10 Reasons Why You're NOT Making Money Day Trading (2024)

making money as a Trader is one of the most difficult things to do in my opinion Traders usually have a difficult time keeping the money or making money in general in this video I want to tackle some of the reasons Traders are unprofitable and ways to tackle it with that being said let's dive into it the first main reason I believe Traders have a difficult time making money is they have no idea what they're doing now you can expect yourself to dive into the market so dive into anything in general and just be good at

it you have to understand it takes time and you need real education to understand how the market Works how to trade and actually put on the real trades a lot of Traders think when they take education when they watch videos when they consume information they will magically become a good Trader learning is one part most of the learning the most experience comes from actual trading when you're actually on the battlefield when you're actually putting on trades so if you have the education component down and let's say that's checked off and you have the good education

good found station that's one piece of it the second piece of it is you putting on real trades most Traders miss that part out they think hey I've learned a certain strategy or I've learned how to trade the markets and now I should be ready to go take that with the grain of salt just by understanding that if you have the education cool now you have to apply it which is the most difficult part in my opinion so if you got the education component down and now you're going into the applying part these are some

things I would recommend you to do number one start off with paper trading but also keep in mind that paper trading is good for a certain period of time just to understand and get a feel of the markets get a feel of the platform but paper trading itself is not real trading like it will not allow you to take the information you've learned and apply it to the real markets because your emotions and your mental blocks are not involved once you have the education component down then maybe you've paper traded go and apply these methods

to the real market and see if it's working and if you don't want to apply it with real money you can always go and back test the next reason why a lot of Traders have a hard time being profitable is they have no real Edge as a Trader you need to have an edge in the markets you need to understand what strategy you are going to trade what strategies maybe you're going to trade well what your approach to the market is and you have to make sure these strategies or strategy is back tested it is

proven that it has a good success rate your job as a Trader is to identify strategies that fit within yourself that fit within your personality right so I see traders that try to scalp and they don't have the personality to maybe be a scalper or to be quick on their feet they go into the markets they replicate strategies from other people that they see on YouTube Instagram Twitter and they're like I want to trade exactly how this person trades it's a good approach of learning and understanding but if you want to really Excel you have

to take bits and bits of from other Traders understand what they're trading how they're trading and then kind of build your own Playbook and understand that hey this is my personal approach to the market this is my personal way of approaching things in general and this is my personality and based on my personality these are the trading methods that I think fit best with me and this is The Edge or this is the approach I want to take on the market I see a lot of Traders when they put on trades it's all random there

there's no consistency of the trade idea there's no consistency of the trade execution and there's no consistency of just a trade in general if you have that kind of Randomness in your trading you don't have the real Edge this will make it very hard for you to scale your trading go to the next level or even just be profitable in general strategy hopping is the next reason that some Traders have a very hard time in being profitable now I see traders that have a good understanding of the markets they have a good understanding of what

they're trading they have an edge but whenever they're strategy or Edge stops working which is normal by the way in in the markets they immediately abandon that strategy they go okay well this strategy has been working or my Approach has been working for two months or a month now for one week it stopped working I need to jump ship and go and find a new strategy now the problem with this is Traders don't understand that their strategy will work well under certain market conditions and some other market conditions the strategy will have a completely difficult

time in evolving right or excelling so when you have these strategies outlined and you have your criteria and you have your full idea of the strategies you need to understand what market conditions are these strategies viable for maybe they're viable for all market conditions what approach do I have to change in my trading if the market gets flat if the market starts to range bounding if the market is accelerating if we have Gap up or gap down days what do I need to change do I need to hold on to this strategy during these moments

or can I adapt to the market so if you do have a strategy that has proven some results do not abandon it the moment it stops working instead understand why it's not working maybe it's you you're just putting on bad trades maybe it's the market that's adjusted or maybe sometimes the strategy was never really a real strategy and you were just getting lucky that could also be it right but it's your job to identify which one it is and actually put in the time and effort to understand these components no discipline and no patience I

see Traders all the time that have a good strategy that have good risk management that have everything on like the technical side down but when it comes to them personally they have no discipline on following their plan no discipline on executing what they said they were going to execute no patience on like waiting for their trades to formulate or their trade setups to come to them these people wake up rush to put on trades rush to make money and this ultimately you know is more of a personal problem problem than it is a trading problem

