Lucas J

@BacksideTrader Gotcha. How do you determine those horizontal levels for the short zone? Doesn’t look like it lines up exactly with any wicks.

@janu5151 Yes, was not at my desk at that time so I missed it. That was my zone so in hindsight, I probably would have short it that rejection or around 7$.

$BBGI Backside short and covered on this meh news. Revenue down 21%, still unprofitable. Debt deal not closed, bondholder approval pending. Hoping for round 2.

@SmallCapSmarts Would you short large caps, or mainly just long breakouts?

A lot of small-cap traders who say there’s no edge in large caps are either looking at the wrong things or just dealing with a skill issue. Large-cap edge usually won’t show up in a spreadsheet. It’s more contextual, less mechanical, and the cadence of setups is nowhere near what you get in small caps. But you get real liquidity, tighter spreads, much rarer fat tails, and therefore real capacity. You can size much bigger and still make similar returns on a far larger portfolio. It also opens the door to managing other people’s money, effectively giving you access to free leverage without the same level of personal downside. Of course, if you’re trading a $30k–$50k account, small caps probably still make more sense, mostly because of lower volatility of large caps.

@HegemonicTrader Your charts are so clean

I usually get burned trying to be patient on majority of size....maybe will work out for once. Will cut half over $7

@RealSimpleAriel Got it, thank you!

@janu5151 My position sizing is based on how well I have been trading lately. A few other factors such as stop level, ADR, and liquidity. If I am taking 10% portfolio position sizing and I lose 4 trades in a row I’ll size down. In a difficult environment I’ll be less aggressive.

March 2026 recap! Market kept up its choppy ways until finally losing the 200sma. That provided opportunities but not without some headaches along the way. Please feel free to retweet this to your trader friends! Lets dive in. 🧵

@RealSimpleAriel How do you determine share size for each position? Is it just based on conviction, and rating the setup A/B/C? Or do you try to risk the same amount and calculate it based on your stop?

Key takeaways: - Do not size up trades until they are going in your favor. - Know where you are wrong before entering - Stay persistent with ideas if the chart hasn't invalidated the setup. $NVDA $APP $PLTR If you are ever curious about learning the setups I'm trading or my general market thoughts and ideas you are always welcomed to join the Discord! join.marketpulsetrader.com/AHXT

@Jordnstm @DeludedVision How do you do this? Any tutorials online?

@DeludedVision Polygon orderflow with your own setup. L2 in Das or any retail broker is TRASHHHHH

@AskEdgarIO Thanks!

@janu5151 Means it’s manually checked by us vs automatic or through a 3rd party data source

@AskEdgarIO What does it mean if there is a blue check mark next to the Float & OS?

@laserwolf33 But a lot of these gappers end green because of curls mid to late day. You might not be able to get the ADF but you can still get a 10-20% gain if you take profit when it first bases out and before it starts building back up again.

As I’ve said before, go back three years and look at who the big ADF traders were, especially the ones active on X. Almost all of them are gone. Sure, some may have just stopped posting, but in this game, when traders are doing well, they usually make sure everyone knows it. The small cap game has shifted. It used to be about holding and building a position with size, riding moves into the close or even swinging. Now it’s more about hyper scalping 2–5% moves, over and over again. If your brain is wired for that style, you can still make a living, but that high win rate, martingale-type approach comes with a catch: eventually, a fat-tail loss can wipe out months of gains. I’ve personally stepped away for now, closed my accounts and moved into Treasuries. I’ll come back if real EV returns to small caps, but with the rise of 24-hour trading and more widespread, AI-driven “China-style” manipulation, I don’t see that environment coming back anytime soon. What used to be a game where the top 95% could carve out a living now feels like it requires being in the top 99.999%. At some point, traders need to take an honest look in the mirror. Too many stay in this game longer than they should…and yes, a lot of that comes down to gambling addiction. If you think that doesn’t apply to you, it’s worth questioning that assumption. Life is short. You had a life before trading, and you’ll have one after it too. Think about the time, energy, and mental bandwidth spent trying to grind out an edge. That same effort could go into building something tangible, or investing in relationships and experiences that actually give something back.

@Yagooker777 @thelaptoplegend I have been thinking the same thing tbh. Like my “edge” is shorting after a big rejection and sign of weakness/reversal. The “edge erosion doomsayers” are saying, what, stocks will stop fading?

@thelaptoplegend @janu5151 The chance of you losing your edge from leaking is zero. The same setups with edge that existed for over a hundred years are still there. Edges erode when the market environment changes, then they come back again.

@thelaptoplegend Nooooooo why did you delete your trading recaps from youtube, I learned so much from them 😭

@laserwolf33 Makes sense. I’m thinking the best option is to hold for the deep fade only in certain circumstances when the odds are higher, otherwise take profit early. E.g. there was a lot of buying pressure on frontside and you get a double bottom.

@janu5151 You need to hold full size for as long as possible if you start taking profits early you kind of defeat the purpose. Plus fades are getting increasingly small and randomized enough to encourage trader to take faster and smaller profits while losses are always on full size.

