TD Ameritrade Side Hustle Challenge - Two Trades, Two Winners - Day 9 transcript

What's up everyone? All right, so latest update in the TD Ameritrade small account side hustle challenge, another $372 of profit. Boom! Two trades today, two winners, and today I'm going to talk about one of the challenges that I have. Uh I had one awesome trade today, really solid stock, uh more than a 10% gain on it or right around there. Um like a very clean trade, but those don't come every single day, and I didn't have enough buying power to fully maximize on that opportunity because I had taken, you know, maybe a a B quality trade earlier in the morning.

Now, the B quality trade still yielded profit, $156, but for the amount of buying power it used, it made it so the next trade, which ended up being an A quality setup, I couldn't fully maximize. My feeling right now with the side hustle challenge is that if I come in, you know, and for you guys who maybe are saying, "Look, I can trade my TD Ameritrade account twice a week. It's Monday and Friday, you know, or whatever, Tuesday and Thursday." Well, then you just have to make the most of what you have on those days, and so that's kind of my approach.

Sometimes it's B plus, B quality setups, whatever, I'll take it, do the best I can with it. Sometimes it'll be A quality, but if I wait for A quality setups and I'm being like, you know, side hustle approach that I can only trade it 2 days a week, I might end up going weeks without trading, and then that's worse than, you know, trading B quality setups and just making small progress. So, today ended up solid, you know, $372, almost 10% on the entire account, uh just shy of that.

I guess the account, let's see, this morning was at 3,900, and so um now it's up to uh 4,200, almost 4,300. So, solid progress. All right, as always, questions, comments, leave them below. I'll see you guys back at it for the next installment of the TD Ameritrade small account side hustle challenge. All right, so we're going to do our TD Ameritrade small account challenge recap here. This is the side hustle challenge.

So, as you guys know, and I'll just kind of reiterate it each time I do these recaps, my TD Ameritrade account is a cash only account. That means every time I take a trade, I have to wait 2 days for the cash to settle before I can trade in it again, that's why I don't always trade in it every single day. Today, I used all of my buying power. I only have $74.13 of cents of buying power left in the account. Now, you can see after my gains today, I have $4,287 in total account value, which means this morning I'm up, let's see, 300 and uh what is it?

I think around 370 or something like that. Let me just do the math. Um it's 220 225 and 20 cents plus 146 and 85 cents. So, 2 372 and 5 cents. So, anyways, um today because I didn't take any trades um on Friday and I didn't take any trades on Monday, I had all of my buying power available. So, the first trade I took was on IDEXG and I only bought 300 shares, but I managed to make $146. Now, I was I was a little hesitant about whether or not I even wanted to trade this stock and honestly, I don't think it was the best bang for the buck um because the stock is expensive.

So, this stock was on our gap scanner. So, every morning pre-market, I look at the stocks that are gapping up in the market and IDEXG was down here. It actually wasn't my top watchlist stock, but it was one I had my eye on for a couple reasons. Number one, I've traded it the past and I've made money on it. It's had some periods where it made really big gains in one day, 40-50%. It's a somewhat recent reverse split and it had news this morning.

So, pre-market had a high of nine, it opened around eight and as it popped up and broke the opening range right here, I punched the order to get in just over 850. So, as it broke 850, I got in by pressing buy market with 300 shares. Now, I could set up an order for buy ask, but that that order won't always fill. So, instead I'm doing buy market. So, I click buy market, I got filled 300 shares right in the I don't know, whatever it was, 50s probably.

It squeezes up to 880, it squeezes up to nine and as it breaks through 925, I put my order to join the ask. Now, I ended up getting filled, I never really know exactly where I'm going to get filled, which is kind of the tricky thing with using these types of buttons, but I can see right now the current price is 816, right? So, if I press join ask now, I guess I would be, you know, joining the ask at around 816 approximately.

Um you know, it's not it's not the the ideal way to um uh to trade, but it it's fine. And for the side hustle challenge, it works well enough. So, uh so I got in here and made with a 50-cent gain, $150, right? Now, I thought this stock had the potential, if it really opened up and this is a nice daily breakout setup over nine, to make a move up to 10, maybe even higher. Now, if that happened, I might have been able to make a full $300 or more um with a 300-share position, but generally speaking, an average winner is going to be anywhere from 10 to 20 cents per share.

