 The newest part maybe is just like trying to like judge like, where is there a fake breakdown? And how do I like, you know, add into that and like, you know, like GFAI, great example right there. Yep. You're pointing right at it. What's going on guys? Welcome to another episode of the after hours podcast. We have our usual gang with us today. We have Joe, Alex and Harry, but we are actually joined by a very special guest, someone who I've been super interested to talk to over the past couple of years. And I know everyone here is super excited to talk to him as well. We have Tim Grittani. So Tim, thank you for coming on. We really appreciate it, man. Thank you guys for inviting me. Cool to be here. Yeah. Of course. Great. Yeah, I was going to ask you to start off. I know you have kids and kids terrify me, dude. I'm 28 years old. My girl wants to get married sometime soon. And obviously the next thing after marriage is to have kids and I'm really terrified. So I want to kind of ask you what it's like been trading as a father and trying to manage that. Yeah. So I mean, truth be told, I'm a lot closer to retired now than actively trading. It's kind of involved into that over the last few years. I have two kids, four and two. When our first was born, you know, I started off just taking a few months totally off and adjusting. And then it kind of turned into slowly easing back into full time trading when he was getting old enough. He would like sit on my lap while I was trading during a period of time. And like one of my three monitors would be like kids videos to like keep him entertained and, you know, kind of kept up with doing it that way up until about gosh, it would have been July 2020, I think. And then around that time we talked about having our second and kind of knew that that'd be a game changer where, you know, then we'd be dealing with two crazy little guys instead. So I plan to, you know, totally pretty much step away once our second came along and I was working on some quant algo trading stuff with a coder friend of mine down in Puerto Rico. And I figured maybe I could try to let that take over completely. So since our second came along, it's been a lot more like I'm just showing up for the very best for at least that's my goal. And I'm trying to like kind of stay a little bit plugged in like, you know, keep an eye on Twitter to see what people are talking about. But unless there's like a huge sector really popping off, I'm trying to just more step away and enjoy time with my kids and not so much be as active on the trading side anymore, which has been at first an adjustment. You know, there's there's a lot of FOMO that kicks in. There's a lot of, you know, feeling bad about missing opportunities. But then you kind of refocus and realize like what's really important. That's absolutely terrifying. I think it's great you're holding your kid and I'm thinking of some stock going like parabolic and you just like, I got to put you over here. I'm just dropping them off. I mean, that's like, how did you deal with like that kind of in the moment? Like kind of like when you were trading, was there ever a moment where you're like, you almost misfire, you did something wrong because you had to kind of deal with your kid on your lap or like had to move them around? I don't remember anything specifically that would have been like, oh, that was my kid's fault or anything like that. My wife, my wife was a rock star. She, she did most of the work, you know, when I was actively trading with my oldest and he was kind of hanging out like she would swoop in and take him away if he was getting fussy or things were starting to get a little crazy. I mean, one thing I will say is that like, you know, parent fatigue and like sleeping bad at night and all that is like a very real thing. And our first one, especially had really rough nights. So there definitely were like some fatigue mistakes that were very avoidable. Like Kodak, I don't know if you guys remember when that thing went crazy, parabolic and there was, there was one day where I think it was just a fatigue mistake where I thought I was totally closed out of a short on that after day one and I had 5,000 shares open that I didn't know about, or maybe it's 10,000. But I didn't, I didn't figure it out until like mid-morning parabolic the next day and we lost six figures on it. At least it was just a partial. But my God, like I had never done anything like that before in my career. And I guess the only other thing really would have ever come into play would have been like just, you know, when you're tired, you make more emotional decisions. So, you know, like getting frustrated and not cutting a loser or taking an impulse trade because I'm like, oh, I'm going to try to trade. But really I feel like I should be spending time with my kids. So, you know, like stuff like that kind of creeps in like just weird little mental things when you're trading alone. At the end of the day, whether you make or lose money, it's pretty much all on you. If you are a lone survivor trader, you feel like at least me sometimes I feel like I could just risk abnormally large because at the end of the day I'm only going to hurt myself if it doesn't work out the right way. After you had a kid, did you feel like your risk tolerance changed after that? Yeah, that's a good question. In some ways, yes, like one huge shift for me is like, you know, like I've got the side algo quant stuff going on that still like is trying to do short selling, but like personally, I said I show up for the best stuff now mostly. Like I am pretty much not short selling at all. Like I think I've done one short personally in like the last two years. And other than that, like I'm just trying to long because it's much less stressful for me. There's a lot less chance of, you know, screwing up and winding up, you know, not fully covering something and having it go, you know, multiple hundreds of percent against you. So I've kind of chosen the path of least resistance in that sense where it's like, OK, let's just play the long side because I know I can do it and I know that it will stress me out less. But, you know, the flip side of that, too, is that, you know, as I did detach a bit, when I do have those days where I choose to show up and try to trade something, I do find myself going larger and attacking it with more size because like I kind of hit on earlier, there's that bit of me that's like, OK, if I'm going to show up, I want to make it worth it. Well, that's that's awesome because that's that's something that I always think in the back of my head is I consider myself someone that welcomes risk. I consider myself someone that enjoys it to an extent. And I guess my fear is that when I have more responsibility in my life, whether it be a wife, kids, more people that depend on me, I feel like maybe I will not be able to overcome the fear of that risk. So it's interesting to say that you actually you actually go even larger and bigger because, you know, you say, if I'm here, I'm just going to do it. I'm going to do it the right way. And that's a great way to think about it. Well, I mean, also, like, you know, there's always that angle of