in my opinion so their personal problems their personal issues usually bleed into trading so I always say a person cannot be disciplined in trading and not be disciplined in their personal life and vice versa you can't be disciplined in one part and not disciplined in the other part either you are naturally you've developed yourself to be disciplined you've developed yourself to you know have patience or have parameters to develop these things or you will not be able to achieve it in trading so for example let's just say in your personal life you say hey I'm

going to go to the gym I'm going to do what I say I'm going to do and when it comes to you know in your personal life when it comes to these things you don't do it what do you think is going to happen when you're trading and immediately when you put on a trade you're like well I'm gonna follow my stop I'm gonna put this position on I'm gonna wait until you know 10 a.m I'm gonna wait for the 10 minute candle tool formulate I'm going to actually follow my game plan what do you

think is going to happen the same thing that happens in your personal life which is you won't follow your plan you won't listen to yourself so if you're having a hard time being disciplined or being patient right in your trading go outside of your trading first develop this in your personal life be disciplined in all aspects of your life if you say you're going to go to the gym at a certain time make that a natural habit every single day hey I've committed to doing this and I will make sure I keep moving forward by

doing this and when you do that in your personal life you'll start noticing it transitions into your trading and in trading you need extreme amounts of discipline and extreme amount of patience right because most of trading is you waiting for setups it's not you putting trades on all the time most of trading is you waiting you sitting in your hand and you're waiting for the right opportunity to come and you as a Trader being able to recognize this opportunity and execute upon the opportunity and that is your job as a Trader that's what we get

paid to do we get paid to recognize opportunities and execute on it not sit in front of a computer for 10 hours and just put random trades that have no consistency or no Edge behind them if you are having a hard time with being disciplined or being patient develop that on the outside of your training first and then you will see it slowly transition into your training tight time Horizon I see Traders always when they enter the market they give themselves like a one month window or two month window or a three month window saying

hey I have this short period of time to achieve profitability or consistency as a Trader and this usually creates very tough pressure for Traders and we as Traders we don't need to make our job more stressful we don't need to add more pressure so when we give ourselves this tight Horizon we naturally just make it more difficult for ourselves like why are we making something that shouldn't be as difficult difficult for us for no reason you're starting out or you're having a difficult time trading get rid of the I need to be profitable in one

month I need to be profitable in two years go and flip it and say you know what I'm gonna give myself two years and I'm gonna give myself proper two years of focusing on the market focusing on what I need to do and in those two years or let's just say one year I'm not focused on making money I'm not focused on being profitable I am focused on becoming a better Trader I am focused on these following things I'm focused on identifying an edge focus on identifying what works for me I'm focused on understanding and

learning about the markets as much as I can learning more about myself what works for me how do I respond to a losing day how do I respond to a winning day how do I respond to my stop losses how do I respond when the price starts rallying and I have fomo how do I naturally respond so my goal is to understand these things year one instead of year one I want to try to make money or year one I want to make x amount of money that should not be the goal and I see

when Traders create that pressure for themselves they have a really really difficult time on being profitable or even just staying alive because that pressure builds and it makes them put on trades or Force trades or take trades that they shouldn't really be taking not tracking their trade so a lot of Traders enter the market and they have no understanding of their data they have no understanding of what their trade what they do well in uh what works what doesn't work right so I'm a big believer on treating trading like a business now if you have

a business what is one thing that you as a business owner should do you should be tracking your expenses tracking what in the business is going well what in the business is going bad now most Traders when they start out trading they do not focus on this they do not focus on keeping a journal they do not focus on analyzing tracking their trades they immediately go open an account and randomly put on trades this is very easy and okay to do I guess but this will not allow you to evolve as a Trader if you

want to evolve as a Trader you need to understand all your metrics you need to understand what are areas in your trading that you are struggling with that you are having a very difficult time with the way to do that in my opinion is to track trades track every single trade you take understand what was your stop loss what was your R multiple on the trade why did you enter the trade why did you exit the trade track your days look at your pre-market game plan what you actually did during the day and then break

down what the outcome of that day was and I can make another video and just tracking and journaling your trades so if you guys want me to make that just comment down below let me know if that is something you want me to go in depth about but just to be on the topic really quick make sure you guys are tracking your trades you guys are analyzing your trades you guys are understanding your flaws understanding what is working you're tracking your your strategies you're tracking your mistakes you're tracking you know uh what is working what

isn't working you're tracking your position sizing and all of these things because it's extremely important for you as a Trader to understand hey what is causing me to lose money where am I making money well when I'm making money am I leaving money on the table what is causing me to sell too early am I actually following my stop loss do I actually have a good stop loss does my stop loss make sense meaning if I put my stop loss and the trade hits my stop loss does the trade keep going lower or does it

reverse from my stop loss area and the only way you will learn these things is if you track and journal and analyze your trades understanding their trading psychology every Trader is different you and I we're both different we think differently we operate differently we all have different personalities so when we get exposed to trading we will be exposed to different problems we will both also react to different problems our job as Traders is once again to understand what is our mental blocks what are things that are impacting our trading from a personal psychological level so

