RvB Trader @Rodericv

Later today we are having a firm-wide trader meeting at @smbcapital. A few teams and a couple handful of traders have been struggling. This aligns with what I’m hearing from other desks as well as those on the retail side. Only fair for me to highlight both the successes AND the struggles of the traders I work with as I try to convey the authentic truth of being a trader. On the SMB call we will discuss what has been working well, what hasn’t been, and how best to adapt. Soliciting feedback across teams and individuals. Here is the main message I will be conveying to their traders which I think is useful for all to hear: IMO, the most common issues I’m seeing is that traders are getting overly involved and over-allocating risk to situations that had potential but never unfolded optimally. $BWET is a name that got extended, but never enough to take a real stand. The breakouts in $QQQ or certain single-stock names had solid charts but the breadth beneath the market was awful. We still had yellow lights flashing in certain areas. The recent AI sell-off was extended and had its moments, but it lacked the intraday flush or intraday setups to size into anything. When these setups have unfolded suboptimally, traders have continued to stay involved and allocate risk in a refusal to acknowledge that the setup is not as good as it had the potential to be. I’d argue this comes down to maintaining an objectively high level of subjectivity. Selectivity is staying in your lane and waiting for the setups in your playbook that match the current regime. Unlike w poker, nothing is forcing you to play or to take a subpar setup. Essentially, you have a good hand and want to place a bet, but if the flop pans out suboptimally, you fold. A lot of traders have not been emotionally willing to fold and not play the hand. Good trading is recognizing that there might be some positive signs, but then avoiding or sizing down when it doesn't fully line up.

One of the strangest things I see when mentoring traders: Some people have built incredibly successful businesses. They've made millions, managed hundreds of employees, and achieved things most people can only dream of. And then they enter the stock market thinking they can easily repeat that success. Big mistake. Trading is a completely different game. In a traditional business, working harder, hiring better people, improving your product, or increasing your sales efforts can often produce better results. In trading, you can do everything right and still lose money. You can work 12 hours a day and make absolutely nothing. You can make five excellent decisions in a row and lose money on all five. And sometimes, the best decision is to do nothing for weeks. That's incredibly difficult for people who are used to controlling outcomes. Trading is a game of probabilities, uncertainty, and emotional discipline. You can't force the market to reward your effort. And your biggest enemy often isn't the market. It's yourself. Your impatience. Your ego. Your need to be right. Your desire to make something happen. I've seen how difficult this transition can be, even for highly successful people. Being successful in business can give you valuable skills. But it doesn't automatically give you a trading edge. In fact, some of the habits that made you successful in business can become your biggest weaknesses in trading. The market doesn't care how successful you were before you started trading.

a guy I grew up with sold drugs for 6 years before going legit we don't talk about it much but one night he was watching me trade and said something that stopped me cold "you're doing what I used to do but nobody arrests you for it" "the math is identical" he broke it down: "rule one on the street: never risk more than you can reload" "if you're carrying $10K in product and you lose it all in one move, you're done. no supplier fronts you twice" "so you split it. 5 drops. $2K each. if one goes bad you eat a $2K loss and keep operating" that's your position sizing "rule two: never expand until the current operation is consistent" "guys who blew up weren't the ones who got caught. they were the ones who scaled before their system was tight" "they'd go from moving $10K/month to $50K/month because they had one good month" "then one thing goes wrong at 5x scale and they lose everything" "that's your traders who go from 1 contract to 10 contracts after a green week" rule three: your best day should look exactly like your worst day from the outside "if someone can tell whether you won or lost by how you're acting, you're emotional. and emotional people in my world got killed" "in yours they just go broke. but the principle is the same" "rule four: the money is in the boring middle" "the flashy guys with the cars and the chains? they lasted 18 months" "the guys who drove Honda Civics and lived in regular apartments? they ran for 12 years" "rule five: never let the money change your process" "first big score, everyone changes their behavior. nicer clothes. new car. more risk" "that's the signal that you're about to lose everything" "your prop firm guys who blow accounts after their first withdrawal? same thing" five rules from someone who managed risk when the consequence of getting it wrong wasn't a blown account - it was a prison sentence and somehow the rules are identical to what every trading book says in 300 pages (i teach the whole framework and psychology i use to make over $50k/month trading in my free discord. Link in bio)

I became consistent when I was so tired of losing that I surrendered to boring, repeatable execution.