it where it's like, you know, how much of your net worth is really in your trading accounts or at stake. And, you know, that answer is different for everybody. But, you know, I definitely keep that in mind where it's like, OK, if I'm long something and it goes to zero, like, you know, that's my worst case scenario. And I still think about that first, you know, before I even enter a trade, like how bad could this really get? And can I live with that? So speaking of net worth, just kidding. Now, what weighs outside of the market? Because, you know, that's what everybody knows you for is is is short selling, well, in the beginning, longing OTCs and stuff like that. I mean, the trading tickers was the first DVD I ever watched. And I was like, this groundbreaking for me. I was like, dude, hell, yeah. But then you transitioned into the listed side of things and was just almost exclusively short. And then you've pretty much been a stock guy for the entire time. What what do you what do you how do you try to diversify or do you outside of stocks outside of the market? I haven't done a ton of diversification. I mean, we have we have a rental property. So I mean, we get a little bit of side income off of that recently with, you know, the interest rates getting so crazy started doing like CDs and things like that, just to get some kind of return on capital. But beyond that, I haven't really branched out too much. Like I never really got into like the whole crypto craze or any of that stuff. You know, much to my regret now. But yeah, yeah, I mean, I remember watching that back when Bitcoin was like a thousand. But it's like when MG, when it was MGTI and John McAfee, when he was alive, was front running all that stuff. Right, yeah. I mean, but yeah, I just I haven't really I guess my form of diversification is is the algo and automation stuff that I'm trying to accomplish because that is kind of the like, like, let's have a computer fully doing everything for me while I'm away. And I don't even have to worry about it. Like that that to me feels like passive income, even though it's still tied into the market. So maybe we could kind of touch on that a little bit because I find that stuff kind of fascinating and also similarly, I also kind of took that approach to I've been like the last like two, three years mainly have been going along as well because I've just seen so much risk just going short. Like in the past couple of years, I found it like it's definitely gotten like super, super crowded. So I've been doing a lot of longing as well. But maybe we could talk about the the AI and kind of or sorry, the algo process and kind of like how you've been like going about that type of stuff, like what's your kind of process of like kind of attacking and like getting involved in in like creating those algorithms and what are kind of maybe you could briefly touch on like something like your strategy and stuff like that. Sure, yeah, I mean, it's I'll be honest, I thought it was going to be much easier than it is. I thought it would be as simple as like trying to plug in rough versions of a few of my strategies and they do fine and like make a little bit on the side. And that's kind of the original goal, like let's just, you know, make a little bit of extra money on the side of the algeos. And it's kind of slowly involved into this or involved into this like crazy in-depth thing where I'm like having to get way more granular with it than I ever imagined, just because it is so difficult to, you know, trying to filter out the best plays and attack them in the best way. It started with longs, you know, same thing, like I didn't really understand if automating short selling would even be possible with the whole locates process and all that. And I mentioned earlier, I have a coder friend down in Puerto Rico and he he had a background in the coding and automating strategies from crypto, actually. And so he's been just a huge asset. Like I could not have done any of this without him just because I don't have any kind of real background in that stuff. So it turned into like his role would be put things in the code and my role would be try to provide like what should the trading logic of each strategy be. And I mean, we've had our ups and downs for sure. Like we really got into the long side of things when the market was at its hottest, when everyone was getting the stimulus checks and made something like $900,000 in January and February of 2021. And I was like around the time when we first launched it, like maybe a couple months after I was like, oh, my God, like, I'm a genius. I've got this. And like, but we had trained the whole thing on like, you know, data from when the market was at its best. And that was the problem because then when things cooled down in March and I was, you know, super distracted, my second son had just been born. I was I was just kind of like really hands off with it. And I was like, OK, like, sure, you know, the market can't possibly keep going at this pace, maybe it'll go sideways for a while. Maybe it'll draw down a bit, but like things will stabilize. It'll be OK. And I basically let it bleed off back down to 100K and it only took like six months for that to happen. So, you know, when the market cooled, it really cooled. And it kind of taught me a lesson about like seasonality and like how much like I hadn't considered that in the markets. Because it's one of those things I think we kind of recognize as traders like in the moment, day to day, week to week. And I was trying to do like a one size fits all approach where it's like, OK, here's a strategy that's just going to cover every market. And hopefully it's fairly consistent. So then after that, I was like, OK, maybe I should get into short selling and we figured out that we could automate through DAS and we could automate the locate process and we could basically get all that firing completely on its own. And that, you know, that was a little bit more consistent and a little bit better on the approach I tried to take with that wasn't so much true to like the way I had traded personally. I was more trying to do like take a really wide stop approach and try to have a high win rate. And the problem with that was just that I think I was over-optimizing where I'd be backtesting these strategies and maybe tweaking my criteria a little bit too much and trying to make it a little bit too pretty. And so we go on these, you know, I think it's a problem. A lot of traders face in their personal trading where it's like, OK, you've got a couple of weeks where things are pretty consistent. You've got decent gains and then a bad day wipes out that two weeks. And that I think we built back up to about positive 700 or 800 K once we incorporated the short selling. But we kept having those big bloody red days. And I got super sick of having to sit through those because those were like, you know, it just it would put me in like a bad mood. Like to see the algo have a negative six year day. And it's like, oh, my God, it's trading so stupid. Would you sit there and watch what it was doing? Not every day, but a lot of days I would be pretty like, you know, you can push notifications to my