Often people tell me:
“DD, I admire how calm you are when you analyse the markets during your streams, even when you are about to take a trade live.”
What is important to understand is that the calmness you see now is the result of years of being the exact opposite.
Sitting in front of the screen with my heart pounding.
Eyes one inch away from the chart.
Every 1 minute tick up or down making me feel like something massive was about to happen.
Watching price for hours without even wanting to go to the toilet because I was afraid to miss something.
Believe me, I am not different than you.
I have been through all of it.
Trading can absolutely break you.
Every weakness, every insecurity, every piece of ego you have will eventually be brought to the surface in this game.
You will face yourself harder than you ever expected.
In the moment, it is insanely challenging. I genuinely do not think I have experienced anything that came close to it.
But once you start getting past that phase, you realise how valuable it actually was.
There is no better way to truly learn who you are than being forced to face yourself every single day.
I believe everything happens for a reason.
And in a way, I asked for all of it.
I wanted freedom.
I wanted money.
I wanted to make it in this game.
And I got the full experience head on.
Making crazy amounts of money for my age.
Slowly losing it.
Watching my confidence disappear.
Feeling like my dreams were slipping away right in front of me.
And the worst part was knowing that I was doing it to myself.
I was the problem.
That frustration, that self hate, that feeling of knowing you are capable of more but still repeating the same mistakes.
It was brutal.
But looking back, it was also insanely valuable.
So when I write these personal posts, I do not make them up.
The reason many of you can relate is because I have been through the same pain, confusion, frustration and doubt myself.
I asked for knowledge.
And I got exactly that.
Now my goal is to bring that knowledge to others and help traders understand this game without having to go through it completely alone like I did.
So to come back to the start.
The calmness you see now is not talent.
It is years of failure.
Years of self improvement.
Years of getting humbled.
Years of refusing to quit.
And a crazy determination to make this work, no matter how many times it tested me.
So if you look up to that calmness, understand this:
If this crazy degenerate can do it, you can do it too.
But it will not be easy.
It will not happen overnight.
And you will be tested.
A lot.
I know many people get value from these posts, or sometimes just need that small reminder to keep going in this difficult profession.
So I will keep writing them.
You see calmness now.
But I know exactly what many of you are going through while trying to make trading work.
All I ask is to leave a like if this helped you in any way.
And if you ever need someone to talk to, my DMs are always open.
I learned to trade without a mentor.
I'm not saying that with pride. I'm saying it because I know what it cost me.
It cost me years.
Not because good information was not available. It was everywhere.
Strategies, YouTube videos, Twitter threads, indicators, market structure concepts, orderflow tools, Wyckoff ideas, RSI divergences, volume profiles, supply and demand.
I was learning every single day.
But I was not actually progressing.
The problem with consuming everything is that you can always find a reason why a trade should work, and you can always find a reason why it should not work.
One setup looks good because of market structure.
The next one looks bad because of RSI.
Another one gets skipped because of an indicator.
Another one gets taken because of a different concept.
At some point, you are no longer trading a system.
You are just collecting reasons.
And when every trade is based on a slightly different combination of triggers, you never get clean feedback.
You do not know what is working.
You do not know what is failing.
You do not build trust.
You do not build consistency.
You do not build real sample size.
That is the mistake most traders make.
They do not stay with one system long enough to actually master it.
They keep changing, adding, removing and adjusting before the system ever gets enough time to prove itself.
What eventually helped me was not adding more information.
It was narrowing everything down.
One framework.
One process.
One way of reading price.
One way of building trade ideas.
One way of executing.
Then tracking it long enough to actually understand it.
Real progress started when I stopped trying to know everything and started building something I could consistently execute.
If you are still drowning in information, this is probably not a knowledge problem.
It is a structure problem.
Tokens like $ANSEM represent everything that's wrong with crypto.
This is the kind of thing that makes it hard to take crypto seriously.
Pure shitcoin brain rot.
Saying you're going to do an "airdrop" is a convenient excuse to funnel tokens into wallets you control, then slowly dump them on everyone else when the time is right.
Let's just pretend it's all organic and those are random wallets.
Some very naive people in this space. 🤣
I'm not here to be the nice guy, I'm here to tell you how it is.
Sooner or later you'll realize it's PvP. You're far better off learning how to trade than chasing worthless crap.
I don't need to remind you that virtually every shitcoin ever created ends up -90% below its highs. None have survived in 17 years, and none ever will, no matter how good the intentions.
The only question is whether you're willing to risk becoming exit liquidity.
Bitcoin for ledges live stream returns Thursday at 9pm (UK) with a brand new look and a brand new partner @Toobit_official!
Sign up before Thursday’s stream using https://t.co/pytnSddDUS and place your first trade with me live on stream to gain access to the new private Telegram channel where I’ll be posting exclusive setups