Day 1 of Day Trading with $2,000 at Webull transcript

Today is day one of my brand new small account challenge of trading in a $2,000 cash account using Weble as my broker. Now, as typically the case day one of trading in a new account, I was a little nervous and I actually fumbled on my first trade, which was a bummer, but all's well that ends well. Today, the account is up 37%. That is a fantastic start to this small account challenge. So, I started with $2,000 at the beginning of the day.

Now, I've got 2,700 in the account, which means tomorrow I can buy just a couple more shares on any potential setup that I see thanks to today's growth. That's how a small account challenge works. Every day builds up the balance so the next day you can trade a little more, a little more, a little more, and hopefully I get into a position where this account starts to grow parabolic just like that. Now, I want to begin this episode by taking a quick look at where we stand in donations.

Many of you guys know that all of the profit from this small account challenge will get donated to charity and every time you guys hit the thumbs up, you're going to add an extra dollar to the donation. I'm doing a dollar-for-dollar match. So, on the first episode where I introduced to you guys I was resetting my account back down to $2,000, we have already gotten 11,000 thumbs up as you can see right there. That combined with the $700 of profit that I have today, we are now at $158,000 in total charitable donations.

This is fantastic. Now, out of that 158,000, I've already donated 145,000 from the previous two legs of my small account challenges that I've done this year, which means I've got about 13,000 that's sitting here that needs to get donated. My hope is that by the end of this week that number will be up to 25,000 and I can write another big check. So, we're paying it forward here and if you have an idea of a charitable organization that you'd like to see me donate to, feel free to leave that idea down below in the comments cuz I do look through them and it does it does help me think about what we should do with all this money that we're raising.

Okay. So, now let's look at today, day one. The account is up 37%. So, those of you guys focus on percentages, 37% in one day, $759.42 right there, which means my account value has gone from 2,000, which was what it was at when I funded the account, up to $2,759 and $0.42. That's really solid. So, what was the goal at the beginning of this challenge? Well, as I laid out to you in my full-length class on the small account growth strategy, and I'll put a link to it at the end of this episode if you haven't already seen it, my goal was for each day, best case scenario, best case scenario goal was to grow the account by 10% without risking more than 10%.

Now, that presents a one-to-one profit-to-loss ratio. Okay, so if I'm have a one-to-one profit-to-loss ratio, if I'm right 50% of the time, I'm going to be break even. The account won't grow. So, out of 100 trades, if I have 50 winners and 50 losers with a one-to-one ratio, losing 10% on losers, making 10% on winners, I'll be break even. But, what I know is that coming into this challenge this year, I'm already trading at 72% accuracy.

And in fact, right now, in terms of my ratio, my winners are actually double my losers. So, even though I'm willing to risk up to 10% of my account in one trade, well, in one day. The The biggest drawdown I want to take in one day is 10% of the account. So, whether that's in one trade or it's in 10 trades, it doesn't matter. That's the biggest loss that I could suffer in the account, which means today I was coming in willing to risk $200 with the minimum goal of being able to make 200.

Okay, so as it turns out, I far exceeded that with $759 of profit. So, today was a really good start to the challenge, but today is just day one. I mean, I'm thankful for a good start, but it's only day one. We've got a lot a lot of a lot of trades ahead of me. So, this is going to be a very simple account growth slide. Each day when I do a recap, this will get updated. So, today all we have is my day one starting balance, my total profit, the new balance, the account growth, the number of trades, the accuracy, 100%, which is great, and the average gain or loss, which is pretty high.

But again, this is just based on the one single trade. Now, let's talk for a moment about the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room, not being the sweater that I was wearing during my last episode, which many of you guys commented on. Thank you, by the way. Yes, that was not made with real elephant hide, of course. That would be crazy. Just a regular sweater, but with a picture of an elephant on it, just to clear up any confusion.

So, I want to give you guys a link where you can download it and set up my layout exactly the way that I have it. So, I put together an episode where I walk you through sort of all of the the nitty-gritty of how to set up Weble. And this is going into the details of each of these different account windows, the color schemes, and in fact, all the way to how to set up hot keys. So, the the keys where with one press of the button you can send an order.