phone if a position was being taken and stuff like that. So I knew what was going on and I could tell pretty quickly in the day if something was turning to spiral out of control and take loss after loss after loss. So I think it was December. I shut them down. I basically just shut them all off. And I was like, I need to redesign all of these because they're just not good enough. And that's what I've kind of been up to for the past four months. And I'm just starting to put together new ones and put live new ones actually in this last week. Where it's totally opposite approach where it's like, OK, now we're really tight on the risk management win rate is way down from what it was before. But now risk reward is like way better. So we're going to see how it goes this time. Are there any liquidity constraints with the algo? Like do you face yourself kind of being stuck in maybe an illiquid stock or oversized in certain stocks or anything like that? Yes. So that is one of the criteria for the play selection that we put in, you know, even before I even really start trying to optimize and make them better, it's like I just like right off the bat try to cut out anything that's illiquid. So we say like, OK, it's got to be trading a certain amount of dollar volume per minute or putting through a certain number of trades per minute. And that's kind of its starting point. But even even with that, we still have issues with some liquidity stuff. Like you mentioned where there's some slippage on the stops. Or I think the bigger deal, honestly, is missing entries. You know, like if you if you have one of those stocks that spikes up and you try to short it on the backside when it's just in its free fall collapse and it never, you know, bounces back up to fill the rest of your position, you know, like missing those wins, especially in something that's supposed to be low win rate, high risk reward, like missing those wins is really painful to the overall results. So I'm sorry. So how do you offset those situations? You know, when you do all your backtesting, most of those times you're assuming fills, you know, perfect world, you're assuming fills. But then when you go and deploy it, like you're saying, you miss those liquidity situations where you're trying to catch it when it's popping and you're adding liquidity versus taking liquidity. So did you ever do an experimentation between that? So with the with the exit side, like stopping out in the slippage, what I did for this generation of play is that I find in the data we pulled what was the highest price within five seconds of the stock stopping me out and reusing that is like, what would the exit be? So that's kind of like the worst case scenario, because if we're firing out a market order, like we're going to fill in five seconds. So we're kind of building it off of a worst case scenario from the start. Like, like what's the worst lipid we might take? And can we still build a possible strategy or build a lost my word, build a profitable strategy, you know, even with that worst case slippage factored in. So now I think I'm going to do something similar on the entries just because there probably does have to be a little bit of chasing involved with the entries. I don't know if I want to be firing market orders at the entries, you know, chasing a stock going down. But, you know, maybe maybe use limit orders to chase a percent or something like that. And again, just, you know, when I when I go into the back testing and looking at, you know, how this had done on the past data, you know, just just factor that in as well. You know, okay, we've had to chase one percent on the entry. Here's what we would have been if we hadn't filled on our stop for another five seconds after the stop triggered. And does it all still net out to profitable and just kind of hope that's good enough from there. Absolutely. Did it ever freak you out having risk on the table with you kind of not in control? Was it something like, because like I know for me, I'm very much a control freak. So is it weird for you to like watch this thing trading your money and like your capital and like almost like knowing like whatever happens, happens, or did it become easier like over time? It's pretty easy because my my coder tests things pretty well before we put anything live. So like if we're testing something like it might only be taking 50 share positions initially just to make sure everything fires as expected. Like my biggest fear would be something doesn't stop out to shut it stopped out. Like, I mean, you know, like something like like the weirdest one actually would have been on top on Friday. We weren't involved in that. But like that, that did not break high of day until after hours, I want to say. And and it volatility halted five minutes before close, which is normally about when we're closing out a position that, you know, hasn't gotten stopped out. So I messaged him on Friday because I was like, OK, like we need to make sure we have something in place for this because like if we wind up in a situation where, you know, we volatility halt don't cover and then there's nothing in place to take it like to close the position after hours, like we could end up in a situation like this. Does the algo work pre and post market? Like it can. Yeah, it can. It can route to like ARCA or Ajax or wherever. You know, any any route you have on your dash terminal it can use. So you just have to make sure you're routing to the right place. But but yeah, the biggest fear would just be not not getting out of a trade which should get out of a trade. And, you know, we've been doing it long enough that I kind of trust that we're not going to run into something like that. So so as far as as far as having risk on the table, just day to day that I'm not in control of, you know, that just kind of comes down to position sizing that's being comfortable with how much we're risking per trade. And yeah, I'm pretty detached about it. I'd say. Speaking of those stop loss situations, back when RKDA ran and James and I are really attached to this stock in a very negative way and then yeah, Harry on the opposite side. But RKDA was a situation where I learned the hard way that certain routes such as Ajax and Arka have limit bands to what they will accept on a stop market order. So for example, if it limits up and then gaps up past that limit band, which I believe it's I had to talk to Cobra, I talked to Chad at Cobra and I was like, what happened, dude? And because it just kept going and I never stopped out and I had to physically like cancel orders and reenter. And they had to do a bunch of research, but it turns out that in that particular time and I don't know if that's really the case, but whatever it was, was that Arka and Ajax, where they were routing their stops through, had limitations to how much slippage past your stop loss a market order would fill. And that creeped me to hell out, man. And from there on out, I was tripping balls always to use a market stop in a in one of those cases where I felt like, well, what if this limits up on me or something like that from the short side, obviously? But yeah, that was I don't know if that's anything you've