Brandon Janssen, MD

So, why is a physician trading? In 2019, my wife and I were looking for a way to help afford daycare during residency. Medical residency is at least 80+ hours/week of rigorous work, so regular 9-5 side gigs were out of the question. Graduating medical school with > 0.5M in student loans combined with the minimum wage pay structure of medical residency/fellowship have a way of making a person allergic to trading time for money. Researching top ways to make extra money in 2019 led us to create an Airbnb (great success), Amazon FBA business (great idea, decently executed, margins/shipping logistics wrecked by pandemic), and trading (easily the worst idea, maybe ever). While our classmates were going on vacations, my wife and I were grinding. The guest suite Airbnb and Amazon FBA company created decent cash flow but it wasn’t enough to move the needle after accounting for startup debt. *Day trading enters the chat* I did what any rational person would do and bought a top day trading guru course on the assumption I was going to “make $3000 in 30 seconds.” I saw the guru and a lot of goofy people online posting screenshots of similar profits. Sounds good- all the proof I needed to fund the off shore broker account to get around the PDT rule. Off shore brokers are a bit messy, but no worries! It won’t matter for long because of how much money I was about to make with trading. All sounds pretty good, right? About 2-3 complete account blow-ups and 2 years of unprofitable trading later, I finally realized I had been duped. The guru trading community has a way of making you feel like you’re always on the cusp of success while you’re beaten into submission. I did every type of trading you could imagine, most poorly executed without market context and with eye-watering position size relative to my account. Now, nearly 5-6 absolutely brutally isolating and humbling years later, I stand before you as a broken person who is still picking up the pieces. So, why is a physician trading? Trading has taught me intense self-awareness, self-leadership, situational awareness, patience, first-principles reasoning, and so much more. Ultimately, trading has made me a better father, husband, physician, and human. I am more present, less distracted, and more focused than ever before. I entered the USIC in 2025 but dropped out because I discovered my mind wasn’t ready. Now, after some deep work, I entered the USIC 2026 as a late entrant because trading has taught me that growth comes through discomfort. Instead of journaling my thoughts in private, I’ve decided to journal in public with the hope that anything I say might help the 2019 version of myself. What is the point of being successful and alone?

I'm allergic to blindly trading someone else's signals. Copy trading gives someone else the control over your PnL. The market is hard enough without adding a second person's biases, mistakes in judgment, and the countless other hurdles ahead of consistent execution. The path forward to consistent profitability is to do the work yourself. Sure, you can start with someone else's idea. But research the edge yourself. Come up with a plan to execute on that edge. Refine that edge over time. You develop the edge and make it your own. This ownership path is obviously slower and more difficult. But at this point, I've learned if whatever I'm doing in trading isn't difficult, it's probably a signal that it's not worth doing.

@SRxTrades This is good advice, but only if you have nailed down your timing and stock selection imo.

"As long as a stock is acting right, and the market is right, do not be in a hurry to take profits." Most traders struggle with this because taking profits feels good. Selling locks in a win... & holding creates uncertainty. The problem is that the biggest money in trading isn't made from being right often. It's made from being right and staying right. A stock that is: -Holding key moving averages -Respecting support -Showing strong relative strength -Trading on healthy volume Hasn't given you a reason to sell. Many traders spend weeks looking for the perfect setup, only to sell the moment they have a small profit. Meanwhile, the stocks that can change your year often require patience through pullbacks, consolidations, and periods of doubt. You'll never be able to sell the top on every stock... The goal is to stay with the trend for as long as it remains intact. Give your winners time to become something meaningful.

A fun fact about me: I've been cutting my own hair since medical school in 2014. I started doing this after getting tired of coming home and feeling the need to do touch ups after paying someone else cut it for me. Do I cut my own hair perfectly each time? No way, but at least I'm the one in the drivers seat. I think this mindset applied to trading is what finally flipped me to becoming a profitable trader. I've obviously got a long way to go before I'm killing it like @GnT_Trades, @stamatoudism, or any of the other top USIC contenders, but the amount of self leadership required to achieve consistent profitability can't be understated. Full credit to @PradeepBonde at Stockbee for helping me realize the importance of self leadership, self efficacy belief, and for ultimately helping influence me to becoming a person who can recognize and fix his own trading problems.

@RealizedTrader Congratulations!!

