Swing Trader, Technical Analysis, Strategies, and Themes. This is my trading journal and thought process. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, and patience is king.
Joined May 2017
- Tweets11.6K
- Following63
- Followers911
- Likes16.5K
GoforThomas retweeted
This has DEFINITELY triggered now.
I cannot stress how old 7 of these data points are. These are to ooh and ahh at, not to lose what little money you have left on.
GoforThomas retweeted
Big swings in the market require an immense amount of experience to tackle efficiently and to treat them as an opportunity rather than something that kills your account for good.
When I started out, I would always drop to lower timeframes as volatility increased. I’d ramp up my activity right alongside it. That wasn’t the best approach, because I didn’t have enough experience or time in the markets to know that volatility was my enemy. It’ll kill your progress swiftly.
As you build time and experience in the markets, you get used to the swings and start to understand how to handle them. It can become a weapon. But the part to remember is that when you’re starting out, it is not the same as someone with 15 or 20 years sitting at the screen. They know exactly what to tackle and when. That’s a skill you learn over time. It doesn’t come from following someone or copying someone’s word.
This volatile environment we’re getting into is going to have large bottom wicks and large upper wicks. It’s going to be a losing proposition for most of you, because you don’t yet have the experience to know you don’t have the experience.
As lucrative and easy and welcoming as it looks, just ask yourself one thing. Do I have a volatility setup I’ve actually mastered? If yes, trade it. If not, don’t take decisions you were making on a daily chart and start making them on 1, 3, and 5-minute charts, suddenly convinced you can day trade.
Returns come from having a definitive edge. If you keep placing trades without one, you get diminishing returns and an equity curve that only points down.
The main point is that trading volatility is earned. Some of the most experienced traders avoid it altogether. They’d rather wait for the environment where liquidity is high, ranges are tight, bases are built, pivots are there and themes exist. That’s where they can operate definitively with size.
GoforThomas retweeted
A choppy summer market continues with low liquidity. The action we’re seeing is that one-day move to the upside and then five or six days of fade. $CRWD is a good example of it. Worth keeping in perspective that we’re still in July.
A few things this week added to it. $TSLA blew a tire completely on earnings, plus the way $GOOG and $INTC reacted in the market.
The prior cycle leaders like $SNDK $ALAB $MU have topped a while ago and have stayed below their 50-day. Combine that with summer liquidity and the setups you get are the kind I’ve been using: take half your gains at 5%, move your stop to even, then forget about the position. Or something like $IREN that rallied intraday on a catalyst and you just day-trade it. It all equates to a lot of hard work for very little gain.
I had a conversation with Oliver earlier this week that landed on the same thing. A lot of hard work for very little progress. When you do make progress, sell into strength. And if selling into strength turns out to be the wrong call, that’s good information too. It means the market is trying to prove you wrong. You thought it was going to pull back in and it didn’t. That’s a signal in itself.
The biggest thing is just that we’re in a summer environment and summers run on low liquidity. The prior leaders aren’t acting great, and cybersecurity looked great but went nowhere after that one-day run. That’s the market. It’s been this way since around June 22. You just have to wait it out.
That doesn’t mean you stop looking at setups or collecting information. Nvidia trying to put in an inside day while the Qs make a lower low, that’s the kind of observation you log. The little stuff you pick up while the market’s correcting or consolidating ends up being profitable information down the line.
That’s what the daily homework is. Tracking the market, watching it, picking up information over 30, 45 days, however long it takes. It turns into real edge once the market turns. Nobody knows when that is. It turns when it turns. Could go into a crash from here too, no one knows.
So the consistent thing we can do is the homework. Maintain a list of the names trying to ride this out, pulling back on low volume, consolidating, decoupling from the market action. When the market’s ready as a whole, those are the first names that run. That’s when the homework pays off in a big way.
GoforThomas retweeted
Same 💩 different year.
One thing I know for sure is if I took off every summer from trading my PnL would be better for it.
Perhaps I actually succeed at that this year
GoforThomas retweeted
‘Father’ and ‘dad’ are synonyms.
‘Figure’ and ‘bod’ are synonyms.
But, a ‘father figure’ and a ‘dad bod’ aren’t exactly the same thing…
GoforThomas retweeted
If you spend too long consuming without producing, you fall into the state of "blah" -- restless yet too tired to do anything. The fix is active production, not more passive consumption.
GoforThomas retweeted
Friendly reminder
It's not about how much $ you make it's about how much $ you keep when things inevitably go tits up
GoforThomas retweeted
Regarding the recent action:
You can't make big returns without giving some back.
If you have a system that is based on big/home run trades and selling most of your shares on weakness in stocks, you must accept 5 facts:
1. You can't have outliers by intervening too much into strength.
2. We can never predict the power of a stock beforehand, so there is no reason to judge.
3.Not all drawdowns are created equally. There are drawdowns from peak capital and drawdowns on the money we actually own. There is a difference between the two. We can't avoid the first, but we can do a lot to have protective measures for the second.