tested or anything you've seen ran through. But that was a weird situation, man. Yeah, we had some kind of a similar thing like going into volatility halts where certain routes, you know, if you're trying to shoot the order through like right as it's halting or something that like it just rejects and then the Algo like our Algo was being too dumb to like realize that the order rejected. So I thought the order was placed. So we worked through that maybe a year ago or so. But yeah, we've gone through similar things. Yeah, I just thought that maybe we could start on some of the sector plays and switch gears into that because we just had AI and obviously AI was a pretty big sector craze. So did you trade any kind of AI stocks? I did. Yeah. Yeah. I was I was around for those. I totally missed it back round one in January or February or whenever it was. Yeah. I somehow it just totally slipped past me at that time. But this time I think it was the first thing that kind of I caught wind of was the AI, you know, the stock AI was breaking out. Yeah. And that kind of intrigued me because it was like, OK, maybe this is what will kind of reignite the sector for round two. And this time I want to be there for it. So my process for that kind of was just immediately start researching, you know, what, you know, AI stocks are out there. You know, I put the quotes because, you know, a lot of low flowed stuff kind of takes advantage of sector crazes. But yeah, I kind of started off going through Fendi's and finding, you know, the lowest flow ones that were in the same sector and going over to Dilution Tracker, which is still a huge time saver for me because I don't have to comb through filings then. And, you know, what, you know, what could possibly drop an offering on me? What can't and came up pretty early with the stuff like CX AI, GFAI, BFRG, a couple of others that never really ran too well. FRGT, I think was one of them. AIXI, I think that was a that was close to having that like $8 break up. I never really got there. But yes, I mean, I kind of like came up with a low flow list. And then from there was just kind of looking for ones that weren't too varied in previous resistance from January or February. Because, you know, there was stuff out there. Like I wouldn't call it low flow. But like SOUN or BB AI, you know, like those things had run back then, but they had run with like, you know, 40, 50, 100 million volume days, I think. And yeah, yeah, there's 100 million there on SOUN. So like stuff like that was like, OK, yeah, that might rebound a bit. But I don't expect that to have some big crazy move. And like, I'm trying to be present for just the very best stuff. So I kind of like wrote those off. And I came back, I came out for a GFAI. Like I had GFAI on that first day when it was at like $5 or maybe $550. And I had it through the next morning and sold it at like 11 or 12 into the morning spike, which was, you know, in hindsight, not the best sell. And I don't think I had a ton of size behind that one, like maybe four or five thousand shares. But still, it was like a nice trade on that. And then I kind of was kicking myself a week or two later when GFAI broke out. I did buy that breakout. I started scooping up a bunch of low float once again, just kind of in anticipation because I'm figuring, you know, all of these chat rooms are going to start hitting low float stocks. And CXAI, I had tried it back around the time GFAI had its first run and it never really got any volume, never got anything going. I think I think I was out of that for about break even. And then the morning that it, the day it went two to what two to nine, it looks like I bought that pre-market because pre-market had had more volume than I think it had had any other day. And, you know, I love the daily chart, the limited history, the kind of lack of volume on it. And so I was buying dips pre-market and, you know, texting one of my trader friends as it's having its morning spike being like, I'm making the exact same mistake as I'm going to GFAI here, but I'm selling it and I sold it like in the threes. Like it was, you know, I had more sides behind that one at least, but still like that was really frustrating for me that like I'm still not that great at holding onto these things because like, you know, that emotional side of trading still does kick in for me a bit where it's like, you know, the thing is up from 150 to three in a couple of hours. And I'm starting to think about like, oh, I'm going to be so pissed if this like reverses and I give back a bunch of my gains. And like, I never even really let it have any kind of like trend break or any kind of, you know, negative move. Yeah, like I was like, it looked like that scary bullish chart you've ever seen, like in terms of wall, like it never even really cracked below VWAP during regular market hours. So yeah, like I've got a ways to go on my, you know, holding these things. I also had INPX, I think, on this day going into the next one, whatever day gapped up over a dollar. And I sold, I sold that one too late. Yeah, INPX, I bought this one after the dip and the hold and took it all into this morning and got out. I kind of had to chase the weakness down into the low ones. Unfortunately, it was really bad sells on that one. And it was like, it was like, this one actually had dilution. It was it was sloppy. Like, I mean, I made out really well on my I longs, but at the same time, like it was really poor execution and a lot of room to improve. So it's kind of like, you know, you know, as a trader, there's always mixed emotions, right? You know, like there's some things you can say, hey, I did that really well. And there's always some things where it's like, hey, I could definitely improve at that. You know, sorry, James, go for it. I'm just because it's funny hearing you like almost excited about the longs when I just know you as such like a short seller. And I think it's like he's like a whole time. I'm just like, who is this guy? I thought we were interviewing him, I'm like, what is happening right now? Did you didn't get involved in the short side at all? And any of the I did, I'm I'm honestly like, I feel like I'm too out of practice at this point, partially. So let me one thing for some context here, part of what happened with the short selling is that when we went live with all these short selling algos through the DAS terminals, it was it was a situation where it was like, I can't be logged in in both places. So if I tried to like log in and trade personally, then it would kick my algos off or my algos would just like kick me off every like 20 seconds when they make sure they're connected or something like that. And then later I found out from the brokers, it's like, no, we can just make you a second username. And like, then both usernames can be connected to the same account. So like, this doesn't even have to be an issue. But I don't know, like, like I said, I just I was getting too stressed out by shorting and I wanted to be like stress free as much as possible. So I let myself get way out of practice with my shorts. And now it's not a huge part of what I do when I do briefly show up to place trades. And I do miss it a bit because definitely there's a lot of missed opportunity there on the short side. Would you say that you're mostly doing like breakouts a lot on the long stuff like that? Yeah, I'm definitely still looking a lot for like the big picture multi-day breakout type situation. You know, a an intraday piece to it that I've kind of added for like looking for ads is it seems like there's a ton of fake breakdowns like where it's like, there's like a support crack like right around VWAP where it cracks under VWAP and then somehow, you know, you would expect to see a waterfall down instead of it holds itself and just perks right back up. Like I love using situations like that to add to a position and then just using whatever that little crack low was as my new risk level. So I mainly was looking for situations like that where the daily chart I think is like really primed to possibly go. There's not much of a float to it. And the intraday is doing sneaky trappy shit. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, it's funny. Do you think this strategy of like, because you again, I've known you as such a short biased guy, you know, is this strategy of you learning to do breakouts? Is this something that you think a lot of other traders can replicate? Or was it something that like really took you a long time to even kind of have the stomach to try it after coming from shorting? Right. I mean, I was I was like, one of the first strategies I ever got good at was OTC breakouts, unlike the scammy OTC pump and dumps. So like multi-day breakout, like has always kind of been like a big piece of what I did with listed stocks. I mean, of course, it was tougher and a lot choppier. But I did build some comfort in that like back when I was still doing a lot of active trading on my own. So it's really not like that new of a thing to me. If there's like the newest part maybe is just like trying to like judge like, where is there a fake breakdown? And how do I like, you know, add into that like, you know, like GFAI, great example right there. Yep, you're pointing right at it where that that looks like it could suck her in some shorts or scouts and longs or whatever. And then somehow it just catches and continues. But yeah, like I, I don't have much fear at all with longs like it's very easy and very comfortable for me because I know my stops and I know what I'm going to lose if that stop gets hit. And you know, I factor some slippage in of course, but I'm very rarely surprised, you know, by how much money I lose when a long trade goes wrong. So it's it's very easy for me. And as far as up whether other traders can do that, like longer short, I think I think the risk first mentality is just the way to go and that can make trading much less emotionally draining. You know, if you if you kind of know your worst case scenario, as long as you actually stick to your stops and take the trade off. I know one question that like definitely a lot of traders when they're watching this will definitely comment or ask and that's going to be do you would you rather anticipate the sector plays or would you kind of wait for the volume to come in? Like so a lot of the time, like the volume will kind of come in and we'll get over that breakout level and run intraday. But also sometimes you'll wake up and it's already blasted in pre market and you've already kind of missed the entry, you know, and it's already fading back down to that kind of level. So would you recommend people anticipate a little bit or would you recommend people just kind of be patient and wait for that kind of intraday setup to kind of come? Yeah, that's that's a good question. I mean, it was it was a mix of both for me this last time where you know there were some anticipation plays that tried and you know that was maybe 50 50 whether it worked or not. And then and then yeah, there were the ones where it was more like it had blasted already like CXI pre market that day and I was having to buy a dip and kind of like, you know, anticipate that it wasn't over yet. I think that gosh, it might just come down to personality type like which one is easier for you. I feel like I personally feel a little more fear in the ones that have already run a bit and are having a pullback because at this point like now they're already trading a lot of volume and they're already are people you could say oh man, they're bagged and like it might be hard for the thing to come back and break to new highs. The anticipation trades the biggest hurdle is liquidity because like I don't want I don't want to anticipate on something that is trading a lot of volume already I feel like I'm chasing like you know the idea is kind of like try to start accumulating something that's pretty low float before it's really started to show any activity and what I like about those is that you know if there's not been a lot of chasing already if there's not been a lot of volume already well if the sector comes and goes and it never really takes off for whatever reason like there's not a lot of people to panic out like nothing's really gonna like tank that stock on you as long as you're okay with your selection and you didn't grab something super dilutive or anything like that so so I did have a few like that where it was like okay I grabbed like 50,000 shares of this liquid stock and then it's not really working and how do I get out of this and I found like you know breaking up my orders into like little you know 500 to 1,000 share pieces and just like taking off like you know 50 little trades like you know e-trade doesn't charge you per trade or anything like that it's free trades so you're not like eating commissions or anything like that so I'm kind of like you know tiptoeing in with tiny little orders and tiptoeing out with tiny little orders and trying not to like get too noticed because like if I put a 50,000 share selling all at once like yeah the market's gonna move I'm not gonna fill Jack but you know you fire through little thousand share market orders like you felt like that yeah that's definitely one thing that I've been working on as far as my own trading trying to find that balance between like anticipating and also you know you see that volume come in intraday and you're like okay this is it this is exactly the confirmation that I'm looking for so yeah that's definitely something that I've definitely been working on so even for me that answers kind of some questions for me as far as kind of like what you do too so that's kind of cool and then Harry buys it and they dump it exactly that's great in other news though what the is happening to GFA I what if I did today yeah I hadn't looked at that in a few days wow that's what Alex what they do at an offering today oh that's awesome that's horrid oh man I was just Peter and I was Peter through these charts and I was like why is the bid so much look oh no it's not that offering today proposed offering did you catch any of those did you catch any of that sector bit sorry what was that the Chinese stuff that's happening today yeah I've been watching that a little bit like so when it comes to like the whole like playing sectors thing for me um I like to more focus on