Lance breitstein has made over 10 million in trading profits in a single year multiple times in this video he shares his secrets for finding what we call Easy Money trades that can make your trading career I'm Mike Bella Fury and we're one of the top proprietary trading firms located in New York City since 2005 and proud to develop numer seven and even eight figure per year Traders watch take notes and learn from Lance an inspiration to many developing Traders so you can grow your trading account thank you thank you thank you everyone so one thing
before my real presentation starts is many of you know I'm a huge fan of Traders especially in the retail side forming pods together and so so often I get asked how do you form a trading pod how do you find these pods and so this event is exactly one of those opportunities and what you all might not realize is there are Traders here from all over the world what the Traders themselves didn't realize is we have two Traders here from leads UK we have Traders here from Switzerland Berlin Toronto Vancouver so all of you guys
that are looking for a pod you cannot leave this weekend without exchanging contact information if youve not got someone's email to do a daily report card with if you guys are not creating Discord channels or any types of groups this is part of the huge value of these events the same way we all do Bella and I are on the board of Traders for a cause and part of that is not just education like talks like this but a lot of it is getting together and grouping up with people maybe more experienced than you maybe
less experienced and we all have something to learn from each other so please please please do not be shy there are Traders from California there are Traders from Atlanta there are Traders from all over Florida so please link up with each other find someone start hosting and organizing the London UK Meetup start hosting uh the Singapore Trader Meetup maybe uh you'll convince the one lance be to come to some of these if you're Eduardo you're trying to get me to go to Spain we will see I never reveal my hand and so with that being
said thank you all for traveling all over the world for this thank you all for the wonderful comments unlike in the Twitter World nobody has uh you know talked yet and I love to keep it that way so thank you all for the sport love love to be here and let's get into it I know this is going to be a good talk topic because already as I've been speaking with some of you all yesterday and today I've received so many questions and my answer has been I would love to address that question but that
is the bulk of my talk and so for all the people that I've said hey ask me that question after my talk if you still have questions this talk is for you and what it's called is Easy Money trades make trading careers usual disclaimers anything I say you will inevitably lose money if I say this is going higher it goes lower if I say it's going lower it goes higher uh that's how it works every time if I say Zig you zag if I say zag Zig so really easy money trades make trading careers and
so often I get asked what was it that finally clicked for me a lot of you may know that I struggled in my trading career a lot of you may know that the first 12 months of my career every single one of those was a red month I did not make any money the Trillium salary at the time was a whopping $26,000 per year and I had student loans I had rent and I was eating a lot of Subway sandwiches and ramen and other shitty food that healthy Lance would no longer eat and something needed
to click or it was going to be byebye Lance so what was it that allowed me to finally start seeing progress and realize that I could have a chance at the job the answer to that was Easy Money trades and let me tell you back when I was learning there was nobody to give me this path or this Guidance the person that trained me exceptionally talented he built this whole method of technical analysis that I still do today but what he didn't have is the process of how to learn how to get better and so
it really was like drinking from a fire hose it was so overwhelming to be learning like 15 20 trading strategies all at once how am I supposed to differentiate between these things and essentially if you're the if you're the you know kind of like Trader of all trades you're really the master of none and as Bruce Lee says you know fear fear the man that has done one punch 10,000 times and 10,000 punches once and I had no process of getting better to see profitability and that's why I say I was the trader that almost
never was a year into my trading career I was at the dead back of my trading class all the other people that were where I was were quitting and not I was simply rising up ahead of the pack just because other people were quitting and giving up and I did not want to do that I did not think I would ever achieve great things all I was telling to myself is if I can just make a career out of this you're playing a video game it's fun it's casual it's Lively it's challenging all I want
to be able to do is support myself but the Clock Was ticking I had a twin brother that was living it up in New York City with like a nice uh investment banker salary I had all my friends making good salaries and they saw me turning down the sales and trading job offers to make 26 Grand a year plus commission but that commission was a zero and so it really came down to recognizing that feeling and like I was working so hard 60 plus hour weeks going in every Sunday and like many of you that