Being a trader is weird. People you have known your entire life think you are just gambling. Then a random person you met on discord wants to see you win more than anyone in your real life.

FRIENDLY REMINDER: A profitable strategy is useless if your nervous system can't tolerate the uncertainty required to execute it.

Unsuccessful people complain that the game is rigged. Successful people know that too, but they master the rules and win anyway.

Mom: "Stop trading. You're just a gambling addict." Dad: "If you think trading will work, you're a moron." Brother: "Trading doesn't work, man." Sister: "Quit trading. Do something with your life." Random stranger: "I believe in you, bro. Keep going!" It f*cking hurts, man.

FOUR MAIN CONSTRAINTS IN TRADING There is nothing more important in trading and in life than working on the key constraint that is most effective for the output you are trying to achieve (PNL). In trading there are four main constraints: -Edge -Risk Management -Execution -Opportunities Any time I see a trader working hard but not seeing progress over a multi-month period… guess what? You’re working hard, but you’re not working effectively at solving your key constraint! If you don’t even know what your key constraint is… hit pause and do that reflection first. Hard work (especially using AI) is useless if it’s not solving a constraint to your trading.

James Clear @JamesClear

3 weeks ago

A Monday morning question for you: Always work on the limiting factor. What is holding you back right now?

0 84 1K 76K 334

Market Wizard Linda Raschke's 12 Technical Trading Rules 1. Buy the first pullback after a new high. Sell the first rally after a new low. 2. Afternoon strength or weakness should have follow‑through the next day. 3. The best trading reversals occur in the morning, not the afternoon. 4. The larger the market gaps, the greater the odds of continuation and a trend. 5. The way the market trades around the previous day’s high or low is a good indicator of the market’s technical strength or weakness. 6. The previous day’s high and low are two very important “pivot” points, for this was the definitive point where buyers or sellers came in the day before. Look for the market to either test and reverse off these points, or push through and show signs of continuation. 7. The last hour often tells the truth about how strong a trend truly is. “Smart money” shows their hand in the last hour, continuing to mark positions in their favor. As long as a market is having consecutive strong closes, look for the up‑trend to continue. The up‑trend is most likely to end when there is a morning rally first, followed by a weak close. 8. High volume on the close implies continuity the next morning in the direction of the last half‑hour. In a strongly trending market, look for resumption of the trend in the last hour. 9. The first hour’s range establishes the framework for the rest of the trading day. 10. A greater percentage of the day’s range occurs in the first hour than was the case in the past, and thus it has become increasingly important to trade aggressively if there are early signs of a strong trend for the day. 11. There are four basic principles of price behavior which have held up over time. Confidence that a type of price action is a true principle is what allows a trader to develop a systematic approach. The following four principles can be modeled and quantified and hold true for all time frames, all markets. The majority of patterns or systems that have a demonstrable edge are based on one of these four enduring principles of price behavior. Charles Dow was one of the first to touch on them in his writings. Principle One: A Trend Has a Higher Probability of Continuation than Reversal Principle Two: Momentum Precedes Price Principle Three: Trends End in a Climax Principle Four: The Market Alternates between Range Expansion and Range Contraction In the world of money, which is a world shaped by human behavior, nobody has the foggiest notion of what will happen in the future. Mark that word – Nobody! Thus the successful trader does not base moves on what supposedly will happen but reacts instead to what does happen.

@aw_trades_ @TradingLucid Code AW

@iamJMinx 🔥🔥🔥😎

Your A+++ setup appears 2 times a week. That’s roughly 8 trades a month. But you take 20 trades. That means 12 out of 20 trades weren’t even your setup. 60% of your decisions had nothing to do with your actual edge. Maybe you don’t need a better strategy. Maybe you need to stop trading outside of it.

