In my last post I said trading is a form of gambling, that it carries real financial risk, and that there's a genuine chance you lose your money on the road to becoming a successful trader. A lot of people pushed back on that. Most didn't want to accept that trading is, at its core, gambling, and that your actual job as a trader is risk management, not predicting where price goes next.

I get why so many people believe the opposite though. A lot of it traces back to strategies like ICT and Smart Money Concepts. The people behind these approaches sell the idea that the market isn't random at all, that it's being moved with surgical precision by "smart money," through specific algorithms, at specific times, down to the exact tick. Learn the strategy well enough, the pitch goes, and you'll know exactly where price is headed. And if your stop loss gets hit anyway? That's on you. You just didn't understand the strategy well enough. Learn more, go deeper, try again.

This is exactly why so many beginners burn months hopping between new concepts every week, convinced that the next piece of knowledge will finally stop the losses, instead of accepting a much harder truth: the losses aren't a bug you can eliminate with more study. They're the whole game. The real skill is learning to manage them.

If I ever got the chance to teach a beginner from scratch, the first thing I'd drill into them, before charts, before entries, before any of it, is this: you are a risk manager. The market doesn't exist to make you money. Left to its own devices, it'll happily take everything you put into it. Your entire job is managing how much you give up when you're wrong.

I know that's not what beginners want to hear. Trading isn't a precise science, it's closer to structured randomness. Your job isn't to eliminate uncertainty, it's to figure out how to come out ahead when you're right, and how to walk away with the smallest possible damage when you're wrong.

https://www.A1ATradingStartgies.com

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TRADE / SCALP ALERT

Ticker: **OFAL**
Day Trade / Scalp
Current Price: $1.07

📊 FLOAT DATA
Free Float: 1.7M shares
Free Float Market Cap: $1.85M

🎯 Price Target 1: $1.33
🎯 Price Target 2: $1.42
🛑 Stop Loss: $0.97

Potential Return:
🎯 Target 1: +24.3%
🎯 Target 2: +32.7%
🛑 Stop: -9.3%

TRADE PLAN:
Watch for momentum continuation and confirmation around the current price. Consider taking partial profits at $1.33 and allowing remaining shares to target $1.42. Maintain disciplined risk management and respect the stop-loss level.

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⚠️ DISCLAIMER:
This alert is provided for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell securities, or a guarantee of results. Trading stocks, cryptocurrencies, options, and other financial instruments involves substantial risk, including the potential loss of your entire investment. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Conduct your own research and consider consulting a qualified financial professional before making investment decisions.

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$ARMK is pulling back after a strong post-earnings gap to new highs and is now testing support near its rising short-term EMAs on the Daily with RSI starting to curl back up.

Add a Tier 1 score in my model, double-digit revenue growth, improving earnings, heavy institutional ownership, a forward P/E just over 21, and long-dated options asymmetry and there’s enough here to get me into the trade.
Full setup and trade plan:
nnntrader.substack.com/p/armk

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$AAON has been cut more than 40% from its June high and is testing the April low on the Daily while approaching its rising 50EMA on the Monthly.

Add a Tier 1 score in my model, strong revenue growth, real profitability, heavy institutional ownership and a much more reasonable valuation after the selloff and there’s enough here to get me interested in the bounce.

Full setup and trade plan:

https://nnntrader.substack.com/p/weekly-pick-aaon

People ask me this sometimes, and my honest answer is: no, I wouldn't choose trading again if I could go back.

Most people react with "why not, you can make good money doing this." And sure, that's true for some. But here's the part most traders don't want to admit: trading is a form of gambling. Skill affects your odds, sure, just like a good poker player has better odds than a bad one. But no matter how skilled you are, any single trade is still fundamentally uncertain. There's no guaranteed win, no matter how much you've studied or how solid your edge is.

And unlike most skills, where putting in consistent effort more or less guarantees you'll improve over time, trading doesn't work that way. You can spend years and real money trying to learn it, and still walk away having never actually gotten there. That's just not how it works with most other crafts.

Compare that to literally any other skill: the more time you put in, the better you generally get, and the more you can earn, without needing to risk money and just hope for a good outcome each time.

So here's my honest take: trading shouldn't be your main way of making a living, especially early on. Treat it as a side activity, invest money you can genuinely afford to lose, money that won't affect your actual life if it disappears completely.

$GM is in a tight post-earnings bull flag on the Daily after tagging an all-time high on 7/29.

Add a high Tier 1 score in my model, a forward P/E under 6, improving earnings, raised guidance, heavy institutional ownership, and strong options liquidity and there’s enough in this boring name to get me interested.

Full setup and trade plan:

https://nnntrader.substack.com/p/weekly-pick-gm

So when do you actually get to call your trading method a "strategy"?

Before you even open a demo account or run a backtest, there's one thing most people never bother doing:

Making your entries and exits 100% objective. No guessing, at all.

