There's a reason the same kind of stock keeps making people rich.
William O'Neil found seven traits behind nearly every massive winner of the last century.
Here's the formula he built from them ↓
If a janitor told you:
“buy low, sell high”
... you would likely roll your eyes.
If Warren Buffett says the same thing, suddenly it’s timeless wisdom.
Value is often just perception.
David Ryan won the US Investing Championship 3 years in a row.
No insider edge.
No prediction magic.
Just leaders, timing, pyramiding, and brutal discipline.
Here are 8 lessons from how he traded. 🧵
I've been around the block a few times. Here's one piece of advice I think every beginner trader should hear:
Waiting for the reversal to initiate before you enter will be a lot more profitable than trying to predict the exact bottom
Over the past 5 years, I've read 50+ books on trading.
The truth is — most of them added nothing.
Skip the noise.
Read these 8 and you'll save yourself years ↓
You think you know that trading is probability. You've said it a hundred times. Wins and losses are part of the game. The outcome is unknown. You know this.
Then your stop gets hit and you feel like the market just reached into your pocket and took something from you.
That's the gap. Between the sentence you can recite and the belief your body is actually running. Years of programming don't dissolve because you read a chapter on probability. They dissolve when you stop reinforcing them every session without realizing it.
Here's what the reinforcement looks like. The trade loses. You feel hopeless. You think: the market reversed on me again. It's picking me out. It's hunting my stop. And then instead of getting curious about why you're feeling that way, you focus on the market. You tweak the entry. You add a filter. You change the timeframe. You fix the chart instead of yourself.
Next week, same situation, same feeling, same conclusion. The market is against me.
It's not. You are against you. Not because you're broken. Because you made a mistake, blamed the market for it, and walked straight back into the same room you just left. Nothing changed because nothing was allowed to change.
The traders who've been at this for a decade and still feel hopeless after a stop loss aren't stupid. They're stuck in a loop where the response to pain is more activity instead of more awareness. More trades instead of more space. More forcing instead of more curiosity.
When your stop gets hit and the first feeling is that the market is against you, that's not information about the market. That's information about you. And in that moment, you have a choice. React to the feeling and reinforce the old belief. Or get curious about it and start breaking the cycle.
Curiosity doesn't feel productive. It feels like doing nothing while the market moves without you. But that space between the impulse and the response is where the entire shift lives.
Your ambition got you here. It kept you in the game when most people quit. But that same ambition pointed at forcing outcomes instead of understanding yourself is what's keeping you in the same place year after year.
More emotion creates more friction. More forcing creates more mistakes. More activity without awareness is just running faster on the same treadmill.
The answer isn't louder effort. It's quieter attention. And the traders who figure that out stop fighting the market and start seeing it for what it always was: neutral, indifferent, and waiting for you to stop making it personal.
"ब्रदर, सबसे पहले एक बात अपने दिमाग में अच्छे से बैठा लो: ऑपरेटर को तुम्हारे 1 या 2 लॉट से रत्ती भर भी फर्क नहीं पड़ता। उनके एल्गो (Algos) तुम्हारा नाम या तुम्हारी क्वांटिटी नहीं देखते।
तो फिर तुम्हारा ही SL क्यों कटता है? क्योंकि तुमने अपना Stop-Loss बिल्कुल उसी जगह रखा था जहाँ बाकी के 10 लाख रिटेलर्स ने अपना Stop-Loss रखा था!