“I tested it thoroughly, but the results do not match my testing.” “I cannot build a system with an edge.” Do any of these problems sound familiar? “I cannot execute properly.” “I am always unsure what to do.” “I get emotional.” “I automated it, but it still does not work.” I have heard these concerns over and over. These problems stem from not having built a “repeatable” system. You may want to say, “I have already written my rules and tested them”, but in most cases, those rules are incomplete, covering only entries and exits, or the testing itself has been done incorrectly. Because people do not recognize this, some conclude, “Even automation did not work”. Unfortunately, automation does not fill in the gaps in your rules but simply executes those incomplete rules precisely. Testing will produce some numbers at the time. But those results are not reproducible. If you have built a system that combines properly defined rules, proper testing, and position sizing derived from that testing, and have completed the necessary practice, all that remains is to “wait and click”. That is because the necessary steps themselves reshape your thinking through experience, leaving no room in live trading for mistaken thinking rooted in immediate wins and losses to arise and cause emotional suffering. You still think this is an “emotional problem”. You think, “If only I could get rid of this emotional problem”. That is not the issue. It is a problem with how your system has been built. Trading cannot begin until you have a “repeatable” system with an edge. Repeatability means more than simply “having rules”. I spent many years working out the complete process for building a trading system. TRADING SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE is the blueprint that brings that entire process together. Working through that process yourself will still take time. But you do not have to figure out what to do and how to do it from scratch. This is an unavoidable path to success in trading, and I am rooting for everyone who is serious about doing the work. Follow the instructions in it. If you already own it, read it again and again, and put it into practice. I have one request to help you get the most out of this resource. Read it not with the thought “I will start someday”, but with the intention to “take one step today”. Knowledge only becomes meaningful when you turn it into action. This resource asks you to do the work. And I hope that work will fundamentally transform your trading. payhip.com/b/bqKpV Let us get started together.

【What Trading Requires More Than Intelligence Is the Consistency to Keep Repeating the Same Actions Like a Fool Who Learns Nothing】 Great traders may seem highly intelligent, but what is really required is the consistency to keep repeating the same actions "like a fool who learns nothing even after losing". In reality, this is not foolish, and traders at the stage of putting their edge to work do not need to learn anything from losses. ■ Just Wait and Click That is because traders at this stage already have the "answer" to an individual loss. You keep following your rules because you are convinced that "accepting those losses and repeating the process is what leaves you with a profit", right? It is contradictory to already have that answer, yet treat every loss as something bad and try to learn from it. What is required of traders at this stage is consistency no matter what happens, and calculating position size is about the only thing you need to use your intelligence for. But while I have made "repeating the same thing like a fool" sound simple, it is actually a highly advanced skill. ■ Consistency Is Undeniably a "Skill" When you trade based on probabilistic thinking, consistency is essential because it allows you to accumulate a large sample of trades under the same conditions, so that the law of large numbers can work and your edge can emerge. This skill of consistency reflects everything you need to understand as a trader. As long as you hold the mistaken belief that "winning or losing the trade in front of you matters" and place value on that outcome, you cannot achieve consistency. Consistency is undeniably a skill. ・Understand probability ・Understand how a large sample size contributes to success ・Understand the "statistical edge" of your strategy ・Develop the ability to recognize signals on a live chart and reliably execute your entries ・Take a long view and understand exactly what you need to do now, without a shadow of a doubt. You need to shift what you value completely from "winning or losing the trade in front of you" to "results over the long run". For that to happen, you need to be convinced that your strategy has a statistical edge across a large sample size, that realizing that edge requires a large sample size, and that you must not attach value to any individual result along the way. Understanding randomness and statistical convergence, developing understanding through experience across a large sample size, and practicing are all part of this skill, which is not easy to acquire. Conversely, as long as you hold the mistaken belief that "winning or losing the trade in front of you matters", you will never achieve consistency, and you will keep directing your efforts toward the wrong goal under the misconception that consistency requires "the mental strength to endure something unpleasant". There is no answer at the end of that path. In other words, consistency is the embodiment of everything you need to understand as a trader. ■ The Road to Success Is the Road to Consistency Many traders mistakenly believe that having a strategy with an edge is enough to succeed, but unfortunately, most people fail to succeed no matter how good their strategy is. That is because no strategy, however good, can eliminate randomness, and losing streaks and drawdowns are unavoidable. If a trader has not matured, they see losing streaks and drawdowns as bad and cannot accept them, so they think, "The strategy has stopped working" or "If I had done this differently, I could have avoided that loss", fall into an endless "improvement loop", and never build the sample size needed for their edge to emerge. Do not attach value to the outcome of a single trade in front of you. Your intelligence is not there to serve individual wins and losses. Think big, take a long view, and be consistent. 【New】 📚 Content for serious traders payhip.com/YumiSakura/col… 📨 Yumi’s Newsletter …mi-sakura-newsletter.subscribepage.io Thank you for reading.

