Dilution Tracker

Gambler > Alchemist? 2M goal met half a year early. Thanks to @wallstreetbets for blowing up that tweet it helped my mentors find me. This is why I always continue to be public about my "crazy" ideas. Always comes back to me in a unexpected overwhelmingly positive way (got more eyes on me in DotA 2 to help find a team/popularity), finding a mentor in trading. Also motivates me and feels great in the end when I'm right and ur all wrong. I did not want to post my PnL curve untill it was stable, was a tough journey to prolonged consistency. Been over 2 months no daily DD more than 4%. No intraday DD more than 5%. Current total PnL at 2.28M. Curve starts from Dec 2023 till now. Why I started trading: In mid 2022 my parents fell under a scam which would result in them losing half their house that took half their lifetime to pay off. They ended up taking on many lawyer fees and a 800K CAD debt. I was not told this till mid 2023 as they did not think I was in a financial position to help them. I retroactively understood why they were so sad all the time and so much more stressed. I strongly believe that had I done better in DotA or with my finances, they would not have done stupid deals and gotten scammed because they would have seeked me for financial advice instead. I was extremely angry at myself. Three people I knew since childhood were worth multi 8 figs and even 9. There had to be a way out for me too. Unless I won multiple TIs or became as popular as @Gorgc there really wasn't a way to do it through DotA. The odds were also too low as only a handful of people in that field could make that amount of money. I was convinced I had to quit the career I spent a decade on. I knew that top tier gamers were extremely good at poker and I heard poker was similar to trading. I was convinced by the path of @brax10 and @BrianLeeTrades that trading > poker. All the stories I hear about trading talks about how most of the top tier traders took 3 years, 5 years, even 7 years to make it. I did not have that time. I'm old, my parents are even older, and I needed to settle my career so I could start a family of my own. I saw that @Steven1_994 made 500K first year and 2M by 2nd year as a trash Starcraft 2 player and was like 19 years old or some shit. This goat became my goal. I quit DotA 2 and placed my first trade mid July 2023. I told my girlfriend that I would spend one hour with her a day, I'm not celebrating anything including her birthday, and our anniversary and we will retroactively celebrate it later once I'm profitable, and I would only leave my house to be with family on holidays. We stuck it out as planned. Now 1.5 years later it has all worked out in the end. Last two months we celebrated our Anniversary / her birthday at least 8 times at $500-2K restaurants. I give my parents a monthly allowance of 6K. I wanted to be Santa Claus so I bought a twitch mod an anime figurine. And maybe I'll play Metaphor:refantazio and that will be the first game I've played since DotA 2.

Making Real Money in Trading the TOP 2% Disclaimer: I am not some top trader dude but I don't like waiting to speak up. It's easy to talk when your up. I'll say what I see as one side of the truth that isn't being brought up and I like to do it sooner rather than later. Being in this trading community for more than half a year now, there are some things that just don't resonate with me. I'm ready to start some shit. Clout chasing traders keep telling me that one day I'll fall in line but with each day makes me more convicted to stray further. After talking to some struggling traders I decided to write this article. I am not only doing this for the traders will who eventually succeed but ESP for the other 95% who will not: Teachings I DISAGREE with in the trading community: Starting with the one thing traders don't want to hear the most! 1. Doesn't matter if you take 7 years and blew up 5 times! As long as you stay in the game you've never truly lost! Ya I would tell you that too if you paid me $600-2000 dollars a year too. Don't quit bro, keep paying me my salary. The reality is that there is incentive to keep trash traders in the game. More retail traders = more edge for good traders. This shit is a fortnite game we all in this battle royale together. Noobs pros it don't matter, we don't discriminate. This shit ain't a zero sum game its a negative sum game (fees, tools, courses). My ultimate goal as a trader is to make enough that GURU money doesn't make sense for me. I can't imagine the vast majority of my students being arrogant stupid lazy fucks and I have to lie to them or hide what I truly think about them to get paid. I'd tell them they trash so fast no way Id ever succeed as a guru. The reality is that 95% of traders are gonna lose money and 97% aren't gonna make good money. Your fighting to be AT LEAST in the top 2%. My cousin made 20M trading Crypto gave a few M back and quit trading because he knew he wasn't good enough. Smart guy. Lots of other traders did great in crypto then gave it ALL back after 2021. My Caltech PHD graduate quant trader friend was making a few hundred K trading. He quit trading bcuz he wasn't good enough, now he's a 9 figure dude doing something else. There's nothing fucking wrong with questioning and diving into whether or not this is