ऑपरेटर 1-2 लॉट हंट नहीं करता;
ऑपरेटर 'Liquidity Pools' (पैसे का कुआं) हंट करता है। तुमने अपना ट्रेलिंग स्टॉप-लॉस किसी एकदम साफ (Clean) सपोर्ट लाइन या पिछली कैंडल के ठीक नीचे रखा होगा। दुनिया की हर पुरानी ट्रेडिंग किताब रिटेलर्स को यही सिखाती है।
ऑपरेटर को बस वो लाइन क्रॉस करनी होती है, और लाखों लोगों के SL (जिसमें तुम्हारे 2 लॉट भी शामिल हैं) एक साथ कट जाते हैं। इसे हम SMC में 'Liquidity Sweep' कहते हैं। तुम टारगेट नहीं थे, तुम सिर्फ 'Collateral Damage' (बीच में फँसे हुए) थे।
इस फ्रस्ट्रेशन को खत्म करने और एक प्रो-स्नाइपर की तरह ट्रेल (Trail) करने के लिए ये 3 SMC Rules याद रखो:
⚙️ HOW TO FIX YOUR TRAILING SL (The Sniper Method)
1. Trail "Structure", Not "Candles" (कैंडल्स के पीछे मत भागो):रिटेलर सबसे बड़ी गलती क्या करता है? मार्केट थोड़ा सा ऊपर गया, तो वो डर के मारे अपना SL पिछली कैंडल के 'Low' के नीचे लगा देता है।
The Fix: बाज़ार सीधी लाइन में कभी ऊपर नहीं जाता; वो सांस लेता है (Pullbacks)। तुम्हें अपना SL तब तक ऊपर नहीं लाना है जब तक मार्केट एक नया 'Higher Low' (Swing Low) बनाकर वापस ऊपर न मुड़ जाए। कैंडल के पीछे नहीं, पूरे 'स्विंग' के पीछे छुपो।
2. Give It Breathing Room (बफर ज़ोन):अगर कोई सपोर्ट 24,000 पर है, तो अपना ट्रेलिंग SL 23,999 पर मत लगाओ। ऑपरेटर हमेशा सपोर्ट को 5-10 पॉइंट नीचे 'Sweep' करके (Turtle Soup बनाकर) ही वापस ऊपर जाता है।
The Fix: अपने स्ट्रक्चरल स्विंग के नीचे थोड़ा 'Buffer' (जगह) छोड़ो। या फिर SMC रूल लगाओ: "मैं अपना SL तब मानूंगा जब 5-मिनट की कैंडल उस स्विंग के नीचे Close होगी, सिर्फ 'Wick' (पूंछ) मारने पर एग्जिट नहीं करूंगा।"
3. The 50% Psychological Cushion (आधा माल बुक करो):तुम अपना ट्रेलिंग SL बहुत पास इसलिए रखते हो क्योंकि तुम्हें 'डर' (Fear) होता है कि जो प्रॉफिट स्क्रीन पर दिख रहा है, वो वापस न चला जाए।
The Fix: जैसे ही ट्रेड तुम्हारे फेवर में जाए, अपनी 50% क्वांटिटी बुक कर लो। प्रॉफिट जेब में आते ही तुम्हारा डर खत्म हो जाएगा। अब बची हुई आधी क्वांटिटी का ट्रेलिंग SL दूर (सेफ स्विंग के नीचे) रख दो। ऑपरेटर को छोटे-मोटे झटके (Wicks) मारने दो, तुम्हारा मेन ट्रेलिंग SL सेफ रहेगा और तुम पूरा ट्रेंड राइड कर पाओगे।
The Commander's Verdict:मार्केट तुमसे दुश्मनी नहीं निकाल रहा है, वो सिर्फ अपना 'ईंधन' (Liquidity) जमा कर रहा है। भीड़ के साथ अपने Stop-Loss रखना बंद करो। स्ट्रक्चर के पीछे छुपना सीखो। अगली बार जब ऑपरेटर लिक्विडिटी हंट करने आएगा, तो तुम्हारा SL सेफ होगा!
Welcome to the Sniper Squad. Keep your shields up!" 🦅♟️
How to do a psychological autopsy on your worst trade.
Not the chart. Not the setup. Not where price went after you entered. None of that matters for this exercise.
Open your journal. Find your worst trade from the last two weeks. The one that still bothers you.
Now answer these questions in order. Write the answers down. Don't just think them.
Question 1: What were you feeling 30 seconds before you entered?
Not 'I was emotional.' Specifically. Was it heat in your chest? Tightness in your hands? A rush of urgency? Flatness? Nothing at all? The physical sensation that was present before you clicked is the signal you've been ignoring. Name it.
Question 2: Why did you need to take this trade right now?
Not why was it a good setup. Why right now. What would have happened if you walked away? Would the day have felt wasted? Would you have felt like you missed your chance? Would the loss before this trade have stayed unresolved? The urgency to enter is never about the setup. It's about what not entering means to you.
Question 3: What did you tell yourself to justify it?
Write the exact words. 'Just this one.' 'It looks good enough.' 'I'll get back to the plan after this.' 'This one feels different.' Whatever your brain said to give you permission. These justifications are the voice of the belief. They're the clearest window into what's actually driving the decision.