You believe that avoiding losses protects you. But in a game governed by probability, avoiding losses also means avoiding profits. There is a brutal paradox at work. The profits you need are all hidden among the losses you need to accept. Eliminating losses means eliminating the very profits you seek.

The ugly side of trading is the loneliness. The beautiful side of trading is also the loneliness.

Steam Rollers & One way price action -Written by Bartholomew Fatus Catus If you're familiar with ES price action in the afternoon until the close. It had steam rolled. This is a type of price action I want to talk about. Currently I'm long at 97.75 we're trading around 11.00s - and it's 1:49pm CST. So while I watch this hopefully go to 30s and finally get paid for the fucked week and month of fighting my ass off, I decided to write. This will take me a few hours to write. These always do. And no I don't use speech to text... There's a phenomenon in the ES where it just trends, but not all trends are the same. Not all ranges are the same. Trend or Range is like the word "Human" What culture? what color? what gender? what age? ASL? ES does this thing... This thing thing where it starts blasting bids or offers. Currently offers. There's these reloads. The offer reloads and reloads and we go up and up. Often times when they do this - the price can range and you see cumulative delta push up and up and up while the price ranges. Which is a huge reload. Now I look at multiple products on a master delta. For example MES should be rolled into it with the ES. Arb algos keep them lock in step. So notionally adjust the contract size. ES is not the only product that directly tracks the SPX - NOT THE OPTIONS! SPX is the actual ticker for the SP500. ES is a futures contract so its I can't remember like 60 basis points away from SPX price. They move the same, exactly the same price for price, but at different prices. Futures slowly close that point gap with SPX as it nears expiration. So the price movement is pretty much the same but the smallest drift back toward SPX price that takes full quarter. Hence future. It's trading a future projected price from SPX. Now the index itself has no order flow. The price is a math formula based off stocks weights. Trying to figure out what the fuck moves ES - is like trying to find Bigfoot in the woods. I've been trying for so long. Is it the fucking stocks? The options? What the fuck is it!? My current theory is the volume rolls between buckets or different tickers. This is why ES can move on like nothing. You know when the limits just fucking pull and the delta is barely doing shit? Will the flow is somewhere the fuck else. Now ES does have inventory as well as MES. So the order flow is not entirely useless. I made a video years back about how broken the flow is. And people read the title and not watched the shit nor got an hour in - which is time stamped by the way... I talked about the usefulness of the DOM... No matter how these dealers fucking hedge their inventory. Which quite frankly I don't think there's enough volume for them to hedge into ES like the GEX guys think. If you look at daily volume adjusted notionally there aint enough. Plus the put side often see inventory balance on the call side. CBOE even wrote an article on the myth of gamma squeezes. They own the SPX. See a squeeze is when there's too many short calls or some shit and they buy futures to hedge, but the put side often has rebalancing or equal volume, seeing how the puts and calls are on 2 different books. Again not enough fucking volume in futures to fucking hedge and not all the fucking volume in options are dealers, that shit is all theory... Now I use to poo poo on cumulative deltas, like 2019. I'm not going to dismiss the fact that there isn't hedging. There is.. But not the way retail thinks, because no market maker comes in and really tells us what the fuck they do. The only legit market maker I know was a bond guy who started in 85. Took him 15 fucking years to find a profitable strategy. Recently retired. I mentioned him multiple times, but he's not apart of the retail, X, youtube world. Hasn't a fucking clue about any of this shit. I picked his brain. Now they did it by hand and we obviously have algo market makers. I'm sure it's all different. But the capital required to balance their books were huge. They had to keep throwing money at it, to insure true delta neutral positions. It's like their postion is constantly being rolled. Never flat. Always open PNL - with their profits just coming in from the actual spread over the course of time, even though some of their positions got ate up by trends. Now the issue in trading is we never know the open interest until the end of day. Same with cumulative delta. This makes knowing what the hell is truly going on tough. The delta shows us outstanding or orders skewed to one side however. It removes the matched flow. So you can get a better idea of reloaded areas or even limit pulled areas. No matter what is going on with how the ES actually moves - as in - is it SPX or something else? The inventory always needs to rebalance at some point. You can't