then, dividend profits seemed so tiny compared to my account balance that I instantly ignored it.
I thought it made no sense to wait months for a small dividend when I could make 1% or 2% on a single day trade.
Before stage five, I had zero interest in dividend profits because active trading was making so much money in comparison.
But in stage five, when I took low risk trades, which turned most of the account unused, and then moved my unused trading capital into investing style positions, my account began generating decent dividend income on its own.
Because I was trading less actively, dividends surprisingly became my largest source of income recently.
I never would have believed that was possible back when I was a beginner.
There is a saying that a human brain can’t really imagine compound growth. And it’s definitely true in my case.
I never thought boring investing style things would make me excited and happy. And the exciting risky thing becoming less attractive.
This will only get better over time as the account size continues to compound.
Another major change after 10 years of trading is that my yearly percentage targets are much lower now.
Early on, I chased 200% profit a month and later 100% a year, which was exciting but carried a lot of stress and risk.
Nowadays, my target is simply to make between 20% and 50% in a year.
A 20% return is great during difficult market years, and a 50% return is great during strong years.
For some, these returns might sound too high and risky, and yes, they are high and risky. But it’s just that I have done it before. And it’s only possible because I use high leverage on high probability setups.
I risk very low and aim for low returns when I don’t see tested high probability setups.
But now, even with these lower percentage goals, the actual dollar amount earned is much higher than ever before because of 10 years of compounding.
Looking ahead into stage six over the next five years, I plan to trade technical setups again once market conditions become less risky.
My plan is to combine strong technicals with strong fundamentals to take the highest quality trades.
Most of my future active trading will focus on selling index options on higher time frames.
That’s mainly because higher time frames make it easy to manage risk and hit more realistic return goals without unnecesSARy lower timeframe stress.
I will continue to aim for a 20% to 50% profit in a year depending on the market conditions.
As the account gets even larger, my percentage target will likely move closer to 20% because there is no reason to take extra risk when your returns already cover everything you need.
Basically, my future plan is safer profit percentage targets, higher time frames, index option selling, and combining fundamentals with technicals.
Just like the dividends guy I saw 10 years ago who lived off his portfolio, I have apparently become a boring long-term investor with a trader popping up in between when good trading opportunities arrive.
But I do not want to optimize for high dividends like that guy, because one or two normal trades make more profit.
Still, having more reliable dividend income that covers living expenses provides peace of mind that beginner me never thought of in the learning stage.
Over the coming years, the account will probably continue to compound with lower risk, lower stress, and more realistic profit percentage goals.
I will update how it went and show the next progress in the future.