Question 4: What would have happened if you didn't take the trade?
Nothing. Your account would be the same. Your system would still be intact. Tomorrow would still come. But that's not how it felt in the moment, is it? In the moment, not taking it felt like something was being lost. That gap between the reality of not trading and the feeling of not trading is the belief.
Now look at all four answers together.
The physical sensation is your early warning system. The urgency tells you what need the trade was serving. The justification tells you what belief is running the show. And the last answer shows you the gap between what you know and what you feel.
Somewhere in those four answers is a pattern. And it's the same pattern that shows up in every bad trade you've ever taken. Different setups. Different days. Different market conditions. Same belief underneath.
You don't need to fix it today. You just need to see it. Because a belief you can see is a belief you can question. And a belief you can question is a belief that's already losing its grip.
Do this once a week with your worst trade. After a month, you'll know your pattern better than any journal, any book, or any course could ever show you.
Because nobody else can do this autopsy for you. The answers are in your body, your thoughts, and the two seconds before you click. And they've been there the whole time.
There's a moment in trading that changes everything. You don't go looking for it. You just see it one day and you can never go back.
For me it was losing trades where I did everything right.
Not sloppy trades. Not impulsive entries. Not revenge trades I could blame on my emotions. Clean setups. Perfect structure. Entries I'd take a hundred times over. And they lost.
The first few times, I explained it away. Bad luck. Wrong session. Market was weird today. There's always a reason if you look hard enough.
But it kept happening. Perfect setup. Loss. Perfect setup. Loss. Not every time. But enough times that the pattern became impossible to ignore.
I did everything right and it still didn't work.
That sentence broke something in me. Because my entire trading identity was built on the belief that if I just got good enough at reading the charts, I could control the outcome. That skill determined results. That a perfect entry deserved a win.
It doesn't. It never did.
Winning and losing on any individual trade have nothing to do with skill. A perfect setup can lose. A garbage entry can win. The outcome of the next trade is genuinely independent of how good your analysis was. You can do everything right and still lose. You can do everything wrong and still win.
Once I saw that, I couldn't unsee it.
And something unexpected happened. I stopped trying to be right.
Not gradually. Not as a decision I made and had to discipline myself into. The need just dissolved. Because what's the point of trying to be right about something that was never knowable in the first place?
I stopped entering trades expecting a win. I stopped feeling betrayed when a good setup lost. I stopped needing the market to validate my analysis. Because my analysis was never meant to predict the outcome. It was meant to filter for setups where the math is in my favour over a hundred trades. Not this one. A hundred.
That shift didn't make me a better analyst. It made me a better trader. Because I finally stopped fighting the one truth that the market was trying to show me from day one:
You were never in control of the outcome. You were only ever in control of the decision to show up and execute. Everything after that was always out of your hands.
The traders who see this stop chasing. They stop forcing. They stop grieving every loss and celebrating every win. They just trade. Quietly. Consistently. Without needing permission from the P&L to feel okay about themselves.
That's not a technique. That's not a mindset hack. It's something you see once and carry with you forever.
How to Read Volume Like a Pro
- Price tells you what. Volume tells you who.
Big volume = institutions. Small volume = retail noise.
- Heavy volume on up days = accumulation.
That’s the fuel behind every real breakout.
- Light volume pullbacks = healthy.
Sellers are weak, buyers still in control.
- Breakouts without volume = suspect.
If big money isn’t buying, the move won’t stick.
- Repeated high‑volume support bounces = demand zone.
Funds are defending their positions.
- High‑volume down days = distribution.
Institutions are unloading — the trend is aging.
- The best stocks rise 30–100% after a proper breakout on volume.
Volume is the confirmation, not the prediction.
✧ Richard Dennis:
ROI : ~120% annualized in his strongest years.
STRATEGY : He traded commodities. He used a trend-following strategy that was 100% mechanical. He held trades for long periods of time.
✧ Takashi Kotegawa:
ROI : Turned $13,000 into $150 million.
STRATEGY : He traded the Japanese markets with extreme focus on liquidity and order flow. He made money off of immediate inefficiencies in price movement. He held positions from minutes to hours, relying on tape reading.
✧ Paul Tudor Jones:
ROI : 20-30% annualized.
