Chapter 0. What it takes to be a seven-figure trader, and how it all started.

9 min readOct 14, 2022

Many talented people were forced to find new means of living right after Covid hit us. Some of them happened to be damn good writers. I am an avid reader of 10+ substacks weekly. Different opinions from intelligent people can benefit one’s thought process and overall understanding or “feeling” of the world.

However, I find trading industry storytelling is non-existent as a genre across many platforms, while the emotional intelligence part is crucial to developing your own “feel” for the markets. Instead, the macro view, meaningless technical analysis articles, and news aggregation narratives dominate content platforms.

The story I will tell, and the format I will use are slightly different. My journey started in 2019 with me joining a proprietary trading desk called “Albatross.” Since I’m still holding a broker-dealer license before I get into any details, please read the disclosure below:

None of the things you might read in my journals or any other types of posts is financial advice. To be clear: Nothing here is financial advice.
The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.
I’ve never worked at a trading desk or interacted with other traders.
All the images you might find across the whole story are 100% done in photoshop. I’m really good with it.

With the legal part out of the way, let’s shift back to where I was in 2019. I had quite a basic understanding of markets, and my risk per trade was $20. This is where it all started on 01/04/2019:

And this is how it was going on my best day of trading carrier on 02/11/2021:

Since my first trading day and in a matter of 2 years and 3 months, my account net PnL has grown enough to touch seven figures. By any means, this is not an impressive number at all as a measure of net worth. However, I find the path from 0 to 7 figures fascinating and jam-packed with the worldwide events that contributed to this rapid growth. It is essential to add that my drawdown on the account never exceeded 3% at any given moment, and for the most part, all my losses were well within the 1% range. It was a pure grind out: a day in, day out. How did all of this happen?

I got lucky to be in the right place at the right time, surrounded by the right people, and yeah… I was obsessed and sacrificed most of my time with loved ones to trading gods.

#Live, breathe, eat, and trade 24/7.

It was not a one-night success story. In fact, it was very monotonous and meticulous work spiced up with my inability to control my own emotions or follow my own rules, which resulted in heartbreaking experiences I had to endure. Overall, trading is all about endurance, stamina to keep going, and capital preservation first, but this is a topic for a separate conversation.

There were several factors contributed to what happened next:

First, Albatross had a perfect technical stack and good connections in the financial world. We had access to all the prominent banks’ dark pools. Generally, as a retail trader, you don’t need it at all, but in our case, it enabled those of us who meant pushing size to get in and out frequently with minimum slippage and without moving markers (except small caps). It also allowed a possibility of scalping and market making. I’ll dive into these strategies later on in this web 3 book. Overall I’ll be introducing setups and information in the same chronological order I learned them. It might not always be the case, but that’s the plan.

Secondly, the most crucial factor was the people I was working with. MoneyG and HFT — were senior traders on our desk. These two people have changed my life forever. They opened my eyes on how to trade stocks, taught me how to manage the risk, and sized me up insanely when the time was right. They taught me how to be The trader like they were at the moment. I feel nothing but colossal gratitude and respect for them.

Thirdly, it was the whole market environment and the events we lived through together as a humanity. It was a Covid Trading Era. An insane amount of the black swan events happened on a pretty compressed timeline. And this is why I wanted to publish these journals so that the new generation of traders will know what it was like, and maybe they’ll get a chance to recognize similar market conditions in the future. In the end, it’s all about complex pattern recognition.

Times were insane, to say the least:

In March 2020, SPY hit SSR at least four times, meaning it was down 7% on the day. ($SPY SSR bands are slightly different from regular stocks)
The oil crisis hit so hard that the price of oil futures contracts first closed in negative territory at around -$40 per barrel. Thousands of people who decided to play bounce were instantly liquidated, and multi-millionaires were made from those who rode it on the short side.
Then, suddenly the whole population realized the pandemic was not going away and decided to do something about it. Almost overnight, everyone became a trader sparking an enormous amount of newly opened brokerage accounts in 2020. A whopping amount of 10 million new accounts were opened. This unheard-of influx of trading volume from uninformed market participants changed the whole trading game for a while.
This exact moment in May — July 2020 predefined everything happening next, including how it all ended at the beginning of 2021.
It made $AMC, and $GME squeezes possible and took Gabe’s Plotkin Melvin hedge fund out of the game with the $7 billion hole he was never able to recover from.
These were the exact times you must shoot a movie about, and it has to be epic.
For me, it changed a lot. It took me a year to get my first $1.5K salary check, and a year and a half later, I was closing my best month with $250K. At this exact moment, I knew it was The top. And it was…

How Prop Trading desks operate.