long a 0DTE call and hedge an ES contract without closing both sides to lock in the PNL. Like - you can't exit an options contract on a futures book.. You can hedge.. Sure... But at some point you have to close those positions on their specific books. What this means, is even though you're not looking at all of it. All of the different shit that contribute to the SPX movement. Watching what you can will have to rebalance at some time... Now where will the price be? Fuck if I know. However when we got these massive clusters of big fucking offers coming in just eating the flow, yet the market orders on the buy side just keep fucking pushing and eventually break the offers or at least keep pushing them higher and higher like they're dollar cost averaging to hold the market down. This is some form of a rebalance taking place which often looks like a trend. It's interesting because the bids at times especially during the more steam roller slow style of shoving up - The bids are not reloading really. It's just the market order buys that will not stop pouring in. On the opposite side the sellers are not selling because if they did aggressively the delta would dump. They just sit passively eating. ----- Side note. Finishing this draft the next day. I did a post here: x.com/realFatCat1/st… I did cut that long - which funny enough did almost makes 30s. I talked about what happened in the post. "oH YoU cOuLd oF bEeN jUsT sAyInG yOu WeRe In ThE tRaDe BuT yOu WeReN't AnD wRoTe ThE nExT dAy" No mother fucker. It went in at 1:19pm, and as it was zooming in my favor - I'm like "I'll write about this." Screen shot of entry, notice the purple boxes or ranges in ranges type of shit I wrote about in prior posts. "wHiCh OnE?" I don't fucking remember - read them all. Either way. The purple boxes represent the reload offer areas getting steam rolled. Now I was short right before flipping long. The short was at a critical area and had it worked. All these reloads would of fuck shoved the market to new lows in my opinion. I've seen them back foot. Or reloads further and further up as the market presses, and then just juice the price down. Almost like someone is trying to hold it and dollar costs averages in. Now obviously whales use their massive pools of capital to do this kind of shit, and it works until it doesn't. *cough* Melvin *cough cough* Capital... So for me this area was range top - and for whatever reason - this fucking current regime - is model rectangle ranges that almost pull these perfect SR rotations off prior ranges. Not sure how long this will last? But the market doing this is also what's probably fucking everyone. I watched some old footage and this is too clean and orderly most of use expect more breaks or momentum, or sloppy loose shit. The market just fucking always changes. Always evolves, into some sort of regime, but what's crazy is this style of price action has been consistent for some time now. When we're use to more random days that dont look like prior days, but hey. Seems the highest of time frames are in a range overall which is rippling through each day and the lower time frames creating that fractal shit. Now being on this area. The book was thick. It slowed hard. I had scalped in the 95ish section well pulling slip scalps. But then the algo switched turned on, for steam roll mode. I've seen it too many times. I know what this is. I've also been fucked with no lube by it many times over. So I decided if there's a party and we're fucking I'M THE PITCHER THIS TIME!!! --- Pivot back to talking about these steam rollers. Man this post is a bit all over the place. Did a big review on Thursday on my trading which was shit. 27 Trades -$1,486.84 Posted the full PNL curve for this month below. But any ways there was a range that day 9/17 - It was pretty much skewed to a bid reload. Then on close the inventory balanced up off that range as the range was near high. The closing volume. The MOC and LOC orders jammed inventory down. Another huge stream of selling came in absolutely pivoting that range - or area at this point - hard core bid reload. We ended up ripping up in the over night with offer reloads hitting at 1:35am CST. This offer reloading maintained all night well into the open. Forcing us back through Thursdays range. The market was pretty much being driven on passive selling. Not aggressive. Now there are these moments where the bids - just let go. Whether that's from some other product, or not. The reloading of delta and pulling of limits cause the delta to price skew. And really looking at it long term or for a full session is not the way to go. Where are the value zones? Or Ranges? When we blow out of a range it seems to be coming from a few phenomenons. -Limits pull and we rip hard on no fucking volume. -We naturally come out of range on hard diverging as in the passive side just ate enough flow while out bidding - going up - or the inverse. -Inventory rebalances. Sometimes the inventory spikes off a whale and we go from reloaded inventory to an unraveling of that inventory which can push us out. The 4th way which happened Friday on the way up, was offer reloads - but the value