This week my wife retires. Even typing that feels a little surreal. A couple years ago, when I left healthcare to trade full time, neither of us knew exactly how the story would unfold. We had conviction, a vision, and a lot of faith. Beyond that, there were plenty of days where we were simply figuring it out one step at a time. People see the trader. What they don't always see is the person quietly carrying the family while the trader is trying to build something. The uncertainty, the sacrifices, the conversations behind closed doors (or when kids are finally asleep). The years where the outcome wasn't guaranteed... My wife carried a lot of that with more strength than I can put into words. This isn't the finish line. Far from it. But it is a milestone that means a lot to our family. For the first time in a long time, she'll get to spend her days exactly where she wants to be, which is at home with our kids. I'm grateful beyond words. And if you're building something difficult right now, I hope one day you get to experience a moment like this too!

I'll tell you what had a correction today: my FOMO from sitting on the sidelines all week while in the ICU! 😂

@NickSchmidt What steps do you take to get back in sync?

The market environment is always subtly changing and you want to get in sync with it. When I am I try to protect that feeling at all costs. Sometimes I get out of sync even in a good market. Maybe I keep trying to trade a group too long before realizing it hasn’t been in favor. I’m late on rotation so make some sloppy buys to catch up… then market pulls back and stops me out. That pullback is probably the great entry but I’m not going to buy because I just got stopped out from chasing. And the only reason I chased is because weeks ago I did and it worked. If I didn’t chase I would have missed the other trades. Now I’m out of sync. It’s a bad spot to be in and my priority becomes getting back in sync. The wrong way to go about it is to keep placing sloppy trades focusing on getting my account back to highs. Sloppy random trades are going to give sloppy random results and at the point you can start to spiral or just stay stuck. The right way to go about it is to slow down wait for top tier entries or don’t take it at all. If any position has been frustrating and taking up mental space get rid of it. Last year I felt out of sync so just blew out all my positions to refresh and think clearly from scratch. To get back into a rhythm you have to slow down and be intentional with your decisions. It’s easy to get stuck feeling behind and in a rush to catch up but trading from that pov you are at a disadvantage before you even place a trade.

@thestockmd Congrats! FYI- your website isn't working!

$AMD +$12.1M profit now. What's the exit plan from here?

@RealizedTrader Thanks for the kind words! Look forward to following you as well!

This hit home. I came from healthcare too, and I remember the weird feeling of being highly competent in one area of life, then stepping into trading and getting absolutely humbled. What stood out to me was the part about trading making you a better father, husband, physician, and human. I don't think people outside of trading understand that. They think we're studying charts all day, but a lot of us are really studying ourselves. The money gets us through the door. Then trading starts exposing everything else. The impatience. The need to control outcomes. The pressure to provide. The stories we carry about success and failure. The neuroscience side of this fascinates me. Trading puts you into repeated contact with uncertainty, and uncertainty has a way of revealing patterns you didn't even know were running the show. The market becomes less of a financial challenge and more of a mirror. Love the idea of journaling in public to help the 2019 version of yourself. Truthfully, those are usually the posts that end up helping the rest of us too. Looking forward to your journey!

So, why is a physician trading? In 2019, my wife and I were looking for a way to help afford daycare during residency. Medical residency is at least 80+ hours/week of rigorous work, so regular 9-5 side gigs were out of the question. Graduating medical school with > 0.5M in student loans combined with the minimum wage pay structure of medical residency/fellowship have a way of making a person allergic to trading time for money. Researching top ways to make extra money in 2019 led us to create an Airbnb (great success), Amazon FBA business (great idea, decently executed, margins/shipping logistics wrecked by pandemic), and trading (easily the worst idea, maybe ever). While our classmates were going on vacations, my wife and I were grinding. The guest suite Airbnb and Amazon FBA company created decent cash flow but it wasn’t enough to move the needle after accounting for startup debt. *Day trading enters the chat* I did what any rational person would do and bought a top day trading guru course on the assumption I was going to “make $3000 in 30 seconds.” I saw the guru and a lot of goofy people online posting screenshots of similar profits. Sounds good- all the proof I needed to fund the off shore broker account to get around the PDT rule. Off shore brokers are a bit messy, but no worries! It won’t matter for long because of how much money I was about to make with trading. All sounds pretty good, right? About 2-3 complete account blow-ups and 2 years of unprofitable trading later, I finally realized I had been duped. The guru trading community has a way of making you feel like you’re always on the cusp of success while you’re beaten into submission. I did every type of trading you could imagine, most poorly executed without market context and with eye-watering position size relative to my account. Now, nearly 5-6 absolutely brutally isolating and humbling years later, I stand before you as a broken person who is still picking up the pieces. So, why is a physician trading? Trading has taught me intense self-awareness, self-leadership, situational awareness, patience, first-principles reasoning, and so much more. Ultimately, trading has made me a better father, husband, physician, and human. I am more present, less distracted, and more focused than ever before. I entered the USIC in 2025 but dropped out because I discovered my mind wasn’t ready. Now, after some deep work, I entered the USIC 2026 as a late entrant because trading has taught me that growth comes through discomfort. Instead of journaling my thoughts in private, I’ve decided to journal in public with the hope that anything I say might help the 2019 version of myself. What is the point of being successful and alone?

