15 Years of Trading Advice in 15 Minutes That Made Me $100M

It took me 15 years to become one of the world's top traders and earn over a hundred million dollars in trading profits.

I'm here to help you speed run through the learning curve with the biggest lesson from each of my 15 years trading.

I'm Lance Breitstein, ex Trillium top trader, mentor to seven and eight figure P&L per year traders.

And yes, I also sucked in the beginning. I started trading in 2011.

And my first lesson was that you need to trust the process and simply focus on improving every day.

I had an awful start. Trading in real time happened so fast and I kept on making the same mistakes again and again.

I was hesitating on my entries. I chased after moves and I held onto my losers way past my stop.

It wasn't until I took a step back and built a framework for how to get better as fast as possible that I started to see progress.

This process was based upon deliberate practice as well as systemizing my work.

Now keep in mind, that didn't mean I started to magically make money, but I did start to see my win rate increase along with my percent of positive days.

I was moving in the right direction even if I was still not making any paychecks.

Year two, 2012 was the year I coined my broken slot machine concept, where I learned it's better to focus on trading a select few standout tickers each day.

This came from recognizing that a couple plays per day represented the majority of the firm's profits.

Meanwhile, most traders were giving back P&L in the majority of other tickers they traded.

I started to drastically restrict my trading to in-place stocks and prioritize my study time towards only the best plays of the day and the week.

In-place stocks are tickers that either have an exceptional chart setup with incredible volume and volatility, or tickers with fresh breaking news on them.

To this day, I still largely only stick to trading in-play tickers.

The lesson in 2013, year three, was my breakthrough year and it was all about building a playbook of a couple easy money trades in in-play stocks.

I define easy money trades as the simple layups or free throws of your trading.

Replicable setups where you have well-defined risk and can consistently put up a few hundred bucks in.

It was two simple plays that I started to refine and focus on, gradually sizing them up.

One was a simple mean reversion play when certain tech stocks had sharp moves off the open, and the other was also a mean reversion play for when stocks moved too euphorically over the course of multiple days.

It was being able to make these consistent small plays while minimizing my unforced errors that had an outsized impact on my trading.

This is not only what finally allowed me to become profitable and find some consistency in P&L, but I was making paychecks and they were growing fast.

Once you catch your stride with a few layup chart setups, that is when your newfound confidence becomes a feedback loop driving progress.

If you're curious about trading playbooks, I cover the fundamentals of building your own in this video. It's linked in the description.

You would think that my fourth year in 2014 would have been smooth sailing.

Yet towards the beginning of the year, I almost blew up my whole career.

As my equity curve was starting to take off, I took a fat tail fluke loss in Allergan on a crazy after hours headline that I was coincidentally short into.

In minutes, I lost over $100,000 so early on in my career.

This drawdown would have ruined most people. And I think most traders face a moment like this in their hero's journey.

I had extreme moments of doubt but I built a series of best practices and rules for handling drawdowns.

Trust me, my career has had many of them. Essentially,

in the times when it's the darkest, my drawdown protocol

could guide me towards the light and help ensure I dug my way out of the P&L hole and can continue on a sustainable career path.

An example of one of these practices is having strict daily, weekly, and monthly loss limits.

How much are you willing to lose before you cut yourself off? No questions asked.

I've used those lessons throughout my career and passed those lessons on to my trainees.

I can't even imagine how many training careers it's saved by this point.

By 2015, I had built up a solid foundation of plays, confidence, and consistency in my fifth year.

What I learned this year is something I now call the bobblehead concept, and the concept is what led to my parabolic growth.

The bobblehead concept has you imagine that each day you're trying to improve your expected value as a trader

rather than obsess over your P&L. In other words, the more you learn and grow,

the expected value of you trading each day increases. This is irrespective of your P&L.

Adopting this perspective forces you to judge your days based on whether you learned and grew as a trader, not whether your P&L was red or green.

Too many traders that obsess over P&L get frustrated or discouraged by red days rather than viewing them as amazing opportunities for growth.