zone breaks because the aggressive flow is just too aggressive. If the aggressive flow keeps pressuring while the offers keep back footing, or dollar cost averaging - basically trying to hold the next set of prices down - eventually they will blow out had assuming pressure sustains. This is what happened on Friday before it just kept mooning. Now what happened on Fridays low 9/18 during the RTH? Keep in mind PA is always fucking different. This is why I think edge is bull shit. At least the way most retail thinks of it. Edge, is being able to perform. Not this mechanical systematic way of trading. Yes that can work. But the rate of return will be terribly low, unless you got some sauce like insider knowledge or some sort of unfair data or information no one else is looking at, or tech - speed advantage. For most of us we need to manage well, and perform, and none of these trades or setups are every exactly the same. Never. Especially bigger picture shit. Plus the ever evolving regime constantly changes the finesse. And look you can manage well but placing trades in shit spots will kill you. The good spots and shit spots are always shifting. So edge is a combination of thousands of little thinks, like processing the screens faster, proper diet, sleep, being able to focus, being clear as fuck on your narrative - even if the trade fails, then manage it well. Proper trade entries hedge off unnecessary risk. Having a pulse on the higher time frame. It's so much. None of that shit alone makes for edge. But most traders think it's this setup, or technique. Sure that shit can be used to eventually extract alpha. But seeing how good trading is pure performance based and making less errors like the fielders in baseball - does create the bottom line. This is why I'm not afraid to talk about it. For starters like 90 something percent of what we do day to day is subconscious. I'm only conveying a fraction of what I consciously know. And you guys tend to retain 8% of what I'm saying. This is why reading my material 15 times over is required to achieve some form of proficiency. Also most of what I say probably also gets lost in translation. You guys hallucinate shit which was never my intention. Most of you will also take what I say and add it - into whatever the fuck shit you look at making it not what I do - thus it's different now. "hOw Do I kNoW wHeN tO eXiT, oR eNtEr!?" Hear that shit from new traders all the time. Look if it was that fucking easy, then I wouldn't be struggling the last 2 fucking months. So yeah. This is a performance sport. Trading isn't a fucking baking recipe where we add 2 parts of sugar and 3 parts pubic hair into our muffin bread or whatever the fuck. --- Okay so what happened near the low? Well seeing how this IS NOT RULES for trading every low. Let dissect RTH 9/18 low. On the open we had a HUGE amount of long inventory shoot up. Price shot up as well. But there had been larger offers passively eating that. We dumped got a bid that zipped us back up but this time around 05s offers started to eat more inventory. The overall aggression of the sell side was not there. It started to stagnate and pop upward getting offer reloaded, followed by price dumping further on smaller sells market orders. Each time the flow or delta went back up the offers passively reloaded further down the price to the point of 85s. At this point a huge wave of buying hit jamming price to 95s. Between 85s and 95s we experienced reloads both bid and offer side. But they were smaller. Not these behemoth reloads. Basically smaller players at play here. I wrote about how the spread or ranges widen based of the size of players here: x.com/realFatCat1/st… This post gets into ranges somewhere. Which sort of contributes the what's going on right now right here. Now this range also had a lot of two sided limit thinning which you never know when the fuck that will happen. Sometimes this happening can force a reload and you don't see it. It happens all the time. A range might limit bull up legs forcing an up move on not shit volume, followed by a normal amount of sell volume. This pattern shows a diverged delta overall contributing to a reload, but a cut up reload, where the up legs were made up of offer pulls. That's some big brain shit right there. Any who around 9:32am CST our range saw a fat little bid reload however this reload rebalanced it's self - meaning the inventory came back out - while the price went to the high of the range around 92s or some shit. Then a fat buy order smashed in being offer reloaded. The range - especially the highs and lows of 85ish to 92ish - had full inventory rebalance after our whale friend hit a huge buy order into a massive passive offer. This sort of spiked price up where it collapsed back in. I've talked about this. These sweeps are most likely hitting just ES and since ES arbs SPX, the market makers pull ES bids so they don't get picked off. That's why you see those spikes that are back where they started before you can blink. I mean it's theory, but it makes sense. Now this range became "neutral" where inventory and price basically had slight variations of reloads, on the smaller