have been talking to me this weekend you guys have that struggle you're working hard you're getting close you're making progress but it's not enough for your timeline so what was it that really got me to profitability and turning that corner this was the trade that quite literally saved my career because I was interviewing at other firms fortunately I was disillusioned so I interviewed at a firm de Shaw you know home of Jeff Bezos before he was Jeff Bezos and as you can imagine they're really smart there and they said hey Lance you're not smart enough
for us and thank you God they said that because I would have had to take that job offer cuz I saw no light within a few weeks of that this Tesla exhaustion Gap saved me and you know Steve Spencer is going to laugh because this is probably the time when he was buying it when I was making my money short in the most epic growth story of all time but what happened is in early 2013 this had a news event we gapped up on day one we had pretty much like a a middle of the
day close Wicks on both sides next day is a continuation day where we really drove day three is another continuation day and then we had a big gap not just the big gap but this Gap then drove off the open and this was a very specific pattern that we had been play booking my boss loved this pattern for him this was pocket aces and I had seen him go big on this a couple of times now this was something that I had really play booked and much like in poker when your chip stack is winding
down when you might only have 10 hands left so many amateur poker players they end up just waiting waiting waiting for some perfect hand then they never get it and by the time they do they don't even have enough chips anyways and so I knew where I was in my career I did not have that many shots left and I still remember in the moment thinking that it's very likely this might be the best chart setup I see before I need to walk away from my dreams and I knew that if I'm going to go
big somewhere if if I'm finally going to have the courage to put the risk on this needed to be it and thank you God every single day that this trade ended up working out exactly as we had expected it so often when this exhaustion Gap failed they often go to the that upper Ballinger from how far they're extended above it and that is exactly what this did I captured the whole move and I ended up making something like $11,000 in p&l that for me now wouldn't be that standout but back then when you were making
nearly nothing that was oh wow I can do this and I saw what my boss made which probably was 20 30X and that told me wait a second he did nothing any different than what I did in this specific trade if I can just get a couple of these and scale it up and make even a fraction of what he made that can be a whole career and that started to give me hope and that started to teach me that like at least in these patterns that are recognizable and game planable and that I can
really premeditate I can stand a chance at this so here are the two plays that back then in 2012 2013 2011 they became my easy money plays so while more rare than the other one the first was that exhaustion play that I just described so to simplify it you get a strong day following a breakout or news uh News Gap up you then get even more euphoric continuation and after that a capitator exhaustion Gap ideally with that euphoric opening drive and for many of you that are thinking hey this this pattern doesn't seem so different
than what smci or Nvidia recently did well you're right because a lot of these patterns have been Timeless and I've been trading these and filtering for these again and again and again and the other Easy Money Trade that I really did was uh it was more orderflow based and you would have these days especially around witching for whatever reason or like any option XPR this would be pretty common and the NASDAQ might be up call it half a percent and some of the other tech stocks maybe you know maybe Microsoft is up 7 apple4 uh
but then Intel off the open it starts three as as it probably should be but then very quickly shoots down to minus half a percent or something like that and so because these are such typical tech stocks especially back then before uh you know the nvidias and Teslas of the world these were the the stocks where it's like if the market is up half a percent odds are on any any given day assuming no news which is a critical piece there assuming no news if we were at 3% and we quickly shoot down to minus
a half perc which for those for those days was a pretty big move I would then mean revert that and again that's where some of the early days of right side of the V started to come so these stocks would get order flow off the open and they would revert closer back to where they should being closer to the NASDAQ and this was highly replicable this was something that I was probably seeing a good I don't know three four times a month and after enough times I started to make 50 bucks 100 bucks in this
play and then over time I would scale it up and this also gave me the courage that I can at least have a play in my playbook and so when I first started my advisory work at SMB this was the number one concept that I started with it's so so important for a Trader to focus on these easy money trades they heard it from me again and again and we even started forming the Easy Money trades group and on every single monthly review whether it was Carlton Jeff Bella Steve we were asking Traders what are
your Easy Money trades what was the easiest money trade for you this month and the beauty of that is these Traders were all learning from each other one Trader's Easy Money Trade might not be the same as a different one and so when you're doing this and I would encourage you all to do it in your pods you're learning what's the easiest layup for everyone else and so this helped everybody see a variety of these and even case in point let me share with you this success story of one beginner SB Trader this is a