STRATEGY : He combines macroeconomic themes (interest rates, inflation, liquidity cycles) with technical timing tools. He keeps losses as small as possible and lets winners run as long as possible.
✧ George Soros:
ROI : $1 billion in a single day. 30% annualized over decades.
STRATEGY : He trades macro imbalances. His trades are highly concentrated and conviction-driven. When he's confident, he bets extremely big.
✧ Stanley Druckenmiller:
ROI : 30% annualized with extremely low losing years.
STRATEGY : He avoids diversification when he sees strong asymmetric setups. Instead of many small trades, he focuses on a few large positions with maximum upside potential. He combines macro insight with price action confirmation.
✧ Ed Seykota:
ROI : ~60% annualized.
STRATEGY : He's one of the earliest traders to fully automate rules-based systems. He's a systematic trader. He cuts losers short and lets winners run.
✧ Jesse Livermore:
ROI : Made >$2 billion in today's value in the early 1900s.
STRATEGY : He traded before modern indicators even existed. He relied on price action and human behavior. He was the GOAT of tape reading. He added aggressively to winning positions.
✧ Mark Minervini:
ROI : 30% annualized, with exceptional years >200%.
STRATEGY : He trades stocks. He focuses on tickers breaking out of tight consolidations after strong fundamentals emerge. He looks for volatility contractions, periods where price tightens before explosive moves.
✧ Jim Simons:
ROI : 66% annualized. One of the best records ever.
STRATEGY : He built Renaissance Technologies using pure mathematics, data patterns, and probability models. All trades are executed by algorithms exploiting micro-inefficiencies.
Who's your favourite?
The hardest habit I ever had to break wasn't revenge trading. It wasn't overtrading. It was the impulse to enter before the setup was there.
A candle looked good. I entered. Price bounced off a level I was watching and started moving. I had to be in it. Right now. Not in a minute. Not after confirmation. Now.
Every time, there was this rush. Adrenaline. A physical pull toward the button like my body was making the decision before my brain caught up.
And every time, within seconds of entering, I knew. That familiar sinking feeling of 'why did I do that.' Not after the trade closed. Not at the end of the day. Immediately. While the trade was still open. I already knew it was wrong.
But knowing didn't stop me from doing it again the next day.
Because in the moment, the impulse didn't feel like a mistake. It felt like opportunity. Like if I didn't act right now, the market was going to leave without me. Every candle was an invitation. Every move was a chance I couldn't afford to miss.
I wasn't trading. I was reacting. And I couldn't tell the difference.
I told myself I'd stop. Every night I'd close the charts and promise tomorrow would be different. Tomorrow I'd wait for the setup. Tomorrow I'd be patient. And then tomorrow would come, and the first candle that moved with any energy would pull me right back in.
That cycle lasted over a year.
Not weeks. Not a phase. Over a year of knowing exactly what I was doing wrong and doing it anyway. Of watching my account bleed from decisions I made in the span of two seconds. Of hating myself at the end of every session and still showing up the next day with the same empty promise.
I didn't break it with a rule. I didn't break it with discipline. I broke it because I got tired.
Not motivated. Not inspired. Tired. Tired of the same feeling. Tired of the same promise. Tired of being the person who couldn't stop doing the thing he knew was destroying him.
That exhaustion was the beginning. Not the fix. The beginning. Because being tired of the cycle doesn't mean the cycle stops. It means you finally stop pretending it's going to fix itself.
What changed was slow. Painfully slow. I started watching myself the way I used to watch the charts. Not the trades. Me. What was I feeling before I clicked? What was happening in my body? Where was the rush coming from?
And one day I noticed something I hadn't before. The impulse showed up, the adrenaline hit, my hand moved toward the mouse. And for the first time, I saw it before it took over. Not after. Before.
I didn't enter.
Not because I was disciplined. Because I finally saw the impulse for what it was. It wasn't opportunity. It was fear. Fear of missing out. Fear of being left behind. Fear of sitting still while the market moved without me.
Once I saw that, the impulse didn't disappear. But it lost its power. Because you can't unsee something once you've seen it. The adrenaline still showed up. But now it was a signal, not a command. A sign that I was about to react instead of respond.
Trading got quieter after that. Less exciting. Fewer trades. More waiting. More doing nothing.
It felt boring. And boring, after years of chaos, felt like progress.
