in today's YouTube video we're going to go over the three fastest ways that you can grow a small account in 2024 and every single one of these I actually personally have tried myself over the last eight years and so we're going to start with what I started with first in my journey and then we will end with what I am currently doing and in my opinion is one of the best ways to grow a small account in 2024 however before you skip right to number three I do think it's very important that you understand each of these three because everyone's different so everyone has a different trading personality lifestyle strategies they gravitate towards different personality traits and that can all play a big factor in which one you might stick with and actually have success with and speaking of I do have a free quiz linked Down Below in the description box that will match your personality traits and your lifestyle and your all your daily habits with what trading strategy might fit you best and so after this video I think that'd be a really cool bonus for you to go take that quiz and see what advice it gives you and see if it lines up with what you chose based on this video and before we even dive into small account strategy number one I need everyone to be on the same page on why it's so important to get around something called the PDT rule so the PDT rule stands for pattern day trader and what it means is it's a limitation put on traders that you are only allowed to make three day trades in a span of five business days if you do anything over that you will be flagged as a pattern day trader meaning that you need to have 25,000 or over in your account to continue day trading now there are definitely ways around this rule that is what this entire YouTube video is about but first I just want to make sure you fully understand the rule and how this can be really damaging to your psychology as a Trader especially if you're just starting out is it can cause you to make a ton of Trades based off of fear or fomo due to not really having many chances based off of the PDT rule to take trades that you might see that are good or A+ and you actually might end up holding on to losers letting green trades turn red for the fear of using a day trade so for example let's say that you have this big Runner that you jumped in on Monday and you're up really really big and you decided that you did not want to take profits and you wanted to swing trade it but you swing trade it into Tuesday and you lose all of your gains by Tuesday morning now this can start to develop that fear that you have to take those profits immediately and if you don't you might lose them and this can cause you to hesitate on trades or just feel a lot of fear and fomo fear of missing out around your trades based off of that PDT Rule and that brings me to strategy number one with small account trading and that is Swing trading so for the entirety of this video I'm going to assume that when you have a small account you have $1,000 in your trading account now some of you may have way less than that and don't worry number three there actually is a way that you can day trade with way less starting at around $50 but on average from what I've seen over the years most Traders when they are quote unquote saying that they are trading with a small account they are starting with about $11,000 I specifically gravitated towards swing trading penny stocks and if I say penny stock it typically is anything $10 and under and so the reason for this is pretty obvious if you have a smaller account then it's going to be very difficult to buy large cap stocks and actually make Headway with it and so I gravitated towards the cheaper ones because I was able to buy more shares and often times if you can find low float High volatility Runners you can get a little bit lucky I will say it's a lot of luck just based off of timing and how the Market's reacting to that sector at the time period you're trying to trade them what I mean by that is let's say that you were preg GameStop in AMC which I believe off the top of my head was was 2020 don't hold me to that but it's been a few years now if you were at that time period or before penny stocks used to run all the time there were tons of opportunity however over the years especially after GameStop in AMC there had seemed to be a big slowdown on penny stocks running like they used to meaning less opportunities daily or even weekly but that does not mean that swing trading stocks and or penny stocks is completely dead you can definitely still make money it's is going to be a slower process so let's dive into the charts and I'm going to show you example of a swing trade that we actually just took not too long ago very simple trade we saw a nice Trend break off of a previous demand Zone and support level and we were looking for buyers to be there just like they were previously so as long as we held between 240 to 250 support looking for buys once Trend broke risking that level and then just looking to sell at previous resistance which you can see we had some nice previous resistance right in the 290 to 288 area so this range right here would have been a great place to look to take profits and so let's just hypothetically speaking say that you had a $1,000 account now you're actually not even able to use margin which is what you're definitely going to want to use as a margin account if you're stock trading you cannot use a margin