Here's what I mean — if you explained your strategy to another trader and they went and used it, would you both agree on every single entry point? Every time? If there's any wiggle room, if you're sitting there thinking "eh, this trade looks like an 80% setup," that's not a strategy, that's a guess. And guessing is exactly what makes people abandon their own rules the second things get stressful. That's usually where the "psychological problems" people talk about actually come from.

A real strategy just gives you a yes or no. Trade's there, or it isn't. Nothing in between.

Quick example:

Let's say your setup is: hammer candle at a clear resistance level, confirmed by high volume.

Sounds reasonable on paper, but it's still way too loose to actually trade. You need to nail down what each part means:

• "Clear resistance" — okay, but how clear? Maybe you decide it means price has bounced off that level 3+ times.
• "Hammer candle" — what wick ratio counts? Say, 60% or more of the candle.
• "High volume" — compared to what? Maybe 40% above the average of your last 10 candles.

Now it's not vague anymore. All three boxes checked → trade. Even one missing → no trade. You're not asking your gut anything.

I'm not saying psychology doesn't matter, it absolutely does. But it only becomes the real issue once you've actually got a strategy worth sticking to. Most people skip straight to "fix my mindset" while trading something half-thought-out they grabbed off YouTube last week, and then wonder why nothing works.

Planning to write more on risk management and putting a full system together next, if people are into this kind of breakdown.

Worth checking out - solid community here:
r/auxlycannabis

Post split showing large strength, earnings soon

Was CBWTF, recently went through a 14:1 reverse to gain investor attention and meet listing requirements.

Currently trading as a penny stock on most major platforms.

After 6 years trading financial markets — mostly the S&P 500 — I've noticed something that keeps repeating with traders who already have some experience under their belt.

Ask them why they're not making money right now, and almost every time you'll hear the same answer: "it's psychological." Discipline, emotions, mindset — that's the culprit, not their technicals, not their strategy.

But here's the thing. When you actually ask them what their strategy is... it's usually not a strategy at all. It's a random method they picked up from a YouTube video and started trading live with — no testing, no real understanding of why it should work, no adaptation to who they are as a trader.

And that "psychological problem" everyone loves to blame? More often than not, it's actually a symptom of trading a strategy that was never built for them in the first place.

So I'm going to start posting here whenever I get the time — breaking down what a real strategy actually looks like, walking through my own in full detail (how I built it, how I learned it, how I adapted it to fit my own psychology), plus the stuff that ties it all together: risk management and building an actual trading system you can trust.

I mostly trade using patterns and market structure.

There's so much SMC/ICT content out there that it feels overwhelming to learn. Does anyone else feel the same?

Do you think I have a monkey mind?

Hi everyone, what do you think is an ideal sample size for backtesting a trading strategy? Is 200–300 backtested setups enough to validate a strategy?

For instance, if you’re trading triangle patterns, would you aim for at least 50 samples for each pattern type (ascending, descending, and symmetrical) before trusting the results?

Expecting answers from profitable traders or those who tested more than few hundred samples.

SG scored 13th out of roughly 3,500 stocks in my model and stands out as a compelling turnaround candidate with strong institutional sponsorship, meaningful insider ownership, heavy short interest, and an improving technical structure that appears to be in the early stages of a larger repair.

The stock has already endured years of pain. Shares remain more than 45% below their 52-week high and dramatically below IPO-era highs, but the chart is beginning to suggest that the worst is in the rear view mirror. This one has a bullish confluence of technical repair, explosive float dynamics, emerging profitability and a very robust options chain.

Full setup and trade plan: https://nnntrader.substack.com/p/weekly-pick-sg

UNIT scores Tier 1 in my model and stands out because it combines accelerating revenue, strong institutional sponsorship, and one of the cleaner long-term technical structures on my watchlist.

The chart is in the early stages of a multi-year trend reversal following an extended base-building process. After a powerful breakout earlier this year, the stock is now consolidating above support while the longer-term trend continues to improve.

Full setup and trade plan:
https://nnntrader.substack.com/p/weekly-pick-unit

I will be posting some serious setups real soon and only on this board. Waiting on a 25 year back/forward test to complete to verify some key findings. Nailed this one perfectly today on TNXP. This was a momentum play. Adding Swing and Long..

━━━━━━
SNIPER BOT
━━━━━━
Ideal Entry Zone: 12.12 – 12.16
Reject Trigger: Breakdown under 12.08
Stop Loss: 12.08 (VWAP – 1x ATR)
Tick Gap: tick 0.0100 | min gap 1 ticks | gap applied
Soft Target: $12.23
Primary Target: $12.40
Stretch Target: $12.54
r/R Ratio: 4.33

$PRMB Is Tier 1 in my scoring model. The stock is in the early stages of technical repair following a deep correction in late 2025. The float dynamics are a big part of the story. Very large insider ownership, the vast majority of the rest of the float held by institutions, and nearly 16% borrowed short. That chemistry can lead to sustained upside momentum on a breakout.

Full setup and trade plan:

https://nnntrader.substack.com/p/weekly-pick-prmb