Status of 10k month mission for 2025: MET ✅

Hey Folks, happy first non-football Sunday.  Oh the withdrawals are starting to set in. 🫨 

Since you might have time on your hands today, I thought I’d share this Black Label email with all our members no matter what service you’re in.  As a trader, you should always assess what’s been working, what’s not been working, and what changes you need to make.

Here’s my assessment of my personal trading in January - wins, losses, and key lessons learned.  Happy reading ☕

As you probably know, this January was not typical for the market.  We saw some days of extreme volatility out there, and it shell-shocked a lot of traders who had piled into AI-growth stocks.

On the positive side, I had a pretty epic trading month. Locking in over $137k in profits for January.

This was all primarily trading stocks on my Hotlist 🔥 (pay attention to that in your daily Black Label email!).

This meets and beats my mission of my $10k/month goal for 2025 - all in one month’s time!

So, it’s time for a new goal… dare I say $1 MILLION in 2025?

Let’s hope I not only hang on to this but do this again and again.

Now, I want to note that I am trading with a larger account so the wins (and losses) can add up much more quickly.

Whatever size account you are trading with, the point is learning to improve so you can increase your account size no matter how big or small that is.  

What worked for me this month

I traded more outright stock and actually less options.  

This was part of my plan for 2025, and so far it has worked out great.

While I still like hitting some big triple-digit winners with options, those are definitely going to be the exception and not my primary focus.

When I am trading stock (not options) I am able to control my risk much better during trading hours, and even sell in after-hours, which isn’t possible with options.

I am also more active trading during the day now.  Before, I was focused on “swing trading” where I would hold option positions for several days at a time.

With the increase in volatility we have seen, that makes swing trading very difficult for me lately.

Instead, I am making small positions on my favorite Hotlist stocks, and then when I see momentum building during the day, I start to make quick moves to increase my position size and try to take a majority of profits in less than an hour when a “pop” happens.

This has led to a much higher win rate for me, even though my profit per trade is much less than with options.

The key is that I have been able to capture these “base hits” over and over during the month.

And you’ll see those base hits can really add up.

Here are my biggest winners in January:

Yes, I traded TSLA 93 times!!!

I also did a fairly good job reading the market and making sure I was not holding a lot of stock when markets were in a downtrend.

My biggest rule is to cut risk when QQQ starts to trade back under the 20-hour moving average.  You have probably heard me say this a million times now!

That single rule helped me save a lot of money this month since I avoided a lot of big down days.

What DIDN’T work for me this month:

Daytrading TSLA options - 

Going into the last day of the month, TSLA was my biggest winner… but I broke my rules and gave a lot of profits back (ugh!) on Friday.  It was my worst trading day of the month. I wasn’t teaching that day so no one was there to keep me accountable. 

I sat at my computer and broke all my rules.

See that big red bar at the right?  That was Friday.

I had my worst day of the month, giving back over $20,000 in a single day mainly due to my stubbornness with fighting the trend on TSLA (something I teach everyone NOT to do!) 

Although overall, I did well on TSLA for the month (see above), I should have not bet against the trend, and as heavily as I did.

I went too big on position size, and I day traded options instead of just trading stocks.

That was a big reminder for me of what I should not be doing.

With that, here are my biggest losers this month:

The first thing to note is that I did a good job letting my winners win a lot more than my losers cost me.

All of these trades above had good trading setups at the time, but they broke down, which happens occasionally.

Some of these I stopped out when I needed to.  Some, I let go a little longer than I should have (like ELF).

Note: I need to get even more ruthless when it comes to cutting losers.  I will continue to get more disciplined at this in February.  

When a trend breaks down, I am only one button away from stopping out and getting out of the way.  I need to get better at that.

I can jump right back in later when the trend is favorable again.

Overall, I am really happy with how I navigated the market to start the year.

I will continue to work on my mistakes and try to also get better at letting the winners run.

There you have it -  I hope to see you trading with me (and JASON!) live in Black Label this month and…

If you’re not in there currently, give Davis a call and he’ll find the best deal possible:

Dial 1-443-269-8824 or email [email protected].

To a successful trading month ahead of us!  

P.S. You might be seeing a fuss made about a new service we’ve added — Weekly Wiretaps with JW. It’s similar to my Bullseye Trade of the Week… so if you like Bullseye, you’ll also love this - especially at BLOWOUT introductory pricing of $97/year - grandfathered for life! Check it out here.