So, it's just not uh it's not quite enough. Now, I'll answer that question there. The question is, I wish Ross would use hot keys with TD Ameritrade. So, here's the thing. Um yes, you can set up the hot keys. Oops, go you go here to set up. This is what happened to me when I used the hot keys. Um sometimes I would press the hot key and nothing would happen. So, um under hot keys you can have it enabled for active trader buy market is shift one.

Sometimes I would press shift one and nothing would happen. And it's as if I never pressed the button. And so, I found that it it for some reason the platform was a little inconsistent about accepting my orders through hot keys and I don't know why that was, but that I I just can't if I miss trades, it gets me so frustrated. Um so, I stopped using them. Now, I see some of you guys say I use hot keys with ThinkorSwim they they're fine for me and that's awesome that that that's the case.

Um but for me they they just weren't working uh consistently. So, anyways, I buy market and then I click join the ask. So, $146 there on that trade. But in fact, BRN um is a stock that if I had used all of my buying power on this, how how many shares could I bought at a $1.40? I could have bought 2,000 shares. I could have bought 2,000 shares at $1.40. I even could have bought like 2,500 shares at $1.40. And potentially on this type of trade, if I had really executed it well, if I bought at $1.40 with 2,500 shares and held into the halt and sold up here, man, I could have made over $1,000.

So, the return on investment would have been it is, no doubt, much better when you have stocks that are priced between a dollar and two dollars that end up making really big moves. It just doesn't happen every day. I want to you know, if I wait if I don't trade at all and I wait for those opportunities, I might only end up trading once a week or once every two weeks. And then the one time I traded could be the time that it just is a total failure.

So, I'm trading a little bit of everything that fits within my strategy that is at least under $10 a share. And um you know, today's a good day. With BRN, I jumped in it at $1.40. And here's the mistake I made, I think. So, I jumped in my with 1,000 shares pressing buy market. And then as soon as it popped up to $1.55, I was like, "Okay, I I should start to take some profit off the table." So, I clicked join ask. It was the quickest thing to do.

And then by doing that, I sold the full position. I think what I'm going to start doing is whatever position I want to take, I'm going to type it in for 500 shares, for half of that. I'll press the order twice. And then when I click join ask, I'm just selling half. And then I can click join the rest to sell the rest, or I can cancel all if I need to and and then sell market. I think that's going to work a little bit better for me to start scaling out of trades a little bit more, rather than one entry and one exit.

I mean, the fact is there's no commission with TD Ameritrade, so there's no reason for me to be managing it in sort of this, you know, one in entry, one exit type of um type of way. So, I'll see if that helps me a little bit more. Um I also realize that I'm not because I'm on my traveling trading station, this layout is just a little different from the one I have at my office. Um which obviously didn't really hurt me today, but I think when I'm back in my office, it'll be a little bit easier.

So, anyways, you know, a nice green day today, up to 4,200, 40 almost 4,300. And as I said, 5,000 is the next stop. Once I get to $5,000, I will have doubled the account. Now, it's certainly a little slower progress than my uh CMEG small account challenge, where I had full six times leverage with a $500 account, or actually it's four times with 500 but then six times once it was above 2,000. But, you know, I'm just making progress as I go and I'm I'm happy with the sort of the progress on this challenge and it really is a side hustle challenge.

The idea is for those of you guys who are only able to trade, you know, maybe a couple times a week to jump in, take a couple trades here and there and to see that you can make progress even if you have a really small account. I started with 2,500 only because I don't have the patience to trade a cash only account with 500, but it doesn't mean you can't do it. It's just do you have the patience to do it? You certainly can.

It's just, you know, your daily gains might only be, you know, $20 or something like that, $12 for the first few weeks. So, slow and steady wins the race, you know, that's what it's all about. All right. So, that's it for me here on the TD small account side hustle challenge, another $372 which is terrific, putting a little more money in my pocket and I think generally speaking the approach of selling early is working very well with TD Ameritrade cuz the account is growing and that's what is the most important thing.

For the big account, in terms of maximizing my gains, today I did sell my positions a little on the early side and I think I left some money on the table, but, you know, it's always better to leave a little money on the table than to give back profit. So, you know, I'm walking away green. I'll try to do the same thing again tomorrow, the day after, and you know, just continue this progress. All right. So, that's it for me and I'll be back at first thing tomorrow morning.

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