Start Day Trading w/ $4

Last week, I made over $4,000 trading just 60 minutes each morning while live streaming the entire thing for free on YouTube in front of over 3,000 people. But I didn't start risking thousands per trade. I originally built this strategy risking around $50 per trade. And what most people don't realize is you can start trading as little as $4. Learn the strategy with tiny risks, build consistency, and then slowly scale it step-by-step over time. The strategy is super simple. The time commitment is small enough that it works even if you have a full-time job because I only trade about 60 minutes each morning. Some days, I'm even done faster than that. So in this video, I'm gonna walk you through exactly how I would start day trading if my goal was to make $250 a day on average and what the actual growth path looks like from starting small all the way to scaling bigger and bigger over time. We're gonna go over the four major steps to this process. What I would trade, what my actual trading plan and schedule would look like, how I would start with just $4, and then how I'd slowly scale the account over time because when you first start out trading, it's not about making money. It's about practicing your strategy, building consistency, building confidence, and learning how to execute it properly. Then over time, you can scale into something much bigger like where I am now. I can make over $5,000 in one day. So first, what would I actually start trading if I wanted to start all the way over again? So to cut to the chase, I would not trade stocks. I would not trade options. I would not trade Forex, or I would not trade crypto. There's a number of reasons why. Each one of them has different complications. What I would actually focus on and what I trade now, what I've scaled with, is called futures. Might sound like something kind of crazy if you haven't heard of them before, but in the reality is you are basically trading something that has the simplicity of trading stocks where if you buy and it goes up, you make money. But it has the leverage that options allow you. You can basically start extremely small and get a big amount of dollar movement. Whereas with stocks, a lot of the times you need a lot of capital to be able to make something like $250. If you capture a 1% move in a stock, that's gonna take 10 to $20,000 worth of cash in your account to get 100 to $200 worth of movement from that. Whereas with futures, to get $100 worth of movement, you really only need something like 50 to $100 in your account and so the ability to start really small is extremely powerful. And as a beginning trader, you want to be able to start small, you don't wanna be able to have to risk a ton of money right away because in the beginning, you need to be focused on practicing, learning how to trade effectively and then scale and focus on the money later once you have figured out the process and your strategy. And also, when it comes to futures, they are the biggest markets out there. Might sound like a funny name, but what I actually trade is the S&P 500 futures and the NASDAQ index futures. You can also trade oil futures, gold futures, there's even crypto futures, but essentially, you're trading the most liquid assets in the world, which allow you to scale really easily, they're very well regulated and so you can trade on safe brokerage platforms so you're not accidentally putting your money in a place that's kinda shady. So what you have to have is a strategy, something you are consistently focusing on executing every single day. The thing that changed me from being consistently losing money to being consistently profitable was not showing up to the market trying to react to how it was moving that specific day, but instead, having a plan of what I wanted to see the market do that day if I was gonna make a trade. Essentially, the market had to fit me versus me trying to fit the market because if you do that, you end up chasing the market constantly, being reactionary, and you're not consistently executing an edge in the market. And everything about being consistently profitable as a trader is consistently executing an edge you have over time. So let me walk you through my strategy and then we'll jump into how to get started trading and scale your account over time. So every morning, I open up my charts to the S&P 500 view. First thing I'm looking for isn't entries, it's location. I go to the 15-minute chart and mark out key areas of support and resistance. These are the zones where the market has reacted before, where buyers and sellers have stepped in, and where price is most likely to reverse again. This gives me the big picture bias. And once I've mapped that out, I actually drop down to a one-minute chart. And this is where most traders actually go wrong, where I went wrong. They start scanning for every thing, every potential reversal, every continuation, every breakout. They try and react and chase to what the market's doing that day. They try and fit the market. They don't want to miss out on any money that could be made that day. I don't do that. I wait for four specific patterns to line up, which together make up my five-step entry checklist. Those criteria aren't met, I don't trade. If the market doesn't fit the checklist, I shut down for the day and go do something else. That's what makes this powerful. It removes decision fatigue, it removes emotion, and it removes that self-sabotage that plagues every single struggling trader. The plan is simple, it's rule-based, and it takes 30 to 60 minutes a day and fits into real life. You can go do this with a full-time job. So let me walk you through a real trade I took while I was streaming last week to thousands of people on YouTube for free of what I saw, why I entered, and how I managed the trade. This is something I execute every single day, and it's the exact same thing. So every single morning, when I open up my stream and I open up the charts at 9 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, the first thing I do is I look at the big picture. I look at the 15-minute chart for the S&P 500 futures and the NASDAQ, but I'll just look at the S&P 500 futures with this example to keep it quick for you, and I look at what is the big trend. Right now, the market has been in a massive uptrend, but also had sideways action. So generally, I've had my bias to the upside, but also understanding that, hey, we do have back-and-forth volatility, and so for reversals, that's great. I can either bet that we're gonna go up and continue with the trend, or if it gets a little overextended, I can look to bet to the downside. And so what I do is I draw, essentially, reversal zones. I like to use boxes, not actual specific lines. I'm not gonna go into it