Trader Brandon who was a SMB intern is now full-time at SMB and he allowed me to read this from his monthly review and essentially it's saying improved consistency came from the revision and betterment of my day-to-day scalping on a month where 97% of my trades were scalps it was essential to build a somewhat smooth upward sloping Equity curve and as you can see on the right that is a beautiful Equity curve for a beginner Trader he was not trading full-time that that long to have something like this and so he was play booking a lot
of the big trades but what really allowed him to take off was he figured out scalping and what's so funny is this Trader Brandon he's he's pretty quantitative like he's got some programming background um he does a lot of back testing work so this was something that you wouldn't have naturally assumed would have been his strength but this is exactly what ended up really just allowing his trading progress to take off and what's so beautiful about that is this p&l cushion gave Rocket Fuel to all of his other trading so the stuff that he started
to collect data on and had back tested then he could swing even harder so why are these easy money trades so critical it's because in the slow months Easy Money trades allow you to hit the singles that keep food on the table some markets are very very slow not everyone has enough Acorn stashed away where like you see on Twitter the traders that are like oh nothing nothing out there for me I'm taking this month off it's like well man some people have bills to pay I was one of those people and so you need
those Easy Money trades to still put food on the table the other beauty of easy money trades is during times of draw down they allow you the fundamental Playbook to rebuild your confidence and get back above water so one of my favorite videos that I've done for SMB is I talk about draw down best practices one of the basic tenants of that is when you're in a draw down and you have this negative Fe back Loop and you're struggling psychologically you need to go back to the basics the basics we push traders to do are
those Easy Money trades so that they can get some wins on the board and end that negative feedback loop and start a positive one then even more important is in the active periods the p&l from hitting these singles allows you to swing even harder on the Home Run opportunities so one of the Traders Max who's going to be presenting later Max was one of those Traders where on the average slow month he was losing p&l and we got him to be a little bit more selective find what some of those Easy Money trades are and
when the home runs come he will connect with the ball every time and hit it out of the park huge sixf figure wins but the issue was especially in years like 2022 he was in a hole or in a draw down when those big fat pitches would come and that would not allow him to swing as hard and what we found especially in the last year was Max changed that in in late 2023 and so far this year rather than going into a home run pitch in a 150 Grand hole he was able to change
his trading so that he was going into that plus 50k or plus 100K and that allows you to swing so much harder and the difference when you're a home run hitter when you can swing harder on your home run trades it's not 5% or 10% you are making 50% or 100% more a year because of that small difference so what are the typical characteristics of what I like to call Easy Money trades so first they should be the slower moving trades that allow the beginner more time to process and assess and I think the reality
is we're all human there is something so sexy about having that huge massive chop that you're going to post about on Twitter and everyone's GNA say oh my God I can't leave this guy made X or Y but the reality is that that kind of seductive like oh my God I'm gonna be so cool I'm going to be the hero as cool as that is it's it's not worth it versus these easy money trades and so what we really help with beginner Traders is look don't don't focus on being the shark don't focus on being
Max don't focus on being swing focus on finding your Easy Money trades and build that Foundation first then you also want these trades to be super common and replicable so you can get the Reps in so much of trading is seeing a pattern again and again and again so the beauty for me with those trades where it was kind of those Tech names dislocating from the index just based on order flow off the open I was seeing it many times per month that allowed me to get the confidence that when it does happen I know
exactly what I need to do I can optimize my system around it then I can start sizing up and it's so important to get those reps in the other thing that's important for an Easy Money Trade is you really want it to be defined risk and I like unlikely to get away from you as we've seen in stocks like ZJ y there's halt risk out there there's overnight risk there's all types of risks where if something's a liquid or whatever else things can get away from you my easy money trades were always the ones that
had very clearly defined risk I was not going to take some whammy I was not going to take some big loss I was always going to be able to hit my little singles the other important factor is you really want these ideally to be high win percentage trades the point of these is to get your confidence back it's to give you momentum it's to give you those singles you do not want to be hoping for the one in a 100 trade with the massive payoff for this and then losing the 99 times but most of
