How To Get Good At Trading (As Fast As Humanly Possible) transcript

Most traders hear a title like how to get good at trading as fast as humanly possible and immediately think shortcut. They think there is some indicator they have not found yet, some setup they have not learned yet, some trader they need to follow, some discord, some strategy, some secret that finally makes the whole thing click. Um, that is not what this video is. The fastest way to get good at trading is not to skip the work. it is to stop wasting time on the wrong work.

That is the part most people miss. You can spend three years watching trading videos, reading market commentary, following alerts, changing strategies, adding indicators, and convincing yourself you're learning. But if none of that turns into better execution, cleaner risk, better review, and a more repeatable process, you're not really improving. You're just staying busy. I've been trading full-time since 2018. I've been around a lot of developing traders.

I've reviewed a lot of charts, a lot of playbooks, a lot of daily rapport cards from other traders, and a lot of the same mistakes repeated. I've also had the honor of sharing the trading floor with two market wizards. And the traders who improve the fastest usually are not the ones who necessarily know the most. They're the ones who shorten the feedback loop. They see a setup, they trade it, they review it, they correct it, they see it again, they repeat that cycle until the patterns become obvious.

That is the real speed hack. So, if I had to explain how to get good at trading as fast as humanly possible, this is the process I would give you. Number one, stop trying to get good at trading. That sounds weird, but it matters. Trading is too broad. There are thousands of stocks. There are options, futures, cryptos, small cap, large cap, swing trade, scalps, mean reversion, momentum, breaking news, earnings, macros, technicals, tape reading, and a 100 different ways to express an idea.

If your goal is, I want to get good at trading, you're already making it too hard. Get good at one situation, one setup, one repeatable trade, one thing that shows up often enough that you could study it. recognize it and improve at it. That could be opening momentum through the pre-market high. It could be a 10 or 15 minute orb opening range break. It could be a VWAP continuation, a day three breakout, a liquidity trap, a mean reversion setup after a stock gets too extended.

The exact setup matters less than the depth. Most developing traders are not bad because they have no ideas. They're bad because every trade is like a new idea. They see something moving, react to it, and then after the fact, they try to explain why it was a setup. That's backwards. A real setup should be explainable before the trade happens. What is the stock? Why is it in play? What is the level? What's the trigger?

Where are you wrong? Where is the target? What would make you pass on the trade? If you can't answer that clearly, you don't have a setup yet. You just have an interest in the stock. And an interest is not edge. So, the first way to speed up your development is to narrow the game. Don't try to become good at everything. Pick one trade and become annoying about it. Two, build a real playbook. A playbook is not I like breakouts.

That's not a playbook. That is a sentence. A real playbook has examples. It has rules. It has variables. And it has lots of screenshots. It has the best versions of that trade, the average versions, and the traps that look close but have failed. For every setup you trade, you should be able to break it down the same way. What was the catalyst? What did the daily chart look like? Was the stock in a hot sector? Was the market helping?

Where was the key level? What did volume look like? What was the entry? Where was the stop? And how did it act after you entered? Where should you have added? Where should you have trimmed? Where did the thesis fail? That is how you stop saying this setup works and start understanding when it works. There's a big difference. Most traders want a rule. Good traders want the nuance behind the rule. Every trader at SMB is very nuanced about their playbooks.

Because the rules get you started, the nuance is where the money is. A breakout with fresh news, high arval, room overhead, and a strong market is not the same as a breakout in a random name with no catalyst and resistance overhead. While the market is h it's okay, maybe a little weak. On the surface, both charts might look like breakouts, but they are not the same opportunity. The only way you learn that is by collecting examples.

Take screenshots, save charts, mark them up, put them into categories, build a database of the exact setup you want to master. I do not need 50 different strategies. You need a 100 examples of one strategy. That is what builds pattern recognition and gets new traders to stop hesitating. Three, compress your reps. This is where most people get trading wrong. They think experience means sitting in front of the screen every day.

That is part of it, but it's not nearly enough. If you only rely on live trading, you get a limited number of real reps. Maybe your setup shows up once a day, maybe once a week. Maybe you even miss it because you were watching something else. It happens. But that is too slow. You need to compress the reps. Live trading is one rep. The replay is another rep. Chart review is another rep. Historical study and back testing is another rep.