too much right now, but I'll leave a link up here for a video that dives into how I draw my level, because they're very important. That's the first part of the checklist, and what I'm drawing off, I've done this one, is all-time highs that were touched and kind of did a double-top here, and then there's a couple little pre-market overnight touches, and technically, the market would be right here when it was pre-market. When the market's in an uptrend, it's kind of hard to draw specific levels. And then I'll go to a five-minute chart as well, and you can kind of see this is where this level makes a little more sense. So my thought is, okay, well, if we come down to here, I'll look for a couple indicators that we might go to the upside, and I'll buy. Or if we pop up here, I'll look for reasons to short, and I'll bet to the downside. Again, I'm not trying to fit what the market does. I want it to fit me and my strategy, and my strategy is looking for a reversal off the lows or a reversal off the highs. And if it sets that up, I'll take a trade like I did on this specific day, or I'll just move on with the rest of my day. And so here to bring up a recording of this day and walk you through this trade that did actually set up, and again, this is something I live-streamed. I show this for free on YouTube in real time. So if this is something you wanna learn more about, I highly recommend watching that. And so first thing you can see in my checklist is a reversal zone. And so we're pretty much at this reversal zone. Now, breaking down through that is okay. To me, that can be called a failed breakout, where it starts to break it and then comes back in. But until then, I need to see that the downtrend breaks. A huge thing is, because I'm in a way looking for reversals, I need to see this trend that it's in currently right here to break, because otherwise, you're betting against a downtrend. And it could just bounce like this and continue lower. And so that's why I wanna see the trend start to make higher highs and higher lows. That's a very basic way of identifying a trend. So from there, the market essentially started to make a higher high here. You can see, to me, this is showing that it made this low right here is higher than this one. And so this could be, okay, it's starting to bottom. And if it breaks above here, that would be starting to make a new high. And so for me, that's confirmation that the trend could be reversing. And so right here, I put in a buy order that if the market broke above that high, I would jump in a trade. I jumped in a trade and then I looked to capture this move to the upside, because the market is pretty bullish. I'm buying off the lows. And so from there, I actually went half size on this because my read in the day was a little bit back and forth, but I still jumped in. I followed my strategy and I used risk management to deal with the other signals that was telling me that things weren't as good of a trade. You can see here, the market's very choppy. It's kind of all over the place. And so I had to give the trade a pretty wide stop. It took a long time to play out. I eventually, you know, I'm not gonna go into management too much right now, but I eventually went to break even. And then the market kind of moved up from there. And even though I'm half size, the overall big picture here was, I'm looking for a bottom of reversal, you know, to pull this big picture back into play, just to briefly show you, is I was looking for it to bounce here and then capture the swing to the upside, right? It's just a simple reversal. But because I used the big picture to show my levels, and then I can find on a one minute chart, which is where I actually trade, is I can get a very accurate entry and capture a pretty big move. And you can see here, I'm trading two ES contracts, S&P 500 future contracts, and that requires $1,000 worth of margin. We'll get to that in a second about how to get access to this and scale your account. It basically took me $1,000 at minimum. You probably need a little bit more, let's say 2,000 to be safe, but to capture a move of essentially $1,500 right here. And so this actually, I start to tighten up my stop loss here as we start to get to the other end, because this is all time high, since it's a reversal zone, I'm gonna expect this to slow down. So I'm gonna take my profits and get out, right? And so here, I just got out here at I think roughly above $1,500, which was two times my risk. So that was a gorgeous trade. I opened my charts at nine and to 11. This was a longer day than normal, but still big picture at the most two hours in the morning. Now I actually have a free PDF guide that has this five-step entry checklist in more detail for you. There's a link to click below, where you can download it for free. So in terms of creating a trading plan for you, some key things you wanna think about, and just basing this off of what my trading plan is, and what I kind of walked you through here, is you wanna think about your trading timeframe. What charts are you gonna look at? I look at the one-minute chart, the five-minute chart, and the 15-minute chart. And I'm very diligent on what I use for what. You know, I look at the five and 15-minute for bigger picture stuff, and then I execute on a one-minute chart. The next thing is, how long are you gonna trade each day? I only like to trade for that 60 to 90-minute window of technically when the market's open. Once it passes that, I get off for the day. And you wanna have a strict rule in place, because if you trade too long, it's very likely you start to FOMO and chase trades, because decision fatigue happens in trading. The longer you trade, the worse your decision-making becomes. And if you make bad decisions in trading, you lose money. And then create a strategy checklist, kinda like mine. Just something that you can consistently look at that helps you be methodical about trading. That is gonna help you be consistent over time. And then risk-reward. I didn't talk about this too much in my strategy walkthrough, but think about how much you're gonna target roughly every trade. Like for me, if the market doesn't look like it has at least two times my risk of movement in play, like for this trade here, I jumped in because I saw the potential to the upside of the market was at least two times my risk. But if it's a lot smaller, like let's say if I jumped in here, expecting it to go up here and then reverse, the risk-reward there isn't good anymore. And so let's jump into now how you can start doing this with $4 and scale up from there. And so the rough step process I think you should take, and I would take again if I started over, is demo trade. When you're first starting out, you're gonna make so many mistakes, and