all these need to play to your strengths and make sense to you so one that I'm going to present now that I think is super common is what I call the bouncy ball setup um some astute person on Twitter said yo bro you're just adding names to stuff that already have names uh why are you doing that confession he is right I did name a name that's probably already has names but I love it and it does actually make sense when you think of a bouncy ball if I take my little bouncy ball it drops
against the stage floor and it makes a subsequently lower and lower and lower bounce until it's kind of flat against the stage and it breaks below that support and sadly we get another layer of stage but nevertheless so what happens in this play and I've done some of these 60-second little Tik Tock videos on it and you short the break of the support level and so this here is Nica but I've found this pattern and done videos on many many similar ones of these ideally we have a catalyst that makes this make an initial leg
then we get those subsequently lower highs and then it breaks and it's a beauty you you short the break uh I tend to use trailing prior bar highs as the Stop and so the beauty of this is it's a slow play it's conceptually easy to understand right the it makes a drive on a catalyst but then it can't push away from that support and when it does break because it's having such weak bounces um you can really Define your risk and odds are that it can't bounce cuz sellers want to drive it lower um and
the best part is this trade is highly replicable so even since preparing my presentation I was going to discuss this in Nova from about a week ago but as someone astutely noticed on Twitter uh this happened in apple the other day and so a lot of Traders at SMB caught exactly that pattern um I don't know if it was Thursday or maybe it was Wednesday day but Apple had the doj decision or not doj the um the antitrust and it made a leg lower and then it did subsequently lower bounce lower bounce lower bounce it
broke and it made a beautiful clean move and especially in a stock like apple you can really size that up and I'm giving this example because I'm not just just pulling this out of nowhere these are multiple ones that are happening every single month and this was noova this was a stock that was weak on the daily on on 3-14 and so what we had there I didn't draw the lines in really but what we had there off the open is we make this week leg we make a bounce but then the ones are subsequently
weaker and weaker we break the level which was about $423 cents and then again trailing prior bar highs we make a beautiful leg lower that is an Easy Money Trade It Wasn't fast it wasn't that complicated you can spot this setup and premeditate how much you want to risk you can really make sure it checks all the boxes on your little checklist and if you can short a thousand shares of this that is a fantastic trade so the beauty of these is it's really in my mind the ideal growth path what you want to do
to really develop yourself as a Trader is you want to focus on Building A playbook of one just one Easy Money Trade first don't do what I do trying to master everything you end up the master of none so just focus on one trade and refine it refine it refine it it then seek to build out that Playbook into multiple trade categories then even concurrently as you're getting comfortable and getting reps in that's when you start to size it up so if I can use mark from the UK as an example he is a part-time
Trader and Incredibly to his credit he is a very consistent part-time Trader and so he is one of the people that asked me hey Lance like what is what is the best advice you have for me and it's not expanding into new strategies he already is doing something that works for him and as I started to ask him questions what he's doing is not liquidity constrained based on his current size and so what he can really do is build a system for how am I going to gradually increase my size and if he just magically
closed his eyes and his size doubled and he didn't even know it he would make 2x the money and all of his trades would for the most part in my view not be affected and that's because he's found those easy moneyy trades then the next thing on his current path is just simply to size them up then worry about expanding The Playbook from there he's already done the really hard work of finding Edge he's built consistency now it's time for you to enjoy the the fruits of your labor this also happened with another young Trader
at SB Joseph friia he started showing me his data and the guy's a nice quiet quiet guy and as I looked through his data I said dude like what is your daily risk why why are these winds so small but so consistent and he told me and I'm like dude you it's time for you to fly you need to you need to start betting more you've done all the work you've built the consistency you have your easy trade Playbook now you need to really make it count next thing you know the guys goes from making
essentially no money to putting up 10K months 20K months then in January when we were doing the monthly review meeting he was up $144,000 in one day and humbly not even mentioning it until I think it was Jeff that was like dude aren't you up like 14k today like that was your whole month a month ago and that's just because he built the consistency then he grew it then you can really focus on the home runs once you have that consistency in you then ask shark what he's doing ask Max what he's doing figure out