Now, I'm going to put a link where you guys can watch and and download and recreate my Weble layout for yourself on your platform. That will be posted in the top of the comments and pinned in the description. Now, the only thing that I've changed since recording that video for you guys is that by popular request, and I say I dare dare I say request, truly it was a demand, that you guys said, "Please change to the dark theme.

The white theme is it's Oh my gosh, I just blinded everyone with that." So, you guys said, "Change to the dark theme." All right, honestly, I don't really mind either way, but as you wish. So, I changed to the dark theme right there. And then, a second change that I made, I noticed today, and I'll talk about this when we get into the recap of today's trades, that I fumbled a little bit. When I took my first trade, I fumbled.

I pressed my hot key to enter, and it's shift one, and I typed an exclamation point right here. That's not what I intended to do. I did not intend to send an exclamation point. I intended to send an order, a live order to the market to buy shares. So, someone that was in the chat room, he's actually earned his million-dollar badge, he uses Weble and he said, "Ross, use the Turbo Trader hot buttons." And so, I said, "Oh, that's a great idea.

I didn't think of that." And so, he said, "If you go to the settings here and you go to add widget, go to all widgets, and then type in Turbo Trader. You type in Turbo Trader, and then what you can do, and this is kind of cool, is you can actually add any one of the hot keys that you've made as a button. So, instead of having to press shift one, I could just click this button right here." And so, this was the hot key that I sent this morning to buy using $1,995, which is basically my entire account, with an order to buy at the ask plus 10 cents.

Now, if I click this right now, it will send the order, so I got to be really careful about that. Now, here's a here's something we can do. We get to go in here today and we actually get to make a change. So, going into tomorrow, I'm going to change that hot key. So, the hot key here for trading, hot key settings, was for $1,995. Tomorrow, we're going to do this for $1,750. All right, cuz I get to take a little bit of a bigger position now that my account is grown.

Okay, so now that hot key is going to be updated. Boom, just like that, that will be the button that I'll be pressing. And then, when I want to get out of a position, I can press this button here, which is sell, and it's going to be at the bid. I don't know where that number's coming from, but the quantity is 100%. So, what that should mean is if I have a position, it will sell 100% of that open position. I mean, we could test an order with one share, but I don't want to mess with a good thing.

So, I think I'm just going to leave that for there for now. Okay, so for my layout, for all of you guys who are asking, check out the link pinned to the top of the comments and in the description. That's where you'll be able to download my small account layout and and that's where I give you the walk-through of how to set up all those hot keys. Okay, so very important. And there's a couple of settings that I changed as well to my liking for for this Weble small account challenge.

Now, the second elephant in the room, perhaps if there's two, is that many of you said, "Ross, why Weble?" I mean, there's dozens and dozens of different brokers you could choose from. What made you choose Weble? So, this is my broker comparison sheet right here. I've actually funded accounts with a ton of different brokers and traded with them to test out which ones are the fastest, which platforms I like the most, and I've come to the conclusion that Weble really is a fantastic platform.

They are probably the best broker in my opinion, my humble opinion. It's just my opinion, but I think they're the best broker when it comes to commission-free trading. Now, there's a lot of people out there that over the years have been really enjoying Thinkorswim with the Charles Schwab broker. The problem with Charles Schwab and the problem with Thinkorswim is twofold. Number one, the Thinkorswim platform is not intuitive.

Everything is sort of the reverse of where you'd expect it to be. So, it's it's very difficult to use, especially if you're trying to trade quickly. I went actually and did a point-by-point comparison of all these different platforms and there's a couple of critical features that I highlighted right down here, which is level two, ability to customize your hot keys, ability to create offsets on your hot keys, so you're not just buying, let's say, at the ask, but you're buying with an offset 5 cents above the ask.

That type of offset accommodates just a little bit of slippage in a fast-moving market. It ensures that you're more likely to get your entire order filled. Uh and then hot key ability to sell based on a percentage. So, today as it turned out, I bought a very odd number of shares because my hot key was to buy based on $1,995. So, rather than having to type in that unusual position size, I just used the hot key that said sell 100% of my position.