mistakes in trading is lost money. You will lose money every time you make a mistake trading. Sometimes you'll get lucky and actually you could win, but in the long run, you're gonna lose money. I know you really wanna jump into making real money because that's why we're all here, but you gotta go through it the right way. And so on NinjaTrader, you can start demo trading, which I'll leave a link for this below. You can start demo trading by opening an account and all it does, after the first two weeks, you actually get data for free, but after two weeks, you have to pay $4 a month for data. You essentially have to get live data. Any trading platform you sign up to to demo trade at will require you to pay money to get live data after a while, otherwise it's gonna be delayed by 20 or 30 minutes, which is just gonna suck. NinjaTrader at $4 a month is the lowest I've seen for futures. That's why I think it's a really good starting point, well, one of the reasons. From there, practice your strategy and then start to trade real money. Shift to opening a tiny account with 200, let's say $1,000. I think you can start as small as 200 if you really want, but 1,000 or 500 to 1,000 can give you a little more cushion with the idea that if you're looking to trade futures on let's say the MES, which is the micro futures contracts, that's what you're gonna wanna trade. You can, let's say I've entered in here. I was looking to capture this reversal here. This is on a one minute chart. I was gonna put my stop below these lows. I was gonna enter here. That risk right there could be $20 for one contract. That is super small size to be able to start with and based on the market movement right now, totally reasonable spot of where you would put your stop and enter and then you could capture this whole swing, take three X of $60. And again, you don't wanna be focusing on the money right away, but that's a good way. So, and then from there, you just scale up how much you're risking as you consistently find profitability. Now, I get asked about prop firms all the time. Should you trade a prop firm? And I always say, no, you should not start out trading a prop firm because actually statistically, it's been shown that most people just lose money with prop firms because about the same percentage of people that become successful at day trading can actually make money on trading prop firms. And the amount of money that it costs to trade on a prop firm, if you were consistently losing, paying their monthly fees, it can be hundreds of dollars a month to effectively be demo trading. You're losing a lot of money with the idea that they are making you think you have the potential to make a lot of money. Because how prop firms work is they'll give you, let's say $100,000 account once you pass all these tests. But to start passing those tests, it costs you a monthly fee. A lot of times they have huge sales to make this a lot less. But if you blow your account, you have to pay a reset fee. And just all these fees add up. And a lot of the statistics, I've seen statistics that show that to unlock something like this and to start get a payout, is it can be like $800 in fees just to get to the point where you can maybe start to get a real payout. And so as a beginning trader, these prop firms are not set up to actually help you succeed. They're just gonna drain your bank account. So I suggest if you really wanna go that route, do the demo trading, switch to real money account because you can start risking a really small amount of money. Get used to the emotions and that part of trading because that affects your trading and then switch to a prop firm. But again, only do that down the road once you've actually shown that you can consistently make money. Otherwise, they're just gonna cost you a lot of money. So when it comes to scaling, demo trade for, I would say, one to two months. You need that time to get used to things, used to the schedule, used to your strategy, but also used to different market cycles because what a lot of beginners struggle with is they'll have some initial success in a week or two, think they have it, then switch to real money or scale up their size and then the market will humble them because the market goes through cycles. It has times where it's just super bullish over a week and then starts to drop. And so you gotta learn how to adjust between these. And then once you have shown some consistency on the demo account, then take a stab at real money but risk as small as you can. What I highly suggest is using NinjaTrader and NinjaTrader as brokerage for this because what they have is if you look at the futures and the margin rates, this is what's most important for your trading and a small account is the amount of intraday margin required. And so on NinjaTrader, not all futures brokerages have this. They will have the normal day margin for some big brokerage platforms for one ES contract can be 14 or 15,000 or even 7,000. This is a lot of the overnight margin but sometimes even with this at 7,000, which would mean for the small account version, it would be $700. That makes it really hard for you as a small account to scale and start with a small size. But on NinjaTrader, the intraday margin that is required, basically the intraday is pretty much any time you can trade. Again, my futures video that explains a lot more in depth on how futures work will go into this a little bit more on detail. I highly recommend checking that after this but you only need for one ES contract, you need $500. For the micro version, you need 50. And so that makes it super easy to trade with a small account. And then there are fees and stuff, commissions, because things are so competitive across platforms now, these are pretty standard. And then exchange fees and all this, that's the exact same on any platform. And so I highly recommend to start demo trading and practicing this journey, go check out NinjaTrader. It's gonna be very, very helpful with executing this strategy. I've used it for over five years at this point. I find it super easy to execute quickly. The drawing patterns and indicators are really good on it and it's futures focused. It's not something like these other platforms that kind of trade everything. NinjaTrader is mainly focused on futures. And if you want to be focused on futures, I think it's good to have a platform that is also focused on that. I also have some third party indicators that I've created specifically for NinjaTrader that make the platform even better in my eyes. Now, if you wanna learn more about this strategy and futures, go check out that futures video right here. I will walk even more into the strategy but also how futures work, how you can profit from them and scale small trading out to a big one.