the sectors like whether some kind of legitimate news behind them you know like AI you know you got all the chat GPT stuff going on like the last sector I really participated hard in was the oil stocks back last March when the Russia Ukraine war started like you know I like there to be like a decent fundamental reason behind the sector as well like with the Chinese stuff it's just like okay these are all scammy companies and everybody knows it so let's chase them so it's like I don't really get as involved in that like I was definitely watching the top after hours on Friday or whatever day it was and pretty amazed at its action and I did actually consider trading a few of them Monday morning because we saw all these sympathy ones gapping up and so like I think the plan going into Monday for me was like okay let's look like I kind of assumed top was just going to fall apart Monday it actually did way more than I expected but I was thinking like okay if top is collapsing on Monday let's have a watch list of other known scammy Chinese tickers and see if there's any that you know gap up and are holding up decently midday and the only one I can remember that really did that and made a big move was H U D I my my algo was actually short that around 415 I think from its quick morning spike and then it covered it right at the 450 break so I was I was pretty pleased at that quick yeah for sure but then I was kind of like hey why didn't I like why why did I stop watching this why didn't I buy this but you know that that's okay like the China stuff is a little scary for even me yeah for sure that's funny it's for you now like everyone knows when you're shorting like the sector plays is like a lot of times like people are taking losses on the way up it's just a very difficult thing to time the top and I know in the past that's something used to do do you prefer this kind of method now I know you're out you're longing now but is this something like do you ever miss kind of that the collapse day and like taking advantage of that side or is that something that you just completely pushed out of your system now um no I wouldn't say it's completely pushed out of my system I mean that that kind of is like like you know I said I totally redesigned the short algo and that's what their ultimate purpose is going to be is being there for collapse day and that that's going to be their style too is they're going to take their paper cuts on the way up you know losing R here and R there but you know hopefully when it nails it it's you know plus five or plus 10 or something like that um so so yeah I'm just trying to automate that because uh especially knowing that like it will stop itself out no matter what like it's going to hit like the offer of high day breaks like I I think that I like knowing that I can't personally get stubborn um it's out of my hands uh so I think I'll get my fix that way um but yeah it can be it can be a little hard to see some of these things tank just be like I used to be involved in that like I used to be I used to be adding on that pop and uh covering this washout on a lot of these uh on a lot of these uh breakout plays how big is filings like how big does that come into play like if you see a breakout at like three bucks and they have warrants that like let's say four bucks would you would you like automatically think like okay they might try and break it out over this level get to these warrants or like maybe they have like baby shelf rule and they like want to run it to this price somewhere to get out of that uh how much does like your tinfoil hat come on when you're when you're longing oh yeah the tinfoil hat's always on I'm always thinking about that stuff um I I will play those differently I will be more conservative for sure um I'm very I'm very paranoid I have been caught in more than enough offerings like I I just don't want to put myself in that position as much as I can so uh yeah like I will I will not take serious size on something where it's like oh they've got an s3 that could go effective any minute or something like that um or you know if there are levels with warrants I'll probably be a seller into one of those levels in a lot of cases I just avoid those though like I'm just looking for the cleanest ones where there's like very little going on the ones that maybe catch my attention um where I might make exceptions is um like I'm trying to think of a good example like maybe back last March CEI like everyone knows how horrifyingly dilutive CEI is and uh that thing was just putting in like day after day after day of like 40 50 60 million shares of volume and kind of like slowly building this multi-day chart and uh it eventually did have some kind of breakout and big move and I think I participated in that one um say what yeah I think it would have been like February and March 2022 but um but yeah like things like that where it's like there's just sustained really high volume and the stock is not falling apart despite the dilution that everyone knows is there then my cheap oil hat you know comes on even a little bit more and it's like oh they're trapping shorts and uh then I'll probably let myself get involved and I like to get involved with ones like that anyway because the liquidity is there like it's really not that hard to take size when the liquidity is there yeah bba uh or sorry bedbath and beyond is another one that uh add that type of chart where like we just kept getting that volume day after day after day and that one just you know before they went bankrupt before they did that whole offering and stuff like that that one was also one similar definitely to cei where yeah you you were asking about um if there's any like times I like miss shorting like this is the one like I I am very upset with myself for not making an exception and shorting this after they put out that filing with that awful dilution a few months ago like I don't know what I was thinking but like that was as much of a layup as you get so I think I'm going to have to adjust a little bit to maybe keep a half an eye out for another one like this I'm back to the dark side we're way down I was getting really excited when they were ramping it up towards like 50 cents the other day I was I had my green and I was like me too I was also watching that yeah I was I was getting ready and they had a meeting coming up in a couple weeks for like discussing a reverse split and everything and I was I was like gearing up I was getting ready to put in a huge short on that and uh and they ruined it with all the bankrupt seniors oh I mean it's gotta be it's gotta be hard bouncing back and forth especially you know if like you're waiting like you say you really want to come out for the best setups and it's like I feel like you could easily get suckered back into almost trading daily you're like oh well gotta make an exception for this one now and then I gotta make an exception that one I did that I did that more a couple years ago I'd say and it was actually after the after the oil sector I kind of got myself a little bit addicted back into it again where it was like okay that oil sector went really well let's let's keep this going and then I traded really