You would think that this is very straightforward and every platform should have it. ThinkorSwim does not have it. Well, neither do a lot of these brokers. TradeStation, nope. MooMoo, nope, they don't have it either. E*TRADE Pro, they don't have it. Interactive Brokers Trader Workstation, they don't have it. Interactive Brokers IBKR Lite, they don't have it. Neither does Fidelity, neither does Robinhood. Now, some of these platforms are, you know, of course they're making enhancements and updates and maybe some of them will end up adding it, but at this point right now, WeBull, right here in this column, meets all of these criteria for me, which I think are very important for active trading.

So, not only do you have the level two, but you also have level two that shows halt levels and the the data when a stock is going to resume. So, if I just make this window a little bit bigger, if you see here limit down and you'll see right here limit up, those are halt levels. Now, you might not think much of it, but this is incredibly important data and WeBull is giving it to us. ThinkorSwim, you don't have it. Fidelity, you don't have it.

E*TRADE, you don't have it. So, it's almost like trading It's not like trading with your eyes closed exactly, but you're It's like trading if you wear glasses without glasses. You could see, but you're just missing stuff. So, is it Is it benefiting you to use a broker where you have incomplete data? And my argument is no. So, I decided to do this small account challenge with WeBull. Now, I suppose if some of you guys are really, you know, hard set on me using one of these other brokers, you leave the feedback in the comments and if I see enough people asking for one of these brokers, I'll go ahead and do a challenge there as well.

Because I would be lacking some of the tools that I think are necessary, I may not do as well. But ultimately, we won't know until I try it. So, anyways, I won't say that WeBull is the best broker out there, but I think it's the best commission-free broker that's out there. And the execution speed is kind of one of the areas that it's lacking a little bit. Um but, you know, I I found today absolutely no issue with execution speed.

Okay, so now that we've talked a little bit about um broker comparison, we'll move this back up here. Um and you've seen the link to download my WeBull layout. Make sure you guys download that so you can set it up exactly the way I've got it. Let's talk about today's trade. Okay, so let me pull up WeBull again so you can look at the symbol. So, today's trade was on a stock, the ticker is EPWK. Now, the ticker uh well, I mean it's important because it was today's trade.

Um it could have really in a way been any stock that had news, but this was just the stock today that ended up working. So, now what I want to do is I want to give you the chance to experience what I was experiencing in the minutes, the just the the very the seconds where I had to make a decision of whether or not I was going to take this trade. All of this comes from, of course, the small account growth strategy full-length hour-long class where I teach you the ins and outs of this process, but this is going to be a real-time case study from today's trades.

So, number one, many of you ask, Ross, how'd you find this stock? Now, right now, if we look at our scanners, let me pull up my scans at Warrior Trading. So, as of right now, do do do do do do, EPWK has 38 million shares of volume. That's right now. It's got 38 million shares of volume. The relative volume is 14, 14 times higher than average. It's got a float of under a million shares. That's pretty impressive. All right, so it's not the biggest percentage gainer as of right now, it's up 20%.

It has pulled back a bit, but still it's got a tremendous amount of volume. It's It's going to be, let's see, third third leading in volume in the market today. So, why? Why is the stock have so much volume? In fact, it's because the stock had breaking news and that news came out at 7:56 in the morning. So, this is kind of interesting. Um I think if you've tuned into my episodes uh before and and learned a little bit about my strategy, you know that I typically am trading breaking news.

I'm a volatility trader. I don't make money buying and selling something at the same price. I need things moving and so the way I make money is by looking for catalysts that will cause stocks to move. And breaking news is a fantastic catalyst. So, when I'm looking for breaking news, one of the things that I know is that most of these companies put out news pre-market before the official opening bell or after hours. Now, I don't like to trade after hours.

You could, but I personally don't like to. I'm on East Coast time and starting trading at 4:00 p.m. is a little later in the day. So, I like to trade during the pre-market session. So, what we know is that these companies put out news typically, they schedule them in advance. So, the news is scheduled to go out and get released usually at the top or bottom of the hour. 7:00 a.m., 7:30, 8:00 a.m., 8:30. Now, this was unusual that this news headline came out at 7:56.