If you're in the cycle right now, making the same impulsive decisions, knowing it's wrong while you're doing it, promising yourself tomorrow will be different. I need you to know: the awareness doesn't come from trying harder. It comes from getting tired enough to finally look at what you've been avoiding.
You already know what you're doing. You just haven't watched yourself do it yet.
You don't fear losing trades. You fear what losing says about you.
That's why a $200 loss can ruin your entire week. The money is replaceable in one trade. But the feeling of 'I got it wrong again' hits deeper than your account balance.
So you overtrade to prove you can still read the market. You move your stop to avoid being wrong. You close early to lock in the one thing that says 'see, I'm not a failure.'
None of that is about money. It's about protecting an identity you built around being right.
But trading doesn't reward being right. It rewards being consistent. Not in winning trades. The outcome will always be unknown. But in collecting quality trades. Success isn't ending the day green. It's ending the day having reinforced the belief that you'll never know the next move.
The traders who break through aren't the ones who learned to predict better. They're the ones who stopped needing the prediction to feel okay about themselves.
Biggest lesson from 7 years of trading: showing up beats everything.
You're not battling the concepts. You're battling your human nature. Impatience. Greed. Fear.
These aren't just charts. They're representations of everything you've pushed down in your daily life.
You can't ignore the sinking feeling of price reversing on you. You can't outrun the nagging thought that this winner might be the last you'll ever have.
You can change. You can learn. But only if you give yourself enough room to let those daily battles compound.
Your trading strategy isn't 3 rules on a piece of paper. It's everything you've lived through, etched into your subconscious.
It doesn't happen overnight. But when it's time, it'll feel like it did.
I never take a long on the lower timeframe… unless a higher timeframe low gets undercut first.
That one rule changed everything.
It filters noise.
Kills random entries.
And aligns me with Smart Money instead of retail emotions.
Sometimes one rule is all it takes.
You’re not a broken trader.
You’re just doing what you’ve done your entire life.
Every time you close a winner early, skip a valid setup, or revenge trade after a loss-your brain isn’t failing you. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do: keep you safe.
You’ve tried changing strategy. New setups. New risk management rules.
And it works- for a week. Maybe two.
Until price takes you out and all you want to do is get even. Until you finally see some profit and you’re out of the trade before you take a breath.
Profitable traders aren’t superhuman.
They just realised losses aren't the cost of trading- they're the condition for it.
Success? That’s what’s left over when you only take quality setups.
So why can’t you do what they do?
You’ve studied the concepts they did. You’ve read the books they read. You understand probability- enough to explain it to someone.
But knowing was never the same as believing.
You’re not just trading your plan.
You’re trading your beliefs about the market,
And you never questioned them.
'If I lose again, I'm not cut out for this.'
'If I don't make money today, I'm falling behind.'
'If I give back these profits, I'll never forgive myself.'
The charts didn’t create these beliefs. Life did. Long before you ever opened a chart, you learned that losing means you’re falling behind. That the fastest way to success is to never fail.
Then you opened a chart and brought all of that with you.
You can avoid a bad grade. You can avoid a bad workout.
But you can’t avoid a trade that was meant to go against you anyway.
Every winner you cut short was your brain protecting you from the pain of giving it back. Every setup you skipped was your brain shielding you from being wrong. Every revenge trade was your brain refusing to end the day as a failure.
The protection is the problem.
And you can’t think your way out of it. You’ve tried. You’ve told yourself ‘losses are part of the game’ a thousand times. You’ve written it in your journal. You’ve said it out loud.
But the moment price hits your stop, none of that matters. The belief is faster than the thought.
So what actually works?
You stop fighting the belief and start questioning it.
What are you actually afraid of- the money, or what losing it says about you?
When you close a winner early, what feeling are you avoiding?
When you revenge trade, what are you trying to prove- and to who?
These aren’t trading questions. They’re the questions that will change your trading.
That’s what nobody tells you about trading psychology. There’s no hack. No breathing technique. No affirmation that rewires your brain overnight.
There’s just the willingness to sit with the uncomfortable truth about why you do what you do. And most traders would rather blow another account than face that.
@JayneshKasliwal I can relate to him, but Maybe he needs to change his mindset, instead of indices, he can look at stocks fno. Understand and apply risk management, study thoroughly, do the hard work. Nothing is impossible