scale. Which again was smaller participants who operate on these 7 point ranges as their view as a value zone. The delta started to power shove high causing another inventory rebalance around the 95is pivot that happened at 9:11 CST. We then jumped into what would become another long drawn out range between 95-90. This range however would experience a steady stream of offer reloads overall. Don't get me wrong there's always smaller reloaded bids and offers spotted through out the entire range causing the ping pong, but net overall the thing was offer heavy. At 10:30 CST a fat sell order came in almost erasing half of the offer reloads. This big hit on the sell side would be the lat time we saw 95s for another 2 hours and 20 minutes. As soon as we started breaking range at 10:38 CST another mass sell spike came in. This fully rebalanced the inventory in that range, but also causing a break out. Often times when we have a combination of reloads and limit pulls - This causes trapped inventory. This is basically a stop run. Not all stops are the same. Some are done on these inventory rebalances, while others can be full on squeezes which has nothing to do with rebalances, like the Friday afternoon rip, that I'm trying to get to as I write. Look... If you find value in what I share, and it's a breath of fresh air from the trash you see on X. Then could consider leaving a tip here: fatcatsofwallstreet.com/product/leave-… I'm not going to do a sub stack right now. Not sure if I ever will? I rather just write openly at this point. But either way when I get out my cup like a homeless man and shake it, then you guys tend to be generous. "iF yOu'Re PrOfItAbLe WhY wOuLd YoU aSk FoR tIpS!?" It's called incentive mother fuckers! How about I just not write anything of value!? Just post trash... You want more fucking trash?? HUH!? Mother fuckers always want something for nothing or feel entitled for free shit... At least heart the mother fucking post if you ain't tipping! --- Now as we dropped on this inventory rebalance and out of that range 90s-95s - some bid ate a fat chunk of that causing the price to dampen or make another fucking range between 86-88. This area is interesting. Bigger picture it's bid reloaded. Smaller picture the top of this 88 range went offer reload on the last leg before we breached and rolled out the bottom of 86 at 10:53 CST. So the lesser of the reloads being the sell side pushed, but overall there was a way bigger bid reload in there. This is how things tend to go. You'll see as I keep writing. Between 10:58 CST -11:02 CST despite that price went down - This was a rolling bid. Yes price went down! But! It took a substantial amount more sell side pressure. Wyckoff effort VS reward folks! You guys can shit on this man all you want. I mean no one really does? Richard Demille Wyckoff - wrote a tremendous amount of material for his time. Documenting shit. I've heard it countless times. Anna Coulling and traders before her all say the same thing. "There's nothing new in markets." "wHaT aBoUt HfTs AnD aLgOs AnD eLeCtRoNiC tRaDiNg!?" Listen... It's still price discovery against multiple market participants on multiple time frames doing multiple different things for multiple different reasons. Huge pockets of reloads and lack of effort vs more effort causes pressure points. It always has and always will... Okay so someone was eating sell orders between 87-82s requiring serious effort to get us down which then price crepts back up to 87s where we then see another fucking range..... 87 - 84 from 11:06 CST - 11:22 CST. Now this range had a decent amount of offer reload. As you can see buyers and sellers are starting to exchange blows as price is squeezing in an ever tighter region. As we approached the break out of this range at 84 11:22 CST - we see a big series of sell spikes. This is one of those inventory rebalance stops I already talked about. All the buyers in that range got squeezed as some big dick forced the range out which then cascaded the inventory. This is where we get the days low. A V-flush. When they forced the inventory out they basically also rebalanced, not only their initial range, but the inventory the buyer ate up when the price rolled down from 87-82 just before the last range - just before the V-flush or days low. Welp. The inventory promptly zipped up and aggressive buying hit. Between 89-82s we had buyers and sellers take turns literally alternating the reloads here. Not like on a range low or range high. But they alternated reloads - bigger reloads on the same exact fucking spots. Now there had been massive sell spikes attempting to get us lower multiple times all through out this post. These mother fuckers are going to bail sooner or later. Hell - The V-Flush on the low was a big sell spike that promptly big buy spiked up. This is like you getting in then promptly bailing. Your flow would hit both sides real fast. This was just a bigger version of that. This buy spike rebalance all inventory for the last hour, where buyers had a go, then sellers, than buyers, then sellers, V-Flush - BOOM! Inventory just unwound. All of that came out causing rebalance on price and