In fact, I was sitting here. I was sitting right at my desk and I was waiting for news to come out and I had said, all right guys, I'm going to be sitting here watching and waiting for news at the top of the hour. I put my microphone on mute. I was having a little sip of tea and I was just kind of, you know, stretching and getting ready. Hadn't taken any trades yet. And then all of a sudden, I noticed on this scanner right here, my low float top gainer scanner, on this window, I noticed EW sorry, it was EPWK moving up.

See how VCIG has this green arrow? Or now it's CC CGTL. That green arrow or the red arrow indicate the stock is either moving up the scan or moving down the scan. And so, when I saw EW EPWK with the green arrow, I clicked on it. Why did I click on it? Well, from the moment that I saw it on that scan, I knew something. I saw that it had the fire symbol, the flame, which means the stock has news today. And at the time it was red.

Now, I grabbed this screenshot a little while later, but at the time it was red, which means the news has just come out. It's brand new. So, it had breaking news with the red flame. I saw that the float was less than 1 million shares. And I saw that the price was around $1.40 or $1.50. And I thought, well, this already meets four of my pillars of stock selection and I knew that without even having to look at the chart.

So, let's break it down. What are my five pillars of stock selection? How well did it meet them? The stock has to be up 10% already. It was already up 10%. Number two, it has to have a news event. We knew there was news because we saw the flame on it right here. Number three, it should be priced between two and 20. That's true, but for this small account challenge, I've known that if I could find a stock between $1 and $3, that could be kind of the sweet spot where I could buy the most shares.

Because here's the deal. We had a stock that came up on the scanner earlier this morning. It was KZIA. I'll just show it to you as an example. So, KZIA pops up on the scanner this morning and I actually traded it in my main account. Um so, I'll I'll go over all of my trades from today cuz I traded in my small account, I also traded in my main account. And today is a little bit disappointing because I'm actually red in my main account.

I traded four different stocks, two of them were winners, two of them were losers. So, in my main account, KZIA was the first stock I traded up 2,700 bucks on it. Now, when this stock hit my scanner, I looked at it and I thought, well, I like it, but it's 200 shares. I could buy 100 150 175. And I thought with 150 shares, what's my goal? My goal is to grow the account by 10%. So, that means my goal is $200. I'm going to have to make over a dollar a share, a dollar a share in profit in order to hit that 10% goal.

It's not going to happen. Uh now, I looked at the chart and I just thought, I mean, it'd be nice to get that squeeze up to 1020, but I would need to get in sort of right down here or right in this area and not sell anything until I'm up a full dollar a share. I just don't think it's realistic. On the other hand, if I find a stock like EPWK that is priced around a dollar a share, I could buy 2,000 shares. 2,000 shares, how many cents per share do I need?

I only need 10 cents to make 10%. Now, of course, if a $1 stock goes from a dollar to a dollar 10, it goes up 10%. If I my whole account is in it, my account goes up 10%. So, my account's up 37% today because EPWK went up 37% between my entry and where I took profit. It was the type of stock that was able to make a bigger move. So, being lower priced for me uh actually was appealing today. Now, I I didn't want to go too cheap on price, you know, if you go too cheap on price, unfortunately, you can get yourself into sort of a a bad spot there as well where they don't really move very quickly, especially on the penny stocks.

I mean, getting 10 cents on a 30 cent stock from 30 cents to 40 cents, it's going up 30 plus percent. And you know, that's you're not as But of course, I suppose you could argue that in that case I could buy like 9,000 shares or whatever, 18,000. I could take a much bigger position at 30 cents a share. But anyways, I digress. Okay. So, the stock hits the scanner right here, EPWK, on the scanner, low float top gainer scanner.

It's got the green arrow. I see the sub 1 million share float. And one of the things I had mentioned is that we're currently in a market where it has been very slow. And short sellers have been very aggressive. And what I know is that typically to break this cycle, you need a sub 1 million share float stock or sub 2 million share float stock that pops up news, shorts will short it, and then all of a sudden they realize, uh-oh, this is the type of stock that can move really quickly.