where the Traders are swinging big and so the mistake that many Traders make I like to give in basketball terms imagine if basketball players were allowed to bet on all their shots the sexy basketball shot is probably the fade away buzzer beater with with the clock you know trickling down who would ever bet a ton of money on that shot though and so often what we do is we as Traders just psychologically we bet the most on the trades that are hard that are diffic difficult that are fast moving that are going to look us
make us look like rock stars on Twitter but what we should be doing is betting as much as we can on our free throws unless we're sha then you don't want to do that then you want to bet on you know the uh the good old shack Hulk smash at at the basket um but the beauty of being Traders is we can choose when we want to bet zero we can also choose on our free throws and our Easy Money trades to bet much more than we would otherwise and so why would you necessarily start
off in the early days betting more on the active crazy stuff that you can't well control and well Define your risk versus the plays that you have a zillion reps on the plays that you've studied again and again and again and that are your consistent Bread Winners and so I've seen so many intermediate Traders make the same mistakes when I was trading there was going to be there was a uh internal statistics page and you could see how many Traders did uh you know x amount of p&l in each ticker and there would be so
many trades that I wasn't some some genius finding some crazy trade that nobody else saw the reality is I was making the same trade as these other people but I was just willing to bet so much more than them and so they would be like they would be like oh my God Lance how did how did you do that and the truth was like that the way I made 50 Grand in that trade was the same exact way they made 500 but they're not conceptually recognizing that those Easy Money trades are what they need to
be betting more on it wasn't fast it wasn't so hard it wasn't conceptually above them they did the same thing why am I getting paid huge and and being able to you know make so much in that trade because I had gradually scaled them up and focused on those and other people are like oh you know that was a nice little easy nothing but a lot of those easy nothings have the liquidity to be big somethings the easiest money on the table for most Traders and I would argue for Traders like Mark the easiest money
for him is taking a weekend and saying what are the ones that are highest probability most Edge for me how can I gradually and prudently increase my size in them that doesn't mean you want to go gungho that doesn't mean oh Lance said I should go home and triple my size and and ignore my lockout nope you know imagine Carlton's over your shoulder uh we all need a Carlton over our shoulder and so go home and figure out what are the trades you want to increase your size how much do you want to increase them
over what time frame how can you do it safely and prudently but this size it really adds up so much over time and it will make the same difference to your career as it did to mine so how can you supercharge this practice for starters you want to use Evernote or notion and create a notebook where you begin to write up and document these easy money trades and that's what did it for me I was literally an Evernote before uh a lot of that stuff even really was popularized or existed and I just had all
these different playbooks so it it would have been my exhaustion Gap Playbook it would have been my uh you know Tech stock dislocation Playbook it would have been my bouncy ball setup Playbook another thing that's super replicable is uh breaking news on stock offerings or maybe you can do um you know one thing that that was a really great one too is um knowing how much stuff goes up on ad deletes like S&P 400 500 600 not so much like an smci that's an anomaly but sometimes the these go up just very predictable amounts and
so one thing you want to do then is once you have your trades find people in this room and start collaborating with them you know say hey like I I really like that that Lance idea I want to share my Easy Money Trade with with you I want to learn yours how can we start as a group walking away from this weekend with real value applied to us right because if we just sit here and listen but we don't apply it it's not going to change your trading you know the work still needs to be
the work and it it always needs to end with you all making real changes to your trading and the other thing that SMB does really really a great job of is always pushing their Traders asking them how can you spot more of your easiest money trades is there anything we can do as far as scanners is there anything we can do as far as Tech is there anything we can do as far as collaboration with each other and part of the beauty of working with a pod is once you're willing to share your Easy Money
trades with everyone they're going to help you spot them so that you never miss them and so many Traders think so selfishly and they think oh my God I don't want someone to steal my Edge or whatever else but they don't realize that they're catching three out of the 10 opportunities that are out there there and so they're selfishly catching their three trades when together with someone else helping them they could catch 10 of them and not only that they could catch 10 of them but then they could also learn that person's Easy Money Trade