I'll give you guys a really quick example I know traders that have a really hard time following their stop now the reason they have a hard time following their stop is because they Don don't want to lose money they don't want to be wrong or every time a trade goes close to their stop they're immediately like oh well this will go higher then I have other traders that have a really really easy time on following their stop but they have a terrible time sitting on their hands or being patient or not letting a trade formulate

the way it's supposed to formulate your job as a Trader is to identify what problems pop up into your trading right what type of psychological problems pop up into your trading and how can you create a system to tackle these problems you can't just identify problems and say well these are problems I have okay well great identifying is one part but how do you identify build a system that helps you tackle these problems and make sure you as a Trader in your long-term career are making sure you're tackling these problems you're on top of them

and you're aware of how you respond to each and every single problem I've seen the mental part of trading where Traders ultimately have destroyed their trading because of mental psychological issues that bled into trading SO trading psychology is extremely important of understanding identifying and then fixing the problems up until you get these parts out you won't have real success in trading and like I said one key thing to help with this is like I mentioned before track your trades and also track your thoughts track your emotions understand what is working what is not working and

just get a good idea of yourself and a good idea of what is working what is not working having unrealistic expectations so this kind of goes hand in hand with what I mentioned before when you have a tight time Horizon unrealistic expectation kind of sets the bar very high and not saying you shouldn't set the bar very high but it's like starting out once again that adds a lot of stress to your trading right where okay well I need to make a hundred thousand dollars my first year I need to make 200 000 in my

first year whatever the case is those unrealistic expectations that you've set monthly weekly yearly just create a level of stress for your trading and I think as Traders we don't need that we don't need to add more stress to ourselves so your expectations or your goal setting if you want to if you want to really call it which is another problem setting goals and having these expectations should be more geared towards identifying problems and small wins so for example if you are able to identify what strategy is making you the most money that is a

small win if you can identify what is causing you to lose the most amount of money that is a good small win right if you can identify some of the mental blocks of the psychological problems that are bleeding into your trading that is a small win if you can create a system to tackle those problems that is also a small win so start focusing on small wins start focusing on that part instead of your p l right because your p l your profits will not reflect right away if you start today as a Trader and

let's say in six months you're able to identify or get these small wins imagine where you'll be in terms of knowledge in terms of understanding yourself in terms of understanding market in terms of execution and all of these things and then imagine when you start compounding this another six months where you could be in a year opposed to well in six months I need to make a hundred thousand dollars or in a year I need to make I need to make a million dollars these things just they just make it very difficult for yourself and

and I don't want you guys to make trading more complicated or more difficult than it is ease it up make it more comfortable make it more concise and just focus on the small wins get rid of the time Horizons get rid of the you know huge goals of of making money or the crazy unrealistic expectations put your head down focus on it focus on the process and I promise in a long period of time you will have a higher possibility for Success Traders don't know how to lose yes I know it sounds weird it's like

wait what do you mean Traders don't know how to lose yes to be a successful Trader you need to know how to lose and I see a lot of traders that aren't profitable they have a difficult time on losing it could be because of ego it could be because they don't know how to deal with losses whatever the case may be I don't know everyone has different issues but the idea is to understand why are you losing and then when you do lose being okay with it so let's just take a quick step back because

I know some people like what do you mean you have to be okay on losing what do you mean you have to be good at losing it's because most of trading you will be wrong most of trading you will lose the little trading you do win in is the trading that will compound and make the most money if you have the proper risk management I see traders that once again as I mentioned they'll have good months good weeks but the moment it's time for them to lose or they do lose they go crazy they'll go

erratic they do not know how to control themselves they do not know how to manage the loss our job is to always protect our downside our job is to know if this trade goes wrong how much will I lose and where am I comfortable in losing and what is an okay amount in losing opposed to your account size when you are wrong there two things to look at and this is how I look at it if I'm wrong in a trade I like to look at it from two perspectives number one let's say I'm wrong