I'm in trouble. They start covering, more people start buying, and next thing you know, you've got a stock going up 2 3 400%. And that's how it typically happens. So, the other scenario is when you've got a mid float, slightly higher, and it's just grinding higher and higher and higher. It's not giving up. But, we just didn't have that set up today. So, EPWK meets four of my five pillars. Um, the being up 10%, having a news event, um, having the price being, you know, roughly a little on the low side, but okay for the small account.

The float, less than 20 million shares, yep, we were very low. The only thing it didn't meet yet was relative volume. However, I made an educated guess that because this had breaking news that was coming out and hitting the wire right at that moment, that it likely, by the end of the day, would have five times relative volume. And that was a correct prediction. In fact, I might have been one of the, you know, a handful of first people in the market to see this stock because of the tools that I'm using.

So, the next thing I do is I check the actual catalyst. I just read the headline. I see synergistic growth, da da da da da. Okay, I'm not really sure, you know, it's not super clear. It's not like clinical trial, phase three clinical trials, or some FDA approval. But, I look at the daily chart. And what I notice on the daily chart is a recent reverse split. We talk about reverse stock splits, and in fact, on my scanners, I have a scan specifically dedicated to looking at stocks that have had recent reverse splits because these can be so strong.

EPWK is at the top of that scanner. All right. So, we pay attention to that. I then check the intraday chart, and this is all I've got to work with. It had just popped up, and it's going sideways. I pulled up my level two right here in WeBull, and I got the screenshot a little bit later, but I pulled up my level two, and what did I do? I pressed shift one. So, by pressing shift one right here, I inadvertently typed an exclamation point.

That's not what I meant to do. So, I had to cancel that out. I had to click in this window again, and then press shift one. Now, I'm not going to send this order because if I sent this order right now with unsettled cash, I cannot sell the position until tomorrow. So, I'm not going to take another trade today cuz it would have to be a swing trade. So, I'm going to cancel this order. I'm not going to send it. But, nonetheless, that's what I ended up doing.

Didn't get that notification. Was able to just take that position, jump in, and I was basically getting in because I'd seen it just popped up, and I I was so I was like, this is finally the first stock that really fits within the parameters of having the potential to make a big move. I was pretty excited. I was like, okay, here we go. It's game time. In fact, I was so confident in this stock, I jumped in it in my small account.

And then I pulled up my big account, and I said, you know what? I like this setup. I'm going to buy this. And I added in my big account with an average of $2. Ooh. Okay. So, I ended up chasing it in my big account. I got in with the average of $2, and although it popped up, it ended up hitting a high of 240, and for a moment, I was green in both accounts, which was fantastic. I had a 30,000 position in my main account at $2.

So, I was green about 10,000 in my big account, but then it drops back down. I take profit in the small account. The big account, unfortunately, I took a hit. I took a loss, but I got back in it. I got back in it as it squeezed up right here, and I got another trade on it in this area, and another trade on it in this area. So, I got some decent trades on it, but in total, in my big account, unfortunately, I'm red, $8,393.16.

I really thought this had the potential to make a big move. And what I ended up realizing was that there was something here that I could not that I did not put my finger on initially. And this was this was a little bit of a miss. The one thing that I didn't notice when I first typed in the symbol and was first looking at the news, and it's blaring it's glaring at me right now. It's completely obvious. It's a Chinese company.

Right. So, this is one of the problems. The float of 988,000 shares, suddenly I don't trust it. Here's the problem. Now, I checked with, um, four different market data vendors, and across these different market data vendors, I saw floats varying from, um, 840,000 shares to 15 million shares, um, on the low end and the high end. I pulled up the SEC filings a little bit later, and you can see that they've got shares that they sold, plus they have warrants.

And when these companies have warrants, it gives the people that purchased the warrant the right to sell the stock. And so, unfortunately, with these foreign listed companies, they do not always play by the same set of rules as the US companies. So, we can look at this, um, underwriter, Univec, right here. So, if I go and look at this, I'm going to do, um, all documents search, and I'm just going to search for that company name.