and they could catch 20 trades and that mindset is so pervasive in the industry and it hurts everyone so the more you can collaborate the more you're going to win by spawning more of these and then you can help each other refine the strategy and push the size as well so to sum it all up I truly believe the easiest lowest variance path to success is to build that Playbook and find the easy money trades for most new and even intermediate Traders by Building A playbook of these highly replicable trades you lower the variance of
your trading and you allow yourself to make more in the long run not only that every Trader I know does better on positive feedback loops so many of us are not immune to the psychology of trading when we're in draw Downs when we're losing a ton when we're getting beat up by the market you are not motivated and thrilled and excited to go to work the longer we can stay in a positive feedback loop and a positive mindset and compound and grow and grow and see progress the more we are going to grow and do
faster in the long run and so much of that psychological aspect cannot be understated and easy money trades help you do that they give you the confidence to succeed in your career and they really accelerate your growth path so when we look at a Steven Hager who's one of the new Traders Bella mentioned when we look at a Brandon Suchi these Traders are doing performances that most retail Traders could only dream of to be a year in and making 40K 50k 60k p&l is unbelievable even less in some of that time and they would not
be able to do it without the mentorship without the Pod without the work going in to figure out what those easy trades are this is what has worked for me this is what has worked for dozens and dozens of Traders I've worked with and I am confident that if you take the time to really sit down and think about this and figure out how to apply this concept to yourself it will likely help you all as well that being said what questions can I answer from you all I'll take Applause first I'll take Applause okay
okay okay so on the uh the journaling piece some your videos you talk about the importance of tagging and tagging and tagging what are some things that you would be we' be surprised know that you tag and then what are things you find lacking when people tag yep so this question I'm just gonna repeat it because it's a big room he was asking about tagging trades as as far as trade review and what are the types of things I will tag what are the types of things I will find surprising um so one fun fact
so trillum did not have a trade review software or anything and they ended up building that as I pushed them to do so and we found one amazing correlation the Traders with the most tagged trades were not the beginners the Traders with the most tagged trades were the top traders in The Firm think about how crazy that is the top traders in The Firm that never need to work a day in their life we doing more trade analytics than anybody else in the firm that's not a coincidence and so at SMB even on the retail
side you have stuff like Trader viiew you can all do this on your own so what are the things that I will be tagging so for starters I want to categorize all my trades I want to be categorized categorizing them as far as these are the exhaustion gaps these are the tech divergences these are the bouncy ball setups I might want to tag them uh fighting the trend versus not fighting the trend I might want to I mean as far as a a funny pattern that most people underestimate I was taking very large rips the
days before long weekends or vacations why is that my head wasn't on the trade my head was out on the beach and so that was one pattern that I found super super common um another place that that I think people underestimate is the small little places you're losing money um and you think oh I'm only losing a hundred bucks it doesn't add up but you're losing a hundred bucks 30 different times each day one other thing that I've seen with tagging and I always love this story is with IPO trades I had trainees and they
were trading these bullshitty IPOs not the reddits not the arms not the airbnbs the alibas they were trading just the bullshitty ones and I would say to them hey guys why are you trading these IPOs and they would say oh I make money in IPOs and I would say do you and they would look at the analysis and I'd say collect the data and get back to me they did make money in IPOs barely but the money they made if there were 10 IPOs they made money in 100% of the three active ones they would
L then lose almost all that p&l in 100% of the seven not hot active ones and so you get a lot of patterns and different data things like that so there were just so many variables um what happens in a breakout uh what happens in the bouncy ball setup when there's um a news Catalyst on it that day versus not what happens on the bouncy ball setup when it's the third leg down rather than the second so it's really unlimited as far as what I would tag and look at and it it takes thinking and
critical analysis to just know this is going to be what's the most value to me what else what else what else what's an example of a Not So Easy Money Trade and why would anybody take those that's a great question so I think we all probably know some not easy money trades uh I know I've definitely had some I'm pounding the desk cursing and saying bad bad things trades and I think a lot of the times we might leave our Playbook I think a lot of the times we might fall for a play looks kind
of similar to what we're looking for but it's not quite what it actually is so if you want to talk about um um one example where a Not Easy Money Trade um in what was it 2020 oh God Steve's G to kill me for this when it was what 2020 and two or three when when Tesla was selling off off hard and going back towards like a 100 or something oh who who who knew that so well who who knew that I I can't y myself and many others were trying to catch the overextension and
