First Weekly Update: Small Account Day Trading Challenge
A week ago, we kicked off our small account day trading challenge. As of today, we’re up +75.3%. Not too shabby, right? We had zero expectations going into this first week, so we’re pretty stoked. For this initial update, I want to break down some of the decisions we’ve made so far.
We started with $2,000 for this challenge. Sure, we could’ve gone with micro contracts, but instead, we chose to stick with mini Futures contracts. Why? It forces us to switch up our strategy as the challenge progresses. For now, until we build a solid cushion, we’re limiting ourselves to one contract per trade. That means we’re mostly scalping — quick in, quick out, no swinging for the fences. The plan is to keep this up until we double our starting capital. After that, we’ll shift gears on risk management and targets. More on that in a future update.
So far, we’ve pulled off profits by keeping risk super tight.
If you caught our YouTube live, you probably noticed our stop losses are razor-thin — right below the previous 5-minute candle (if long) or just above it (if short). We’re prioritizing precision over big reward-to-risk ratios. Like I said, it’s all about scalping for now.
Let’s be real: this isn’t the “ideal” way to trade. It’s just what works to protect our small account from blowing up. At Beymann Capital, we’re all about letting data lead the way. Right now, we’re sitting at a 66.15% win rate with an average win-to-loss ratio of 0.79 (which, yeah, we’d love to boost).
Since this challenge is all about full transparency, we’re tracking a ton of metrics*. No deep dive into those just yet — it’s still early days.
You might be wondering: “If I add your profits to the starting balance, why doesn’t it match?” Good catch. This isn’t fake money — it’s real trading with a real account. That means commissions (thanks, TradeStation) and regulatory fees (shoutout to the NFA, CME, CFTC, etc.) take a bite out of the total.
Catch you next Friday! 👋
[Update] We’ll also track the ‘buy and hold’ metric to see if we outperform the S&P 500 and Nasdaq.
$2,000 invested in the SPY on Feb 19 at the open is worth $1,949 today (-2.61%).
$2,000 invested in the QQQ is worth $1,885 today (-5.64%).
*Quick side note: If you’ve seen our reels or shorts on social, you might’ve spotted a glitch with the trade win percentage and win rate not lining up. We finally figured it out. It was a bug in Tradezella, our journaling tool that pulls trades from TradeStation. In the settings (Trade Settings > Breakeven Offset), we’d set a $15 buffer to mark trades as breakeven. So, a $5 profit trade, for example, would count as breakeven. The problem? Tradezella applied that buffer on their dashboard but not in the daily journal. We flagged it with their team and, for now, ditched the buffer. Going forward, only trades at exactly $0 profit or loss will count as breakeven.