4. We are the ones who create our portfolios. If we have a lot of volatile names in our portfolio, we must anticipate and accept the volatility that comes with them, both on the positive and negative side. We need to understand what's normal to give back.
5. No matter how many Market Awareness flags are evident, you can't shift your stance 180 degrees from one day to the next. We take progressive actions into defense as more and more signs appear.
Giving back some profits is not a bug.... It's a natural thing that should happen in a system like this.... It's a healthy sign that you were positioned correctly in a good run, in good stocks, and followed your principles..... You should be proud instead of being salty....
The damage is not caused by giving some profits back
The damage occurs when you are surprised by this fact every time, when it is actually a normality and violate rules after the fact.
The damage occurs when you don't understand how much is normal to give back based on the volatility of your own portfolio in each regime.... 8%, 10%, 15%+???
The damage occurs when you aim only for offense without having defense mechanisms pre planned. Mental and technical.
To be honest, instead of being salty, I treat these corrections as healthy.... More time for research, for refining skills, for time with family....and for new leadership to emerge... Especially when you have made a good buck over the past 2 months....Recharge your batteries , your clarity and be ready again when things turn!
GoforThomas retweeted
On bounce days after a distribution day, I was often tempted to go long and found myself mostly on the wrong side of the trade and getting stopped out. Those losing trades guided me to learn and develop the pullback short setup.
Those days are tricky and deadly. They don't only dig you into a deeper hole; but more importantly, throw off your rhythm and alignment with the market, which could easily lead to chasing or revenge trading.
Take a break and come back with a refreshed mind later. I wish I can learn it earlier.
GoforThomas retweeted
SLS vs. Saturn V, a real time comparison.
Saw a comparison yesterday using my video on the left at 50% speed. Here's a proper comparison with both rockets launching at their real speeds.
You'll notice SLS is significantly faster off the pad because of the dual massive SRBs!
GoforThomas retweeted
There is no one more confident in their worldview than someone who has never left their hometown.
GoforThomas retweeted
Can I short myself?
GoforThomas retweeted
Watchlist March 16-20 2026
$BE
$FIGS
$YOU
$TMUS comms strong $T $VZ
$KKR over done $APO $BX
$NFLX $PLTR Prior leaders "flagging"
$IDCC basing
$DAVE refuses to die
$UTI $LINC $APEI education strong near highs 🤷🏼♂️
$PL $RKLB $GSAT basing near highs
$EQIX near high 4 weeks
$ALL anytime now...maybe
Big watchlist because the environment is crap.
GoforThomas retweeted
Arguably the most bearish factor in markets is the inability to think independently, as groupthink feeds a self-reinforcing doom loop.
Ex (AI fears): AI is going to end the world. All white-collar jobs will be replaced. Humans won’t adapt, just like they’ve never adapted during prior technological revolutions (they have, every single time).
While AI is certainly a different animal, history still says otherwise.
- Agricultural Revolution
Hunter-gatherer roles disappeared. Specialization, trade, & civilization emerged.
- Printing Press (1400s)
Scribes feared extinction. Literacy exploded, education scaled, & knowledge was democratized.
- Industrial Revolution (1700s–1800s)
Hand labor was replaced by machines. Factories formed, the middle class expanded, & urban economies emerged.
- Railroads (1800s)
Canals, horse transport, and local trade were disrupted. National markets, logistics networks, & time standardization were created.
- Electrification (Late 1800s)
Gas lighting declined and manual labor was reduced. Entirely new industries formed & productivity surged.
- Telephone (Late 1800s)
Messengers & telegraph operators were displaced. Modern communications & global business scaled.
- Automobile (Early 1900s)
Horse-related jobs collapsed. Manufacturing, highways, suburbs, & logistics boomed.
- Assembly Line & Automation (Early 1900s)
Craft labor was disrupted. Mass production, affordability, & job specialization followed.
- Containerization (1956)
Manual dockworkers and break-bulk shipping jobs were decimated. Global trade unlocked, supply chain logistics boomed, & international manufacturing scaled.
- Automated Teller Machines (1970s)
Bank tellers feared total replacement. Branch operating costs dropped, total branches multiplied, & teller roles transitioned from manual counting to relationship banking and sales.
- Computers and PCs (1970s–1980s)
Clerical and general bookkeeping roles declined. Software, IT, data, & digital work exploded.
- Electronic Spreadsheets (1979)
Manual "human computers" and paper ledgers were rendered obsolete. Wall Street financial modeling, corporate forecasting, & advanced data analysis skyrocketed.
- Automated Switchboards (1970s–1990s)
Hundreds of thousands of manual routing jobs vanished. Cellular networks, the structural groundwork for the internet, & multi-trillion-dollar digital economies exploded.
- Internet and Dot-com Era (1990s–2000s)
Retail, media, and travel agents were declared dead. E-commerce, digital marketing, and online platforms emerged. Retail didn’t end, travel agents didn’t disappear, and media didn’t vanish but they instead all adapted.
Every time, the pattern has been the same. Old workflows break & new ones form. Productivity rises & lastly, humans always find a way to adjust.