the issue though was the stock wasn't really fully capitulating the Bars were continuous but they weren't really accelerating and so you can get seduced and say this is a big move on The Daily but the nuances of what I want are not happening and so those oversights I think there's times when we're on tilt so I and many others got got hurt on that time and you're like oh my God it's such a big move but it's not doing what I needed it to do it's not truly capitulating um and so I think we all
just make judgments of error and I think that's really where risk management and Carlton's job comes in we're never human sometimes we're underslept sometimes we um are just unfocused and so there's times where we just do the things that that aren't really true to what we're we're supposed to how can basketball players take uh nonoptimal shots how can they take a shot when they're they're they've got two people covering them we're human you know you it's it's a fast-paced game you're making quick decisions and yeah and I think the best thing we can do is
just be true to our Playbook and have it well defined if we have it there's some A++ setups where you're risking huge but then there's just some setups that are amazing simply because they've got such good expected value I mean there's there's trades like take for example a closing of an acquisition this is something I would do a ton um a stock is going to be bought out for $40 because of time value of money and whatever else it might trade at $397 sense until it gets the official announcement closing of acquisition ticker will be
removed you know end of close 4 p.m. and when that comes out it is quite literally the definition of free money any print in between there you're never going to make a million dollars in that you're never going to even make a 100 Grand in that because everyone is fighting for those prints to close it from 3970 to 40 but the expected value on those prints is literally Infinity like it is a published fact you are going to get $40 it is official it is closed end of story and in that small time frame you
can make the money so while it's not a home run trade the expected value is insane so I don't think there's any formal way to it's it's all subjective how you define it but that to me would be an easy money trade and that was something else in my playbook you know I was always looking for those acquisition closings I think we have time for one more question you uh you identify a setup say it's a b setup or an a setup and you know you have Edge there but the spread is extraordinary like on
an smci when would you get a green light or what would you look to identify as a as a way or a time to blast in and not fight so much for price because you don't want to miss the move yep so this question was if what about if the stock has a very large spread um but it's an A+ setup for you and so I guess I would push back on that definition because at the end of the day how I Define how good a trade is and how anyone should always Define it is
the expected value is the end all be all and the expected value of that trade needs to factor in the spread so you can have some amazing setup but if the ticker is super liquid or if it's super spread or if you're not going to be able to control your risk I would argue that isn't an A+ setup this the spread everything else if if if some trade might be amazing but if I'm afraid that I can't hold it because there's going to be CPI and I have to take you know a Fed minute CPI
whatever and I need to take a like a a uh a coin toss then it's no longer an A+ trade and I think it's sometimes hard for us to accept that and so if there's a really big spread that's going to impair my expected value in that bouncy ball setup in Nicola um that has a penny spread even in apple you can get in with a few pennies if that spread in apple was 30 cents it's no longer an A+ trade I need to size way way down or not take it at all so the
spread is part of the implicit calculation of expected value the other question is are there maybe perhaps better ways you can structure the trade and so what Steve's alluding to with stuff like smci or even it happened in Nvidia as well is potentially with options you might be able to structure it in a different way um smci and Invidia the spread of those option of of in the equity was pretty much the same cost of buying some of those puts and so that's an example where it's like maybe there's a different way to structure the
trade and so I would argue perhaps in mstr or not even just in general maybe if I try to do it through the equity it might not be an A+ trade maybe you don't even necessarily have short locate or maybe you need to pay the borrow or whatever else so it's possible that in the equity maybe it's a b or a B+ but using options or some other way or or a different way to think about it you might be able to get it back up to an a A plus so I'd argue in smci
and Nvidia the A++ Plus+ plus was some of the zero DTE puts um when just the spread alone was going to cost you what you were risking so you're an active Trader not doing as well as you want not doing as well as you deserve and you just can't figure out why you can't become profitable no matter how hard you try well let me show you why this is your competition the traders in this room this room right here is full of elite Traders some of whom are making seven and even eight figures a year
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