Shorting small caps at least the way I like to trade em is done. Toast. Finished. Luckily I made mine when the making was good and I don’t need to do it anymore. It was fun while it lasted. Think I’ll just call it a day here before I bleed out anymore of my capital. If you’re ever in Nicaragua DM me.

@BacksideTrader For ASTC I considered the outsized rejection at 10:58 am EST the trigger and sign of reversal. Do you disagree? I shorted at the bottom of the flush at 5.50 and covered below VWAP when it started building back up.

Shorted $SST backside — rejection at 4.25–4.36 was the trigger. Low float + failed push toward 4.75-5 = momentum shift. BFRG no range, JCSE I wanted higher 1.90-2, ELAB (insane locates) and ASTC no trigger.

@MiddletonTrader @EternaLEnVy1991 I’m wondering the same thing

@EternaLEnVy1991 @EternaLEnVy1991 was your trading stream ($30k to multi 8 figs) recorded o the discord? Could do with some help or a Mentor over here.

Some of the most retarded things I've seen in trading: 1. I streamed all my trades from Jan 2024 till ~Aug 2025 my entire run from 30K to multi 8 figs on my mentor's discord, an unprofitable trader who watched everyday stayed unprofitable trading their own style for majority of it. 2. A trader spent a decade trading everyday for multiple tens of thousands of hours and still remains unprofitable. I found him interesting and we were on dms for awhile. I was honestly trying to learn from him. Later on I suceed heavily and hes never once asked me for help even tho I got him sponsored by my rich friend to trade with more funds. 3. I recently tutored my good friend's friend for two sessions as a favor as they were interested in starting trading. That person had a bunch of things they wanted to explore but I tried to help them focus on a few ideas. It was clear they wanted to explore their own style and I was left on read (thank god). 4. At the beginning I was in dms of 3 ex pro players daily about trading. I reached out to all of them about trading with me more closely. They all rejected or wasn't too interested at the time even though I was starting to find sucess. Most haven't reached out to me since or took like 1.5 years to do so when its too late. And many more... All these retards wanted to "be themselves" and "find their own way." They don't want to admit they are heading the wrong path and they don't want to ask for help untill its giga undeniable (too late). Honestly this is probably just normal human (retard) behaviour. And they think I am eGomAXxing because of how I speak. Realistically more real and humble than any negative trader. The first real hope I found in trading when I first started was from going through a paid discord looking at how people talk and msging the people I considered the smartest to teach me something. Most rejected and didn't offer much but @gabriel__daher who was profitable at the time helped me and taught me some shit. Reached out eventually and turned out he was no longer profitable. I taught him some shit for a few hours and dropped him off in another discord with some profitable traders as repayment for his kindness. Though basically I just left him a new starting point. He msged every fucking profitable trader there endlessly till he found a mentor. And now hes BALLIng. Honestly almost every 8 fig trader I know has found their initial sucess through some mentorship or from working together with other traders and developing together. I've personally learnt a lot from a lot of different traders throughout. But how do you get help from other traders? At the end of the day its all about give and take. Surprisingly people nowadays don't quite understand that. Instead they are entitled and demand help. They annoy you and threaten you instead. Their idea is if they are terrible to someone they will get help from them eventually. Bitch I rather burn all my fucking money than help you. It's honestly just a sense of pride and honor as well. As a taker you need to know your place and to at least try to give back or at least feel in debted to try to help them out later. Some people don't mind teaching a good guy who has potential and willing to work hard. Maybe try to be funny? Make them feel good for helping you. The people who leech more than they give will be cut out eventually or just receive less. For me how I got to learn from traders was by sharing to them than they did to me. Or if anyone ever shared something with me thats +ev first I would tax myself to give something back of value. But if those people take it for granted then thats that. As an example some people taught me some shit first like @irigstocks or Zero and I was too bad to help them back but now I have returned the favor to help them out of being WASHED AND TRASH AS FUCK. And of course my mentor who I have no idea where I would be now without him. But also without me I think he would be at 1/3 as well. Give and pay your debts. I still have some left to pay. (was gonna write something but im hungry peace)

@laserwolf33 Ah damn that’s what I’m trying to learn right now. Do you think it’s still possible to trade this style if you take partial profits earlier in anticipation of the potential curl?

@janu5151 Yes.

@thelaptoplegend I understand. Maybe could still do them but no charts and just talk through general strategy for tickers you traded and why they stood out from fundamentals perspective. Or not. You owe us nothing of course.

@janu5151 No moar edge reek

@marco_thefirst1 @laserwolf33 What do you reckon is the correct way to be trading right now?

@laserwolf33 Day trading got easier the last 6 months Everyone who thinks it got harder comment here and I will proof you wrong with data and facts The problem is you are learning the wrong stuff

It’s wild watching traders celebrate how fast AI models are evolving… …while also wondering why day trading has suddenly gotten brutally harder over the last 5 months. No connection made. None.

@tjfreeman_95 Had this on my to-watch list already but just bumped it up. Thanks.

