A great read: Oliver Kell on how to become a full-time trader:

1) His understanding of breakouts: getting in one step ahead of traditional CANSLIM. Standard CANSLIM often wait for a very clear breakout point, but Oliver tends to start building a position when a mini base has just formed or when the 10/20 moving averages are about to cross upward. The benefits are straightforward: a lower entry cost, a clearer stop-loss level, and more room to build the position later. Try to get in as the trend is just beginning to form, before the market is fully crowded into the trade.

2) Controlling the pace of adding to a position: Oliver usually opens with a very small amount of risk, keeping the initial risk at around 50bp of the portfolio. If the price continues to rise, he adds to the position as it rises, consolidates, and then rises again, while raising his stop at the same time. This allows the position to grow gradually without letting risk get out of hand. For him, the ideal price action is not a sudden surge right from the start, but an initial rise, followed by consolidation, and then a new opportunity to add. This structure is best suited to gradually building a position while keeping risk under control.

3) Selling logic: Under normal circumstances, he does not deliberately try to sell at the high. Instead, he stays with the trend until he sees a clear sign of weakness, such as a major reversal bar, an extreme deviation of price from the moving averages, or a breakdown in the trend structure itself. The one rule he enforces without exception is the stop-loss. Once the stop is triggered, his subjective view no longer matters.

4) Awareness of adapting to market conditions: He does not interpret individual stocks in isolation from the tape, nor does he look only at the chart of a particular stock. Along with a stock’s 10/20 moving averages, mini bases, and price structure, he also watches the index’s 50-day moving average and the overall market environment. He knows very well that his trading approach works extremely well when trends are clear and the market is forgiving, but that it gets whipsawed when false breakouts are frequent and trends lack staying power. So rather than change his system, he proactively reduces position size and trading frequency when conditions are unfavorable, accepting that it will be hard to make big money during that period.

5) His understanding of bear markets: The experience from the second half of 2021 through 2022 had a major impact on him. His account suffered a drawdown, and he went several consecutive quarters without producing results. Even when he often got the direction right, he ultimately had no profits to show for it. The hardest part of a bear market for momentum trading is the abundance of false starts, poor follow-through, and very short windows for trading. Many opportunities last only two or three weeks, or have an effective window of just a day or two. If you cannot get the timing right, the most rational choice may simply be to keep waiting. This is an important lesson: the real challenge of momentum trading is not how to make money when conditions are favorable, but how to survive when they are not.

6) The first signal in stock selection: Rather than focus on fundamental screening, he pays more attention to unusually high trading volume. Oliver does not ignore fundamentals entirely: he looks at earnings growth and revenue growth, and also tries to understand the hottest themes, such as AI. But what usually prompts him to seriously research a stock is volume. When a stock shows a strong volume signature, he pays closer attention and then goes back to examine the company and the thematic rationale. In his view, there are already plenty of analysts in the market doing the research for you; what really matters is whether that research has translated into actual flows of capital. In other words, he trusts the tape more than the story.

7) How he approaches thematic trading: He is not the kind of trader who first forms a strong conviction about an industry and then looks for stocks to buy. He later comes to understand the roles that names such as Nvidia, SMCI, AMD, and VRT play in their respective supply chains, of course, but what actually gets him involved is that volume and trend structure emerge first. This is a very mature approach. Once you develop an overly strong subjective view of an industry thesis, it is easy to lose flexibility in your trading. Oliver has said explicitly that he does not want to become too opinionated about a theme, because he wants to retain the ability to trade according to his system.

8) His view of high PE: Many people instinctively want to short a stock when they see a high valuation, but his view is that as long as earnings are expanding rapidly, a high PE by itself is not a reason to short. The market’s willingness to assign a high PE is essentially a way of pricing in high growth. A stock like Nvidia may have risen a great deal in price, but because earnings are growing faster, its PE may even be lower than it was at an earlier stage. This is an important trading insight: many people lose badly shorting high-valuation stocks in strong trends because they look only at static valuation and ignore the dynamic expansion of earnings.

9) Managing his mindset: Oliver candidly acknowledges that he is highly competitive and is hard on himself when trading goes poorly. His solution is not complicated: when he is losing, he keeps reducing his position size until he strings together a few trades that go well and gets back into a good rhythm. This works well because it directly links feedback from market conditions to his own risk exposure. If P&L is going poorly, it means the market is not currently rewarding his approach, so he reduces risk first; when P&L starts going well again, he builds his positions back up.

10) Jason’s final takeaway: “How does someone who truly wants to become a full-time trader make that journey?” First lose money, then stay close to the market and keep learning; work while trading your own account; save up enough money before coming back; and then keep iterating and stay in the game for the long term. The traders who truly survive are often not the ones who made quick money earliest, but the ones who, despite a very rough start, never left the market.