Watching tape, another rep. Reviewing the best opportunities of the day is another rep. Going back through the best trades of the week or a month is another rep. This is how you speed up. This is what I see traders at SMB doing every single day. If I show you the same setup 500 times, eventually you'll not need to think about it the same way. You'll just start to see it. You'll know when it's clean. You'll know when something is off.

You'll know when the stock is not acting right, when the volume is not there, when the entry is too early, when the move is too extended, or when the market is not helping your trade. That is what people call market intuition. But it's not magic. It is pattern recognition built from reps. The trader who only trades live and never reviews is moving slowly. The trader who trades live, screenshots the setup, reviews it after the close, studies the best examples from the past, and replays that same situation again.

Is improving much, much faster. Same calendar time but more useful reps. That is what getting good fast actually means. Four, learn what actually moves stocks. This is the part that separates real trading from staring at support and resistance lines on a chart. Charts matter, levels matter, price action matters, but if you only look at the chart, you're missing a huge part of the trade. You need to ask, why is this stock moving?

Why today? Why now? Who is trapped? Who needs to buy it? Who needs to sell it? Is this fresh news, earnings, a sector move, a short squeeze, a macro headline, an analyst event, or just a random move with no real reason behind it. That context matters. A stock breaking out because the whole sector is in play is different from a stock breaking out alone. A stock opening strong after real news is different from a stock gapping for no reason.

A day three breakout is not just a chart pattern. It is a behavior pattern. It is about positioning, trap traders, momentum, and the way people respond after a stock has already proven it can move. A liquidity trap is not just a line on a chart. It's about where people are leaning, where they are wrong, and what happens when price forces them out. The chart tells you what is happening. The catalyst and positioning help you understand why the move might continue.

That is why the fastest developing traders do not just save charts, they mark them up and save the context. They know what the market was doing, what the sector was doing, what the news was, what the expectations were, what people were thinking coming into the day. That is how a chart becomes a case study. And once you build enough case studies, you start to see things differently. You're not just asking, is this green candle good?

You're asking, have I seen this situation before? Um, and that's a completely different level of trading. Number five, risk small enough that you could actually learn. The quickest way to slow down your development or end your trading career in a few months is to trade too big. Because when the size is too big, you stop learning and you start surviving. You cut winners early because you're afraid to give back money. You hold losers because the loss feels too big to take.

You hesitate on good setups because you're still thinking about the last trade. You force trades because you want to make money back and now your data is useless. You're not studying or trading your strategy anymore. You're studying what you do when you are emotional. That is not the same thing in the learning phase. Your job is not to maximize P&L. Your job is to maximize quality reps. A trader risking $20 and executing correctly is learning faster than a trader risking $500 and panicking.

That does not mean the money should mean nothing. If you paper trade forever and never feel any pressure, that has its limits, too. But the size has to be small enough that you could still make good decisions. Here's the test. If losing the trade would change the way you manage the next trade, you're too big. If you're staring at the P&L instead of the chart, you're too big. If you know where the stop is, but you're already negotiating with it, you're too big.

Cut the size down until you could follow the trade plan. Then you earn the right to increase your size. That is how professional traders think about size. You do not size up because you want to make more money. You size up because your execution, your edge, and your data justify it. There's a big difference. Six, find the see it moment. This is one of the most important things I work on. After a trade is over, especially a losing trade, I do not just ask where was my stop?

Was it in the right place? I ask when should I have known? When was the moment where the trade stopped acting right? Sometimes it is before the entry. The stock never really confirmed, but you wanted it to, so you took it anyway. Sometimes it's right after the entry. You got the trigger, but the follow-through is just not there. Sometimes it's halfway to the stop. Price starts giving you info that the thesis is weakening, but you ignore it because technically your stop has not hit yet.

That moment matters. Because if your only risk management tool is a full stop, you're going to lose a full R every time you're wrong. But better traders get good at seeing when the trade is not behaving correctly. Not guessing, not panic selling, not failing because they are nervous. They're reading behavior. If the setup should go quickly and it stalls, that's information. If the breakout should hold the level and immediately reclaims lower, that is information.