for you. Its absolutely psycho to suggest otherwise. TheShortBear took 7 years! ADF blew up 5 times! It's ok to fail! Never give up! haha! These excuses only apply if we go back to prehistoric times and your also 14 (TheShortBear) or your trading while juggling school, a full time job, and a kid, a pioneer, and hes also like ~18 (ADF). Completely different times and your situation may be completely different. How long it takes you will depend on your level of commitment (are u in school, do you have a job, blah), and where you are in life (your age, if you've found your competitive spirit). Its almost 2024 and there's starting to be as much good content out there as there is shit! There's no excuse to blow up endlessly nor the excuse to take infinite years. There is a HUGE correlation that high performers in one field will do better in trading. Those same nerds who were obsessed with As and studied all day and became doctors/engineers/lawyers, the degens who were obsessed with their ranks and became top 0.2% of gaming ya you bet they got a way better shot than the ones who haven't pushed themselves in any field. Anyone who has pushed themselves really fucking hard at being great at something competitive have higher stress tolerance, are more used to failure (not first place is FAIL, not 90%+ grade is FAIL), have higher standards for themselves in what they take seriously, and understand the ridiculous time commitment. I believe that to succeed without having this trait is incredibly unlikely. You would either have to be fortunate enough to find a top mentor who is willing to spoon feed you or go through drastic changes in how you obsess over trading. There exists quant traders who join top firms can be profitable within the first month. My mentor was profitable day 1 because he was trading w/ a veteran from the start. Made million+ no real drawdowns for 3 years. It should be to no surprise that the fastest way to grow is to find people better than you to teach you. This requires putting yourself out there and having a keen eye for who is legit versus not. You will also need to be able to logically dissect what is bullshit versus truth since what you will be taught will never be 100% correct. Now are most eventual successful retail traders realistically going to be consistently profitable as quickly? Absolutely not. But I'm going to share the other untold side of the truth, the side that ain't fluffy and warm but makes you feel unlucky and angry. Telling yourself that its only been 3 years and that you've got infinite time is exactly why your never going to win. You should be FURIOUS that it isn't NOW. Imagine your favorite sports team losing in the play offs and saying ITS OK WE GOT 5 MORE YEARS. WTF!? Personally if I don't succeed within 1-2 years I'm fucking out. I'll live with the shame for life that I failed this endeavor and that's fucking reality. I'm an old ass 32 year old who has pushed himself at 80-90% capacity to be the best for over a decade and a half in school and games (top 1% and top 0.1-0.0001%+ respectively). I'm doing this full time and dedicating on average 11+ hours a day. I live and breath day trading unless someone close to me requires my time holidays/family/dog/gf/friends. I'm fortunate enough to be part of two pods with good traders. If with all this I still cant succeed in this time frame then this ain't for me. I absolutely do not resonate with this "your working too hard," "go easy on yourself," "you've got time" mentality. I don't see how any of that benefits me. If I had a button that makes me angry I would press it everyday to work faster. I would press it every time I've won big for the day and want to relax EOD. I don't understand why people tell themselves things that slow them down. Instead of things that light a fire in them. Traders tell me that I've made tremendous growth in the last half year but I still feel frustrated, and angry every single day (and there's nothing wrong with that). I see endless potential everyday that I am missing, repeated mistakes, time wasting, and all sorts of fucking problems. It's like I'm fucking mentally retarded. I don't want to fucking FEEL better. I WANT TO BE BETTER. Actionable Step: If you've been losing for years you really got to question whether you got it in you. Perhaps you can't because you've never ever given it your all so you always have an excuse that you'll go harder this year. No More Excuses. 2. Focusing on one strategy: If your a losing noob trader how can you even tell what is a good strategy versus what is a bad one? IC a lot of traders picking some really fucking difficult popular strategies like D1 gappers to focus on and nothing else. They try to refine it by having multiple entries, high R:R (tighter stops), pyramiding and just get destroyed in the price action. They make an incredibly hard setup even harder and you get chopped out. Meanwhile there are people who when presented w/ the right setup, literally just short the open with a stop and cover EOD and make insane money (now you feel like a clown). You can have bad R:R if you drastically increase WR. You can have wide ass stops, arbitrary stop locations (so you stop covering on resistance, where you should be shorting). Would this be the most optimal way to play the setup? Of course not. But why