Charlie M
@traderCharlieM • 19,226 subscribers
Setups Over Friends | Study great traders and great stocks, Success Leaves Clues | I Share My Opinions, Nothing is Financial Advice
Shorts
Videos
The explosive returns traders like Kristjan Kullamägi 🇺🇦 and Martin Luk can put up don't come for free. The same volatility that drives those gains also produces drawdowns most people can't stomach. But that's a feature, not a bug. "Even the most successful traders/investors are gonna be in a drawdown most of the time. Even this year, even though I'm up at least 500%...I've spent at least half of the year in a drawdown, at least. So expecting to be peak equity all the time, its just not gonna happen. you're gonna spend most of your time in a drawdown even on a really good year. That's just how it works. You just need to realize it, and you need to accept it. Being in a drawdown is not an anomaly, its normal. Now the question is how big of a drawdown are you gonna be in...I try to limit my drawdowns to 10-15%, but sometimes they become more severe than that. I think I've had two 25-30% drawdowns this year. So drawdowns, its the nature of the game, if you wanna have big returns you are gonna have drawdowns, cause if you don't have drawdowns means you don't take any risk, and if you don't take any risk, you wont have any returns..." - Kristjan Kullamägi 🇺🇦
Charlie M26,268 views • 3 months ago
I think most underestimate how much hard work & study time Kristjan Kullamägi 🇺🇦 put in to achieve his level of success.📚 This clip covers only a sliver of it.🎥 "There is NO SUBSTITUTE for going in DEPTH, and studying different traders & different methods, you have to go in depth.."
Charlie M73,486 views • 3 years ago
Breadth is overrated. If you're trading the absolute best, leading stocks in the market, why does it matter what the thousands of other random stocks are doing? In bull markets, the best stocks can make monster moves for weeks/months on end while breadth inches lower and lower. And in bear markets (when breadth is bad), what good does it do to know where market breadth is if you're still going to only be trading the best of the best stocks based on the merit of the setups/stocks? It's just noise... Breadth was falling off a cliff in December 2024 as Quantum Computing stocks made some of the biggest speculative moves of this decade. Breadth diverged against the indexes and leading stocks for nearly 2 full years from mid-1998 to 2000, one of the best periods to trade of ALL TIME. Pundits and bears in the media would constantly harp on about how breadth was hitting 12-month lows while indexes continued going higher. Even Dan Zanger in Sept 1999 (a month before the NASDAQ exploded 50% higher in 2 months) expressed worry about the Accumulation/Distribution being "far more pronounced to the downside today than was 1929 and similar to 1987." However, he was right to say that "This in no way implies a crash, but does imply a high level of risk." And guess what he did? He deferred to setups on the leading stocks, and made one of the best audited performances of all time. “I at times wonder why I even look at breadth…it’s not needed if you just follow the process of the main strategy, it’ll do everything for you.” - Oliver Kell "If you throw every breadth indicator anyone's ever spoken about out the window, you're not gonna have any issues in my opinion." - Oliver Kell "I don’t look much at breadth, no, because some of the biggest winners...they’re gonna work anyways, some of the strongest sectors, they’re gonna work even if the breadth is low. Like usually what happens after market corrections is the first bounce, the breadth is insane like everything goes up, and for every leg higher (this is what we saw also this spring/summer) the breadth kinda deteriorates and deteriorates and fewer and fewer stocks and sectors going up. But our job is not to trade all of the stocks and sectors, our job is to trade the strongest stocks and sectors, so I don’t care what the breadth is. Or I do care, at some point it matters obviously, but you can just see doing your scanning which stocks are going up or not...breadth can also be very misleading..." - Kristjan Kullamägi 🇺🇦 If you're trading the top 10-50 stocks in the market, breadth most of the time IMO just adds noise to your process and takes attention away from more important things.