And then we're going to look at some of the other stocks that that company's been involved with. And this will give us a little bit of a a flavor of, you know, maybe what we should expect, um, from this one today. Okay, so, oops, I'm going to move this over here. Okay, so, SLNH, that was one of the ones we want to check. All right, so, SLNH, and we're going to check, uh, daily charts. All right, so, SLNH, oops, S, sorry, SLNH.

Okay, this is the daily chart on SLNH. So, we back this up a little bit. We go full screen, and yikes. Holy moly. That's not good. That's not chart you like to see. What about GDC? GDC, how about this one? It's not so good. It's not so good. Not very good at all. What What about the next one? Let's go down. Um, ELAB, E L A B. So, unfortunately, what we're seeing is that a lot of these companies, many of them are Chinese, um, end up listing their their shares on the market, and then they just sell them all day long.

On days when they pop up, they just sell and sell and sell. And usually, I'm pretty good at checking to see where the company's located, um, but in this case, I missed it. And I think it was my eagerness to finally break the ice and get my first trade, the fact that it was a super low float. And And I'll also say, I don't have a a strict prohibition against trading, um, Chinese stocks. We have had Chinese stocks like HKD, for instance, that have had epic short squeezes.

Look at this chart. I mean, it it ultimately came back down, but not before first going from about 10 $15 a share to over 2,500 bucks. This was an incredible move. So, what I know about Chinese stocks is that they can be very volatile. But, if you see big sellers, don't underestimate it. Don't underestimate how many shares they're really selling. Because today, it's likely that a lot of that selling volume that came in very quickly were people that are selling that were that are insiders or were institutions that were holding positions.

You know, which is perfectly legal, but it, unfortunately for retail traders, can leave us holding the bag. And I don't want to see you sitting as a bag holder. That's the last thing you want. So, it's important to cut the loss. So, I'm disappointed. I mean, in this case, I took the trade in my main account. I thought this thing was going to keep moving. It was went from $1.50 $1.75 to two, then 225 250 almost. I was like, here we go.

This is how quickly we can have a stock that goes to three, 354, 455, pulls back around five, holds up, next thing you know, it's at 7 8 9 and 10. We've literally seen those moves. As a reminder, GLTO last week, I talked about it, we've talked about it in a couple of our episodes, but GLTO last week made an incredible move here from about $6 a share on this candle right there. You can see that spike. From $6 a share all the way up to $26.

That's incredible. And I was hoping we were going to get something like that today. And I was hoping I was going to be locking up a big win, not just in the small account, but in the big account, too. Trying to trade in two accounts at once is not easy. Obviously, trading in the small account does come at a bit of a cost. Had I been able to get in a little bit lower, and, you know, maybe I would have been green in my big account, and well, obviously, I was green by about $10,000 for a moment before it flipped around on me.

So, nonetheless, I mean, you know, today, the silver lining is that I do have some profit in the small account. This was good. Day one in the small account. The big account took a little bit of a hit today, which is a bummer. And I think more disappointing was that, uh, you know, at the end of the day, we had another Chinese stock that popped up and then just had a ton of sellers. And And I don't love that. So, I've got to be a little bit more careful as I look at scans, um, tomorrow morning, uh, and make sure I'm avoiding those Chinese stocks.

Now, shift one was my entry for the hot key, shift, uh, control Z was my exit, but using these hot buttons, I think will make my entries and exits a little bit faster, which would be really nice because I don't want to fumble. When I see an opportunity, I want to jump in. I don't want to fumble. So, I'm going to try using these hot buttons. So, check that out on your layouts. This is now day one in the history books, and I'm excited for tomorrow, day two.

Hopefully, I can see some nice growth. So, I've already adjusted my hot keys on shift one to now buy with $2,700 of buying power, and I'm going to be implementing the strategy I trade every day, the small account growth strategy. I'll put a link to this episode right up here, and I'll remind you guys as always that trading is risky. My results aren't typical. I've been trading for a long time. So, there's no guarantee you'll find success whether you trade with me or you learn on your own.

So, please take it slow and practice these new strategies you're learning in a simulator before putting real money on the line. I hope you guys hit the thumbs up. Let's raise some money for charity. Let's keep this small account growing, and I'll see you back here for day two of this new small account challenge.