I've been following Lance Breitstein on X for a few months now and somehow only came across this interview today. Two hours in, I had to stop and just sit with it for a minute. This is one of the most honest, dense and genuinely useful conversations about trading I've ever listened to - and I've listened to a lot of them. Lance was the number one trader at Trillium, one of the oldest and most respected prop firms in the world. He started as one of the slowest learners in his class, struggled for two years, nearly got cut, and ended up becoming one of the best short-term intraday traders on the planet. Fun fact: Lance also did a 10-figure trade live on Twitter during the Yen squeeze in August 2024. The man has earned the right to say everything he says here. Here's what stayed with me most. 1. The environment you learn in is probably the single most important variable in your development. Lance said something that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since I heard it - that if he had been on the retail side, he genuinely believes he would not have made it. Not probably. He said he can guarantee it with 99% confidence. The reason is that the feedback loop, the competition, the mentorship, the constant exposure to people performing at a high level - all of that is what actually accelerates learning in a way that sitting alone at a screen simply cannot replicate. He described watching his trainer make six figures on a single trade and thinking: what he did was not that different from what I just did. That moment of proof, of being able to see what's possible from someone operating in the same environment on the same setups, is something most retail traders never get. Finding the closest version of that matters enormously. 2. Deliberate reps beat passive time every single time. This is the meta-learning concept Lance keeps coming back to throughout the entire interview, and the golf analogy he uses is perfect. Hitting 500 balls with the same broken swing cements the broken swing. Five intentional swings where you actually fix the problem are worth more than the 500. The same principle applies directly to trading. A trader who sits at the screen for 500 days but spends half of it distracted, zoning out, watching Netflix on the side monitor - they might accumulate maybe 20 to 30 genuinely focused, intentional days of real learning. Meanwhile someone who is drilling chart writeups during every slow period, watching tape in half-speed, identifying their weakest patterns and actively working to reprogram them - they could get 100 meaningful reps in a single day. Lance was watching his trading tape in slow motion and then in 2x speed so that by the time the real setup appeared in live trading, his pattern recognition was already trained beyond what anyone else was doing. That's why he went from the slowest in his class to one of the fastest traders in the world. Intentional screen time is the real edge. 3. Edge is positive expectancy, and you need to know exactly where yours lives and where it doesn't. Lance was emphatic about this, and it connects to something I've been documenting through journaling for months. Every trader has a set of strategies, and almost nobody properly tracks which ones are actually generating returns versus which ones are quietly draining the account. He gave the example of a trainee who was convinced he made money in IPOs, which was technically true, but when he crunched the data he discovered he was making money on two hot IPOs and losing on eight garbage ones, and the losses were offsetting a significant portion of the gains. The fix was simple: stop trading the garbage ones. But without the data, he never would have seen it. 4. Bet big on pocket aces. Build consistency on everything else. One of the most important frameworks Lance shares in the entire interview is the poker analogy for position sizing and trade selection. The best traders in the world make roughly 90% of their P&L from 10% of their opportunities - the pocket aces, the setups with the highest expected value, the moments where every variable is aligned and the edge is at its clearest. The job during the other 90% of the time is to play the singles consistently, build the cushion, and stay in the game so that when the aces finally arrive you have both the capital and the mental clarity to bet as big as the setup deserves. The traders who flatten their bet sizing across all trades are leaving an enormous amount of money on the table. And the traders who only wait for aces and trade nothing else lose all the compounding value of the consistent singles. Both extremes are wrong. The right framework builds consistency on the easy trades and bets hard when the best opportunities arrive. 5. Untrained intuition is dangerous. Trained intuition is one of your most powerful assets. This one landed particularly hard for me. Lance's framing is that most amateur traders have intuition working actively against them - when the stock is panicking, the untrained gut says sell, which is almost always exactly when the opportunity is at its highest. When the stock is ripping and feels obvious, the untrained gut says buy, which is often exactly when the move is nearly exhausted. The reason most amateurs lose the more they trade is that the market is specifically designed to punish untrained psychology. The good news is that intuition can be trained. Through enough intentional reps, enough tape review, enough honest self-assessment of where the pattern recognition is wrong and why - the gut starts to flip. The pit in the stomach during a panic becomes signal. The discomfort of a choppy, directionless session becomes a clear directive to stay out. That retraining takes years, and it only happens through the kind of deliberate, reflective work that most traders skip. 6. The learning curve is longer than anyone is telling you and that's the most important thing to accept before you start. Lance was direct about this in a way that I genuinely appreciated. At a top-tier prop firm like Trillium or SMB, with Professional Resources, experienced traders around you, full-time commitment and firm capital - the learning curve is still roughly two years. For a retail trader doing this part-time with minimal capital, limited mentorship and no professional environment, that learning curve could easily stretch to five or six years. The most harmful thing in the space is that nobody with an affiliate link and a funded account program to sell will ever tell you that. Accepting the real timeline before you start is what allows you to structure your life and capital appropriately, stay in the game long enough for the process to compound, and not abandon something that was working precisely because you ran out of runway before the results arrived. These were just some of the notes I took and honestly, I could have kept going for another ten lessons without running out of material. Go watch the full interview in its entirety, and then watch it again - I know I will. @TheOneLanceB @Wordsofrizdom @smbcapital youtube.com/watch?v=sMofWA…