To be fair to the whole situation, if you wonder how wealthy I’m after having a decent PnL. I’m not wealthy at all.

-First of all, you need to factor in the profit split. That’s how most of the prop shops work: they give you capital in exchange for your upside; if you are getting funded 100% — more likely that your starting cut after all the commissions and fees will be around 40%.

-The whole system is designed for catching outlier movers — imagine each trader is a stock/ticker, and for everyone who starts trading the same way I did, the cut-off watermark was around $15k or less. If it takes you longer than a year to get at least net positive on your account, you might be one foot in the door. Sorry.

- On the other side, imagine you are getting 4–5 stocks (traders) that keep trending up and up, of course with occasional drawdowns, but still, the trend is only up. These outliers take care of everything else in the firm since the losses from those who didn’t make it are small, and the profits from those who did are gigantic.

- My deal worked out for me. Some traders tend to hold different opinions on the matter. In my personal view: the deal is a deal. Either respect the agreement or quit, but don’t whine about it or complain. I’m grateful for the opportunity I had and where it led me. It’s fascinating where a path can guide you if you trust it and have patience.

Long story short: profit split + taxes + after I left at the beginning of 2021, I didn’t have any income for the following 14 months. In addition, I finished flat in the first half of the 14th month and lost around $13k during the second part. These events, and primarily living without a stable income, drained my net worth to a modest 5-figure number.

Yeah… back to square one. But was it worth it? Absolutely. I’m much happier now; I have a much deeper connection with myself than I ever had. I have a job I’m in love with, and it’s my focus #1. I’m still placing bigger-picture trades on a larger time frame horizon within 1–2 months or a couple of weeks of play-out time. I even have the time and emotional capacity to run side projects I’m passionate about. Yes, it takes strict discipline: waking up at 5 am and falling asleep at 10 pm, but hey… I love what I do, and life is much more balanced now!

What’s next?

From now on, I will be posting my exact journals with minimum corrections — as is. Remember that I usually wrote them after a 1.5-hour bus ride back home. On average, I had to wake up every day at 5:15 am to catch a bus at 6 am and be in the office around 7:45 am, and stay till 5 pm. That’s how my first nine months looked.

On top of that, I will be writing a short overview from the situational and emotional intelligence awareness standpoint in regard to what was happening in the office, in the world, and with me.

I’ll be posting my journals in chronological order; in case you are keen to become a professional trader, you will have many chances to relate to the experiences I lived through. Some were brutal in the moments:

Losing money constantly, while not sure if you can borrow enough to pay for the next month’s rent, was heartbreaking. Although for me trading and regular life were completely separate worlds, I never brought my issues to the trading floor with me.
I bet my whole life on this venture’s success, and this decision defined my relationships for three years straight. I was never able to see it until I hit full stop with trading after I got Covid at the beginning of 2022.
Not only did my physical presence lack enough connection with my loved ones, but I was also lost on Twitter and Discord having infinite conversations with other traders about what happened there and why and what would have been the play to extract alpha out of it.

I’m not proud of how it was, hence the idea to share my trading journey with others to help on their journey. So I’m planning to introduce a novel format: combining the value of looking into someone’s journals and picking up insanely granular details — which there are 0 chances you can find in the public access with the good old storytelling of how it was to experience these times. It feels like a combination that fits great into the web 3.0 era we are living in.

If you are interested in how I progressed as a trader, chapter by chapter, I will publish every single trading journal I had and most of the setups I learned. However, if you are here for a good story — all the story posts (like this one) will be kept separate so that you won’t have to go over tedious details of the actual intraday trading.

It was a rollercoaster that changed my life. It all happened during a unique time in our society and world. Times like this create stories like this.

Timeline and PnL:

It took me a year, from 01/2019 to 01/2020 to grow my account PnL from 0 to $7k; what happened next, starting 01/2020 is visualized on the graph below:

Buckle up…

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