sloppy for a few weeks and was like okay that's enough of that where it just was too much back and forth and I was not making effective decisions so that kind of you know it's kind of one of those things like you get burned and then you learn your lesson I have a question about stress how do you do you mention how shorting becomes stressful from time to time long it'd be stressful too if you get caught on offering but my question is how do you deal with stress how do you release stress and do you have any advice for people that maybe stress in their trading what they can do to kind of release some of that tension yeah I mean the big one for me back in the day especially was just like finding time to go to the gym and work out like or like beach walks like a big one for me after my son was born and I was in Puerto Rico was you know I'd be like end of a trading day I'd be like totally fried and stressed out and then I'd like pop them in this baby carrier and just like walk the beach with them for like 30 to 45 minutes like that was awesome like just getting out and moving around I think that there's also a discipline component of that too like you know a lot of us don't really want to work out and so when you're overcoming that and forcing yourself to go and do it that can kind of translate into trading a little bit almost where it's like okay you're exercising discipline in another area of your life so now it makes it a little easier to exercise discipline in front of the trading screen so yeah just getting getting active I think was like one of the most effective things I ever had for stress management makes sense I like that do I mean I think that it's pretty obvious now that the market has completely changed you know since you started you know since trading we're talking small caps and everything has completely evolved do you think that one now it's hard it's more difficult now more than ever to get into trading and if so do you have any sort of advice that you would give to someone interested in pursuing trading kind of in the current market yeah um I mean is it more difficult to get into it in some ways yeah like I feel like some of the patterns are a lot less clean than they used to be I mean I know one of my favorites used to be like overextended gap down and now it seems like that setup is just like dead like you know not now today's version of overextended gap down is like the stock closes at its highs and gaps down 30% it's like how do I play this so I mean stuff like that going away definitely makes things a little more challenging but at the same time I feel like there's more volatility than ever and uh volatility is really where the real opportunity comes from and then it's just figuring out ways to take advantage of it so I mean the advice for anybody starting out I mean I think it's a lot of a lot of similar stuff to like you know when any of us would have started out where it's like you know you've really got to take your time keep your size under control know you're gonna make mistakes you're probably gonna have a blow-up or two and just not letting that take you out of the game and be like irreparable damage because those are some of the best lessons and meticulous meticulous tracking like I've always been all about that and I always will be all about that like it doesn't matter you know what variation of the setup is showing itself from year to year like you know try to try to stay on top of it with data and figure out like you know just whatever you can try to figure out how to take advantage of certain moves you know figure out what areas interest to you fit your personality and then just get to work do you do you think that with like the rise of chat gbt with like the rise of ai obviously it's way quicker to study and to learn like compared to like a couple years ago the learning curve has been accelerated like crazy you know I can go in to chat gbt and ask it all type of questions about the filings I can go in and ask it questions about a lot of trading things and it will spit me out the answers right away so do you think with the more information that's coming into play that things could potentially change and like patterns could stop working or do you think with like like do you think like there's going to be less opportunity because of the access in like the information or do you think it's just going to stay the same and like nothing really to worry about I think it goes along with like patterns evolving I think that things will probably get a little more difficult in that sense just that like we'll have to kind of adjust our expectations like you know we already talked about over extended breakdowns but like multi-day breakouts like aside from when there's like a big sector running it seems like a whole lot of those stuff now compared to like it used to be a much higher success rate so something like that as well like I think it will just come down to selectivity like I think a lot of the extreme scenarios that we all profit off of are never really going to go away you know like you get a bunch of shorts trapped in a play like that's going to have some kind of blow offish and there's going to be you know maybe an opportunity to get along that if you can recognize it or an opportunity to get short that once it's on the backside so it's you know it probably comes more down to selectivity than anything and like just conditioning yourself to be a little more patient for the most extreme and potentially profitable situations but it will be interesting to see how things change with you know the increase in automation and AI and all that like it's it's going to be a journey so a lot of stock traders you know novice people newbies that are coming into the market you know they they've got varying goals backgrounds anything like that some may have large amounts of savings some may have small amounts of savings and they they a lot of people that come into this they look to day trading as like a solution to their financial challenges so for those folks what do you think that what measures could new traders regardless of whatever their motivations are what what do you think they could implement to protect themselves in the unpredictable world of trading man the million dollar question yeah that's hard just because I mean I I know that when I started I probably didn't have my head in the right place and it was like let's get rich quick and let's do like let's rush this process and like I was trying to like follow trading alerts you know like I was doing everything wrong from the start because like that's just what I want a trading to be like a way to quickly boost my bank account and I mean we all we can really do I feel like is just like keep repeating the same warnings over and over like you've got to trade small you've got to like expect things to be much harder than you think they're going to be other than other than just saying that and helping people listen I don't know what you can do because like I I you know I've for for years I've said that same message over and over and I'll still get messages where it's like hey do you think I should do credit card debt to fund my trading account no don't like