I lost money but like did I follow my game plan on this trade because there's a good loss and then there's a bad loss a good loss is a trade that I followed my game plan right I follow the market moves I had an edge and the edge just didn't work and that's okay there there will be times your Edge your strategy your playbook your your setup does not work it won't work a hundred percent so when it doesn't work I need to ask myself like did I have a high probability of it working during

the time and if I did and it didn't work out cool I live with it I'm okay then it goes into did I follow my game plan did I follow my stop loss did I lose the amount of money I planned to lose and yes we plan to lose money so that's where risk management comes in which I'll talk about but we plan to lose money in every single trade did these things happen and if that's a yes then you followed your game plan you followed your risk man management plan and the trade was a

success even though you lost now there's a different component of where you lose money but you didn't have an edge you took a random trade you didn't follow your stop-loss or you didn't follow your risk management plan or you didn't follow your game plan and instead of you losing 500 you lost 2 000. now that's where you actually have a bad loss so you want to also identify what's a good loss and a bad loss and this is why like I mentioned journaling tracking your trades are very important because it allows you to kind of

combine what is good what is bad but as Traders you need to ultimately know when to lose and how to lose because you will be wrong majority of the time and when you are wrong you have to be able to assess like I mentioned the good trade and the bad trade and if you can assess both of them it will give you a better Peace of Mind of knowing well you know I will be wrong most of the time in training I will be having bad trades I will be having trades that don't go in

my favor so when that happens there's times I need to be okay with it because as Traders we put on risk to make more money and when we are wrong we have to live with the risk as long as the probability and the outcome was most likely in our favor so yes if you want to make it far in this game learn to lose become a good loser learn to manage risk learn to manage your emotions when you do lose and don't just go crazy when you have bad losing days right because some Traders like

I mentioned have one good month and that one day or one week destroys all of their gains so just make sure you know how to manage yourself during losing periods you know how to manage yourself during a loss and you also manage your loss accordingly the last reason I think Traders have a difficult time in being profitable or staying profitable is risk management like that is one of the biggest reasons our job as Traders is to manage risk that is the only thing we can manage we cannot manage the outcome of a trade we cannot

manage if a trade will go higher or lower we we can take a trade based on our Edge based on the probability of us believing that this trade will go higher but we cannot control the outcome what you and I can both control is hey if we are wrong in this trade right and this trade proves it's wrong what is the amount that I'm okay in losing according to my account size and that will also be in contingent or in line with me being wrong like how do I put those two together one of hey

if I do take this trade and I am wrong what is that appropriate position size that I should take where if I'm wrong I can lose the 200 or I can lose the 2 000. now most Traders when they enter a trade they immediately look at the trade from oh man when I take this trade I'm gonna make two thousand dollars or I'm gonna make four thousand dollars and that's not a good approach the approach that I take in every single trade is if I take this trade and I'm wrong I will lose 500 or

I will lose 5 000. am I okay on losing 5 000 of course no one is naturally okay in losing money but once again like I mentioned in trading you will lose money it will happen you have to become a good loser so when I do take on trades I am at times okay on losing that amount I am okay on putting that risk on and if I'm comfortable and okay with that I will take the trade and I'm also mentally prepared to lose that money and I'm okay I'm focused on that loss I don't

take a trade and which is what a lot of Traders do with they take a trade they're like well I'm risking five thousand uh I know I'm gonna make 20 on this so I'm not worried about the 5 000 because I'm going to make money and that's such a toxic trait or mindset to have because if the trade does go in a loss because you weren't mentally prepared for it or ready to take the loss it can put you at a big disadvantage what I would do and what I you know want to share with

you guys is before I take any single trade I always have a mental stop loss like okay well if the trade gets to this level I know I will be wrong if if I'm wrong and based on my position size and how much I should invest or put on size I will lose two thousand dollars I will lose fifteen thousand dollars I am okay with that okay the trade makes sense I have an edge on the trade cool I put the trade on when I put the trade on I'm mentally only thinking about my downside

which is the only thing I can control I cannot control if this day trade goes up or it goes down but if it does go down I know what my Max loss is and that is what you as a Trader should focus on that's what you as a Trader should shift your mindset to and if you can shift your mindset to what your lost amount is on every trade it will allow you to you know take on better trades and also also allow you to deal with losses better in my opinion those are some of

the reasons that I believe Traders have a difficult time being profitable or they're not so great at trading because of those reasons let me know Down Below on what what are some of the reasons you have a difficult time on being profitable or what are some things you have a difficult time with in general with that being said just want to say thank you for watching the video I hope you guys tune in for more and uh yeah see you next time