@BrentThesen IIRC most traders statistically lose money irrespective of instrument. I sometimes use leaps to express leverage in a retirement account since I don’t have access to margin. But I don’t do much outside that.

@brankjanssen From my perspective, you weren’t incorrect directionally. So your loss stems from other factors. Did you know that option buyers statistically lose money on average? If you don’t believe me, just ask your AI.

Easy come, easy go.. Just erased an entire month's worth of account gains in the last 2 days, with losses preventing me from feeling comfortably rotating into software. Next week is my ICU week so will have a week break from the market to lick my wounds. Main problem: over-exposed in new long calls in semi stocks during what is now obviously the end of a run. I try hard to simulate @markminervini's progressive exposure idea with my trading, but this time greed got in my way. Honestly, my trading has improved dramatically the less I trade. Most of this year I've found it hard to get my total exposure above 50% of my entire account, which has led to outperformance compared to last year. In the last two days, I was near 95% invested, much of which was accumulated over the course of a few days. Critical error. I'll be reporting a drawdown in my May USIC submission, but at least I'm still green on the year!

@brianisupercool Almost exclusively do leaps!

@brankjanssen Yes. Interesting huh? Trading requires such a high level of self awareness...and yes the more we need or want to be right in real life shows its head in trading. Side note, unless doing super conservation credit spreads or leaps options can be very dangerous.

Maybe the better way to phrase it is "taking a short breather"? I see many semi stocks in uptrends, but don't see many ripping higher today. My mistake was positioning nearly max long with options leverage (esp on mid cap names) all at once at the exact wrong time. I was expecting another leg up, but the market theme changed and I missed it big. Would you agree on that?

@brankjanssen “Obviously the end of a run”? $SMH is up almost 4% this week. What am I missing? How is it obvious that the run in semis is over?

@Puerto_Rico____ I wish it had been a loss off the top after a big run up. Unfortunately, my losses were from oversized entries. Got complacent and wasn't ready for the rotation.

@brankjanssen A sound trailing stop like the 2 ATR or 10 day MA on the close should protect most of your gains on those high adr names

@brianisupercool Really insightful and something I've thought about a lot! Agree- I think they don't realize their medical skillset isn't transferrable to markets. Counterintuitively, the skills I've learned as a trader have made me a better doctor far beyond what I would have ever expected.

@brankjanssen Appreciate the transparency...I've heard stories how Med Drs tend to be worst traders bc in real world you have to be right...in truth I think most ppl are terrible loss takers til trusting and mastering our rules.

@TedHZhang Seems believable to me!

I believe the root cause of FOMO is comparison and envy. Think on that.

@ThetaEvan Exactly! Not embarrassing at all.. 😂🤣🫏

@brankjanssen How do you lose money when the market is going up every day for 9 weeks straight

@TheOneLanceB How's this for an end of month report?

@TedHZhang Pretty interesting how similar $SWMR looks to $SNDK back before the big run-up.

My existing drone watchlist I've built in the past has become relevant especially after today with the Trump admin announcing they may be funding Drone companies $UMAC $SWMR $ONDS $PDYN $DPRO $RCAT the strongest.

@RealSimpleAriel Can confirm. Got punched right in the kisser.

Without software rotation this market would be getting punched in the face today.

$SWMR showing some persistency 2.5 months after IPO and in both software/drone theme.