people are going to do what they're going to do but man I hope they listen because it just also makes trading so much easier if you're not doing it from position of like I have to make money today yeah like if you can actually come to the market and just say hey I'm going to see what presents itself and I'm going to try to trade it as best I can like you're going to be such you're going to be so much more effective as a trader than if you're pushing and trying to make things happen and it doesn't matter why you're pushing like I'll I'll show up on a day where I say hey I want to trade and I'll try to push and make things happen because I want to feel like it was worth it to like step away and be in front of the screen and I'll have a crappy day like even now like you know you've got to put yourself in front of the market with the right mindset yeah well everyone knows you as you know the the icon of short selling that came out of that age but a lot of people don't know that you know just a regular guy that's just really damn good at trading stocks so what I'd like to do is I'd like to finish up but just a lightning round of questions here for you just regular guy questions right okay completely unrelated to trading so just be ready here you go okay all right so what was your first job was my first job yeah my first job was I was at a Barnes & Noble and I basically worked the Starbucks counter and the Barnes & Noble for maybe 75% of my time there so the secret being a successful trader is being a Dorista what the I heard this before what's going on Alex what's going on now that's crazy all right what's your favorite go-to meal you get one it's your last day on earth you get one meal to finish up what is it gonna be I'm I'm on a ramen kick right now so it's been I'm having ramen like three four times a week so it's probably a big wall of ramen what's your good good ramen not not not instant ramen oh good it's like stop lying ramen I was like damn the AI law the AI alga was tough right yeah what's your favorite hobby outside of trading um probably right now bowling I did a league my first league in like four years hell yeah man and I'm I'm really getting into it again and I'm like man I want to beat my brother because he's a year younger than me and he's always been a better bowler I can't handle that what book are you currently reading I'm not currently reading any books all right favorite non-financial podcast or tv show what do you listen to or watch the most um I really enjoyed severance I was I was big on season one of severance dude that show is wild yeah I know right dude I I still can't figure out what's happening I'm loving succession right now I don't know that counts as non-financial but I think it is I'm sad that's ending but did you ever watch billions yeah billions I've been yeah that's uh last season of that's coming out later this year yep Paul uh Damian Lewis is back too he's Bobby good news nice what you had about what is your most memorable trading mistake and what did you learn from it oh man it might have been that Kodak uh thinking I was totally covered and I wasn't if it's if it's not that then it's the $290,000 lake loss where uh it was just you know short failed to stop out add add add add add and then just like blow out cover because I was too scared and the lesson the lesson there more losses like that to learn the lesson but the lesson was if the stock is beyond my stop loss point and I'm still in it for some reason never ever add under any circumstance most memorable vacation you've ever taken oh um I think going to Florida for the first Falcon Heavy launch that was uh that was really cool I enjoyed that a lot if you weren't a trader what would you have done I don't know I think about that a lot I so after Barnes and Noble I was at state farm for a while I like worked summers full-time at state farm and I I was not a great college student like I didn't really have any internships or anything lined up I was a finance major I had no idea what I was going to do with it so I think I probably would have slid back into that state farm role and just kind of gotten trapped at state farm I have one last question do you think you'll be trading stocks for the rest of your life in some capacity yeah I think I'll always show up for the big stuff at least like I I don't know if I would have thought I would have like retired to this extent already just because like I mean the kids have been in daycare for like a year now like I do have mornings free again I just am like not really using them like I'm kind of enjoying the detachment and not having to show up every day to trade so I'm sure I'll always be someone involved in the markets but I don't know if I'll be back to like totally full-time and if you could have dinner last question if you could have dinner with any historical figure who would it be and why oh my gosh you're gonna stumb me with that one I have no idea I'm not a big history guy I don't think much about the past so I don't anyone you look up to anyone we look up to that's a tough one too who do I look up to yeah that's a great question I don't know Harry Haas that's a tough one that's that's a stumper we gotta work on that yeah that's one to think about maybe I'll tweet an answer on that when I need to think about that a little bit there you go I feel like I'm unreasonably stumped for that question but like you should have something but like it's just not I should have something but I don't and I don't I'm sorry to everybody any up-and-coming talent on like social media Twitter whatever like up-and-coming traders that you've been kind of monitoring or looking at or you think have like potential um there's there's a couple quant guys that like I kind of follow where they like I know they're doing that whole algo thing also and lots of really heavy back testing I'm trying to think of their Twitter handles now one is I think like uh I think he's a teenager still maybe Xander or something like that and uh he looked like he was on some really good results for a while and then day trading zoo I think that's another one and it seems like he's uh you know he's he's very intelligent on the quant side of things and he's got his account at all time highs I think so you know guys like that I'm interested to see how they do because I think their data guys with like a lot better of a data background than me so it's always exciting to kind of see what's possible for people like that because I know they can take it so much further than I can what's one thing on your bucket list that you haven't accomplished yet that you want to I want to do one of those like SpaceX or Blue Origin like civilian flights like whenever whenever those are a little more available you're talking right up Alex's alley right yeah all right I got 500,000 a separate bank account waiting for them to bring me I'm waiting for it yeah I don't know if I want to do the trip all the way to Mars like I think six months on a rocket might like freak me out yeah like one of the little civilian flights we'll start there and see how it goes awesome man well thanks so much for being here dude it's been a yeah thanks again guys that was awesome thanks