inventory. Ahh. But the sellers were not done. No. They attempted a reload between 81-85 after the V-Flush. Once that failed the inventory finished rebalance from one pool while rebalancing an older pool and basically chaining up hitting one rebalance after another. I'm not going to get into the specifics. But this is the reverse of the inventory rebalance stop run I talked about as we went down into the V-Flush. But these rebalance zones were - daisy chained together, so one was setting off another like dominoes. --- Now a big buyer came in smashing us out of 85s at 11:33 CST into the next range between 88-84 from 11:32 - 11:50 CST. This big buyer was probably the same fucking guy who smashed the top of 95 for the last time I mentioned. The size looks awfully similar and it caused a full rebalance on inventory from when the 95 seller stepped in. Also this initial buying or unwinding or rebalancing was happening way fucking faster than how it happened on the sell side. Someone's plans were foiled. Remember folks. Typically there's another whale on the other side of a whales trade. Whales need to fuck whales to get paid, like the time Ken Griffin’s Citadel squeezed Leopold Aschenbrenner’s AI-focused hedge fund "Situational Awareness"...... You know a fucking 24 year old who raised billions with no actual trading experience. He tried to raise more capital on the east coast from the wall street boys, seeing how he got a ton from the west coast tech bros. Will none of them gave him shit. I think black rock - asked him what he would do if none his plans worked. Little Leo didn't have a plan other then sheer confidence. You know how many times that mindset fucked me? A ton... His dumb ass was so public too. Mean while 40 year market veteran Ken, smelled out a pay day. I feel pretty equipped with 10 years of trading knowledge. Can't imagine 40 years institutional with legit tech and superior data infrastructures? Plus if I was in Kens position and some 24 old kid with named fucking Leopold with his goofy laugh and absolute lack of experience showed up. I'd fuck him too. Hell - I already hate teenagers that are traders. One day I'll explain why. Leopold is basically a teen compared to Kens age, so I'd not only fuck him for the money, but because he reminds me of all the other dumb fucking teens I've dealt with in trading. And that would feel good. "Beware of an old man in a profession where men usually die young" See this story happens every day to some degree. It's just rarely public and the narrative I'm sharing on Friday's session is similar. --- The Tides Have Shifted Now the range from 11:33 to 11:51 CST did not defend sell side. This entire area had been a battle ground. The range breaks up on one of those inventory rebalance stop runs. This then rebalances the inventory from the lat 2 hours and 20mins. You got a range from 11:51 - 12:35 CST It had very light sell side reloads, until 12:20 CST This is when the price started to tighten. The looseness of the volatility died and the book started to thicken way up. At this time while still in the range the inventory started to drift softly up. This was reloading on the range offer but it was light. No whales spikes. We then broke above this range which was between 92-86. The delta started to get more and more parabolic as micro ranges tried to hold it down. -93-91 Failed -94-93 Failed -They tried again Failed -96-93 Failed Just sell side reloads failing and they back foot. Fail back foot. Mean while I'm looking at the massive reload from the open between 7714s-7685s, thinking - "Holy shit there's going to be a huge fucking squeeze, and we're steam rolling all the sellers right now. I've seen enough steam rollers to know how they go. They always have the potential to go parabolic and sures a fuck shit it did when I hit my bigger long. Now I wrote about context and narrative building and I can't fucking find which post it's in and can't be fucked with reading all the shit I write... I already spent HOURS writing this! You guys have no idea, what these actually take. But yeah... Context. Ah here it is: x.com/realFatCat1/st… Context and Narrative skills. So important. The better the story the better the trade. I wrote about that in this: x.com/realFatCat1/st… Leave a tip - fatcatsofwallstreet.com/product/leave-…

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realFatCat @realFatCat1

a month ago

Advice for new traders - Why trading is so hard Written by Bartholomew Fatus Catus Stop drinking the koolaid for a moment. Everything you see online about keeping it simple, or simple strategies or this easy strat makes me $300 per day is mostly.... Garbage. Trading content and

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If you suffer from strategy hopping, the fix is not another system. It’s proof. You panic when you lose a trade because you have no idea whether your system actually works. Until you have proof, you will keep switching. Proof is what makes you stop.

If you’re a break even trader, you need to be more aggressive. Protecting your downside is important, but it’s impossible to become profitable if you don’t scale into your winners.