Charlie M32,209 views • 1 year ago
"I prefer to be either in a really hot sector or just in the growth names..." – Kristjan Kullamägi 🇺🇦 KQ puts a lot more emphasis on fundamentals, or the theme/story than many may think. Check out this clip where he talks more about it. "Even if you get a good setup on a random stock, it's probably not worth it. Especially if you can choose from like these growth stocks...like if you have plenty of growth stocks and then you have some random stocks, focus on the growth stocks, because earnings are fuel." – Kristjan Kullamägi 🇺🇦 "You need a reason for something to go up, stocks don't go up just because there's a certain pattern to it, ok? You find the stocks that have a reason to go up and then you look for patterns on those stocks, because patterns are just something that can increase your odds of success and maximize your risk/reward." – Kristjan Kullamägi 🇺🇦
Charlie M54,681 views • 2 years ago
"Remember, money is made in waiting for the big pitches, not trading random stuff in choppy markets." "Don't look too hard for setups, good setups should come to you, they should just scream at you, when you're looking at something it's like maybe, then it means no. Maybe means no." – Kristjan Kullamägi 🇺🇦
Charlie M27,510 views • 1 year ago
How To Trade Hard Penny Markets: "What you can do is trade the setups but sell them more aggressively. That's one way to adapt to harder markets. You can decrease your size, trade less, sell more aggressively, there's many ways of doing things. I personally prefer to just sit back and chill, wait for the easy money. I've traded hard penny markets so many times, it just ends up in frustration. Like a good market...like you're not supposed to work hard, like trading shouldn't be hard, you shouldn't be sitting there and you know, working your ass off, making trades all the time and....you should only trade a certain setup when the conditions are good for that setup. That's something I've realized over the years, I've traded so many of these choppy difficult markets and even if you make some money it was barely worth it because in a good market you will make more money in a few days than you would make in a few months in a hard penny market, so you may as well take a step back, chill, relax, you can do you some trades here and there but don't just constantly look for trades. A good setup, a good trade should be obvious, you're looking at it and you're like wow, that's an insane setup. that's how its supposed to be, you shouldn't be looking with a microscope or a telescope or whatever for trades, they should be kind of obvious, they should be screaming in your face... Now obviously it takes a lot of experience to get to that point, to know which is which. And unfortunately you will have to suffer for a few years before you get to that point, for me it took a lot of years, too many years." – Kristjan Kullamägi 🇺🇦 Full rant here: (well worth watching)
Charlie M13,001 views • 9 months ago
"Something I don't think a lot of people reflect on but, you're gonna be in a drawdown most of the time. You're not gonna be at all-time highs every day. Your accounts are gonna be at all-time highs maybe, if you're a swing trader, maybe 5-10% of the time, 15 or 20% in a good, good market year. You're gonna have these periods that last from 3 months, 6 months where you're gonna be below all-time highs, that's just a fact, that's just how things work." – Kristjan Kullamägi 🇺🇦
Charlie M19,550 views • 1 year ago
"The biggest drawdowns always happen after great runs, and that's how it should be. If you don't have a drawdown, means you're taking no risk, means you're making no money. Like if you have a set of rules, you double your account, and your drawdowns double in size, that's a feature, not a bug. That's how it should be." – Kristjan Kullamägi 🇺🇦
Charlie M17,408 views • 1 year ago
"How else will you know what setup works when if you don't do the study? Most people just jump in, they follow some random people on the internet who have no clue what they're doing...how many people study, go back and actually study how stocks move, what they move on? That's your edge, you do something differently, something that 99% of other people are not willing to do and you will have different results than those people, that's the whole point." "Exactly, you get a completely new perspective, and it gives you conviction. And suddenly you won't need discipline and all these other stupid things, you don't need to be meditating 3 hours per day, and other useless trading advice. You figure out what works, well guess what, then you can use whatever works, instead of jumping into the abyss with the crowd."
Charlie M17,859 views • 2 years ago
No more content to load