would you aim to be optimal from the very start as a negative trader? Your goal should to be to just find consistency. Everyday traders are complaining about how everything's rigged, how they are just unlucky and there's nothing they can do. Absolutely ridiculous. If you choose to only trade one of the more difficult and crowded single edges you cant then just say its the worlds fault when that one edge isn't having a good time or showing up on your scanner. Working hard in trading isn't waking up at 9:30 AM then saying opps there's no setup, unlucky, and then going afk. I also think its bullshit when people say they don't have time and are just "focusing" on one edge. I find it hard to believe they can spend 12 hours a day on D1 gappers day in and day out and lose for 3 years and not run out of ideas. There is a ridiculously high number of opportunities every single day in small caps. I just started trading and even I can see the endless possibilities in shorting small caps. I personally have 13 tabs for my setups on excel. You absolutely don't need this much but my point is that you should fucking explore and not justify WORKING LESS. WORK MORE. What if you spread yourself thin? Then dial it back? It's real fucking easy to convince yourself to work less. You got to fight it. There is ABUNDANT edge in small caps. Not all these setups have the liquidity to generate the 7-8 figure profits the top small caps traders make but why should that be your goal to start? Graduate from them after you've become a 7 figure trader that most gurus aren't every year anyway. Personally I ain't too good for a few thousand extra bucks a day. Try to fit more on your plate not less. Study MORE. Actionable Step: Review all the movers everyday and save their charts and bucket them. Once you've gathered enough try to understand how they behave. People say its bullshit but volume, trendlines, support, resistance, and daily levels are NOT BS. Added bonus look into their news/fundamentals as well. 3. You should only trade from 9:30 to 11, high volume stocks, and over $1 dollar amount: Again another over simplified retarded statement that justifies being lazy. You should be RUTHLESSLY testing whether these statements are even true. As with all your setups. Don't overfit just because someone gave you an excuse to do so. Only fit what is true and tested. If you don't know the answer that means you should find out. Do these variables change expectations? Absolutely. Does that mean they are not tradable? Absolutely NOT. Now if you choose to not deal with this shit that's fine but make sure that's a firm decision you've made after given it much thought instead of a lazy one. I have lower expectations but I don't mind taking a $0.20 stock trade. Path Forward: I've been teammates with the absolute goats of DotA 2, and I was in the most prestigious undergrad program in Canada. Even then I can't even count the # of prodigies on one hand. Those prodigies also didn't end up achieving more than the others. Point is: pursue your goals relentlessly if you want to make it. Truth is your trying to get into the top 2% of this field. Give that number some respect and get to work or get out.

1. eternalenvyy 2. I trade from 4 am till 8 pm everyday mostly shorting smallcaps. I trade mid day pumps, news, gappers, multi day runners, d2s, sympathies, chinese liquidation stocks (short the liquidation event, swing long). I look at dilutiontracker, underwriters, vwap, 72EMA (intraday), 50MA (daily), fibonacci levels, trendlines, sec filings, news, daily levels, minute volume, and certain patterns to assist in my trading. Though I don't want to have a specific bias, I'll trade anything w/ edge as long as its simple and elegant how the edge is defined. 3. My background was a top student in engineering in UofT though I did drop out after 2nd year to pursue a professional career in DotA 2 (same game as BrianLeeTrades), I had a 10 year career, playing at the international 5 times, winning 5 huge international tournaments and being one of the top players/most popular players for a 3 years~. I retired and have been pursuing this fulltime since May 1 2023. My goal as I have stated before is to make 2Million by May 1 2025 w/ a starting acct size of 30K. I know I will most likely fail this goal but I like to aim big 🤡. 4. I'm kinda old now (32 years) and I understand myself a bit better than before. I understand that I simply cant be a normie. Its not that I consider myself superior to normies but I do know that trying to just be "happy" and 'normal", and "low stress" isn't for me. I am a slave to my own ambitions and there's no way around it (trust me I've tried). I will feel regret and anxiety if I tried to "have fun" for too long, and I will feel anxiety/stress if I worked hard. There's no way out but to suceed. That's just how it is. Perhaps a curse? My goal is to pay off a ~1 mill CAD debt that somebody in my family has (dont want to go into detail publicly for now), to retire my family, and have it so my wife can choose not to work. If I'm gonna slave away as a trader I do want REAL money (at least 8 figs). I do want lambos and shit I don't give a fuck. If I can spend hundreds of hours farming for +1 stat on a fucking armor in a game I don't think theres anything wrong with wanting nice things in IRL too.