The Swing Trading Playbook for Avoiding the Expensive Mistakes Most Traders Learn the Hard Way
What if the biggest thing standing between you and becoming a better trader isn’t finding better stocks but eliminating the mistakes you keep making with them?
We all know buying a stock is easy.
Knowing when to buy it, how much to risk, when to hold it, and when to get out is where most traders get into trouble.
Maybe you've bought a stock only to watch it immediately drop.
Maybe you've held a loser for months because you were convinced it would come back then sold a winner after a 5% gain because you were afraid of giving it back.
Maybe you've chased breakouts, chased hot tips, averaged down, thought options would help stop or entered trades without knowing exactly what would make you get out.
I've made those mistakes too.
And most of them cost me a lot of money.
I started trading as a teenager in 2006. I entered the market convinced that making money was mostly about finding the right stocks.
Then the financial crisis hit.
My first portfolio eventually fell roughly 80%.
That experience taught me something I've spent nearly two decades refining: Finding a stock is only one piece of the puzzle. You need a system for what happens next.
Over the years, I went from a teenager clueless about the market to trading professionally at a proprietary trading firm, to working as a financial advisor at one of Wall Street's largest firms.
Along the way, I traded through bull markets, bear markets, crashes, corrections, bubbles, and some of the wildest markets in history.
And I learned many of the lessons in this book the expensive way.
Dumb Money was written so you don't have to.
This isn't a promise that you'll turn $1,000 into $1 million.
There are no magic indicators.
No secret stock picks.
No strategy that wins 100% of the time.
Instead, Dumb Money gives you a practical swing-trading playbook built around process, risk management, chart reading, and discipline.
You'll learn how to:
- Recognize the Four Stages every stock moves through and identify when a stock may be setting up for its next major move.
- Find and trade breakouts instead of constantly trying to catch falling stocks at the bottom.
- Read support, resistance, trends, volume, and price action without turning your charts into a confusing mess.
- Know where you're wrong before entering a trade so one bad decision doesn't become a devastating loss.
- Stop holding losers and selling winners too quickly.
- Size your positions and manage risk so no single trade has the power to destroy your account.
- Build a repeatable trading plan instead of relying on predictions, emotions, hot tips, or hope.
- Develop the discipline to follow your process when real money—and real emotions—are involved.
Most importantly, you'll learn to stop obsessing over predicting what the market will do next.
You need to learn how to recognize when the odds are moving in your favor, define your risk when you're wrong, and stay with your winners when you're right.
Nearly twenty years ago, I entered the market thinking the goal was to find the right stock.
I eventually learned there was a much more important skill: Knowing what to do after you find it.
That's what this book is about.
You can spend years paying tuition to the market and learning these lessons through your own losses.
Or you can learn from mine.
Stop guessing. Stop hoping. Build a process.
Your swing trading playbook starts here
You don’t need to learn every lesson the hard way. Let my mistakes become your shortcuts towards the path of least resistance to grow your investment accounts.