If volume should expand and instead it dies on a breakout, that is information. If the market is supposed to help and it starts going the other way against you, that is information. That is the see it moment. The goal is to identify the point where the trade is no longer acting like the version you've studied. When you get good at that, you stop taking unnecessary full losses. You start cutting risk earlier when the thesis weakens.

And just as important, you start holding longer when the trade is acting exactly the way it should. That skill comes from review. You'll almost never see it perfectly in real time at first. You see it after the close. Then after seeing it after the close 50 times, you start seeing it during the trading day. That is how the feedback loop tightens. Seven. Review like an athlete watches film. This is probably the least exciting part of the video and it is probably the most important.

Every serious trader needs review, not vague review, not I looked at my trades and I think I did okay today. Real review. What was my best trade today? What was my worst trade? What did I miss? What did I force? What setup worked well recently? What mistake did I make that showed up more than once? Did I follow my risk plans? Did I give back morning profits? Did I trade worse after a loss? Did I trade worse when I was tired, distracted, or trying to force something?

What did I do well today? What do I need to improve on? That is how you find the real problems in your trading. Most traders are wrong about what their issue is. I see it all the time. They think their problem is entries, but the data says they're just taking lowquality trades. They think their problem is stock selection, but the data says their best ideas work and their random trades are killing them. They think their problem is discipline, but the data says they trade fine in the morning and fall apart after 11:30.

You do not know until you do this type of review. And do not only review and focus on losers. Review winners and the good in your trading. Your winners and the few things you might do well at first are where your edge lives. Pull up 20 or 30 charts of your best trades and put them next to each other. What did they have in common? What time of day did they happen? What did the market look like at the time? What was the catalyst?

What did volume look like? What did the stock do before your entry? How did you risk on it? Where did it give you a chance to add? That is the work. This is the work that I had to do when I was struggling and the work that I still do. Losers teach you what to avoid. Winners teach you what to look for and what to push. You need both. Eight. Get around traders who are better than you. You could figure everything out alone. it'll just take way longer and cost more.

The fastest way to shorten the learning curve is to get around people who already know what good trading looks like. Not so they could tell you what to buy. That is the wrong way to use better traders. The value is in how they think. A better trader could look at your trade and say, "That was not actually an A setup. You entered too early. You're focused on the wrong name. You size that like an A trade, but it was really like a B.

You missed the real opportunity because you were staring at the wrong ticker today. That kind of feedback can save you months, sometimes even years. [snorts] Because you don't know what you don't know. You might spend three months trying to fix your entries when the real issue is that you're trading the wrong stocks. You might think you need more confidence when the real issue is that your setup is not defined. You might think you need more screen time when the real issue is that you're not reviewing the screen time you already have.

That is why your environment matters. If you're around traders who prepare seriously, review seriously, and hold high standards, that becomes the norm. If you're around traders who chase alerts, complain, post their wins on X and hide their losses, and jump strategies every week, that becomes your norm, too. Who you're around changes what you think trading is supposed to look like. Choose carefully. Number nine, stop looking for the fast way.

And this is the annoying truth. The search for the fast way is what makes traders slow. Every week spent hunting for a new strategy is a week you did not spend getting reps on your current strategies. Every hour spent watching random market opinions is an hour you did not spend reviewing your own trades. Every time you scrap a setup after a normal losing stretch, you reset the clock. That is why traders can spend years in the market and still be beginners.

They do not actually build anything. They just started over 20 times. The fastest path is actually boring. Pick one setup, study it, trade it small, review every attempt, build rules from what you see. Find that see it moment. Cut the mistakes that keep repeating. Increase size only when execution becomes consistent. Then after you actually have something, you could add another playbook. That is the path. Not because it sounds exciting, but because it compounds.

So, if I had to compress this entire video into one line, it would be this. The goal is to compress the learning cycle. See it, trade it, review it, correct it, see it again. Do that hundreds of times and eventually thousands of times. That is how you get good at trading as fast as humanly possible. Not by skipping the work, by making sure the work you're doing actually builds skill.