account technically until you're over $2,000 and a very quick Google search can confirm that for you with multiple different Brokers between Fidelity between Charles swab Robin Hood it is pretty common across the board that you need at least $2,000 to take advantage of margin which is basically just giving you more buying power so that means that you just have $11,000 to play with and what you don't want to do is go all in on a position with that entire $1,000 because you have no wiggle room to dollar cost average if that's your strategy and if the play goes against you you're Auto automatically had a huge disadvantage because you used all of your Capital so let's just say hypothetically speaking you wanted to buy at least 300 shares of fubo so 300 shares and you took it right at Trend break so let's say that you took it at like 257 time 257 means that you're going to be spending about $771 on that position that only leaves you about $229 left out of your ,000 so not much room for error at all so with that you really should have a tight stop loss so 771 is what it cost you to get in this trade if you were at 257 and you put that much money in that trade I would definitely be looking to risk very very tight risk here probably no more than let's see M no more than 10 cents I would risk no more than 10 cents so risking 247 entry 257 with that being said your target was near 280 to 290 okay so 57 to 87 is going to be 30 cents and then you're risking 10 that's a good 1 to3 risk versus reward ratio meaning you're risking 10 cents to make 30 and so that is a good risk versus reward and if you're risking that much you really need to make sure you are getting a 1 to three or better okay so you had 300 shares right and you ended up selling near the top which is definitely not uh reasonable to expect every time but let's just say for simple math purposes you sold at 287 from 257 entry so that is a 30 C gain on 300 shares meaning you made $90 so $90 on a $771 investment that's pretty dang good especially if you're just starting out and if you can do that consistently it could also beat out some typical gains that you'd see from just long-term traditional investing which is like 7 to 8% year overy year on just investing in something like spy so it's definitely not something to knock and it is an easier more beginner friendly way for somebody who's brand new to start out out it's how I started we're talking about the pros and cons of something like this I would say the pros again it's very beginner friendly and an easy way to enter into trading because it is one of the more easier things to learn to do and it's typically straightforward right um I would say a con of it would be that you do need more Capital than the other two that we're going to go over so it does require more money um which is definitely not an advantage if you're just new to the stock market and you're just trying to get your feet wet you definitely don't want to have to put too much of your own Capital up because there is a high chance that you're going to lose a lot of it it's just the reality of being a Trader you have to endure some losses to learn some lessons and then you eventually get better over time so the goal is to start with as little amount of money as possible so you're not risking very much to learn and you can obviously paper trade which is the best way to start put many people including myself are stubborn and skip that and that's just me being honest I tell people all the time to paper trade but I was one of those stubborn ones who didn't however that led me to losing a crap ton of money when I first started so I kind of did that to myself there cuz I knew better and I did it anyways all right so let's move into strategy number two for growing a small account and strategy number two is going to be options trading so this is typically what I see most people go from stock trading into options trading and that's exactly what I did it is one of the most difficult things to learn when it comes to trading in my opinion and it is the hardest thing to do in trading because there are so many variables involved you have got things like Greeks AK Theta which can Decay your premiums even without the stock or ETF moving and if you have no idea what I'm talking about just know that it makes trading more difficult it also makes it more difficult for you to set a hard stop and just let that play or trade play out in your favor you have to be very quick especially if you are trading short-term expiration dates but but options trading can be very very lucrative and you can absolutely grow a small account with options trading I myself over the years have grown many accounts from 1,000 to 5,000 and even 1,000 to 10,000 it is possible but let me tell you it is freaking stressful and it is very risky so you can easily blow an $1,000 account options trading within a day or two depending on how risky you are being for the sake of this options example we're going to use spy just because that's something I used to trade options on all the time and options the simplest way to put it are like a little leveraged contract that you can buy on larger cap names like spy which is an ETF that tracks overall market conditions Tesla Nvidia Apple all of those have option contracts and so you can use a small amount of money to place either call or put bets on those different stocks is the simplest way to put it so let's do a spy example let's say that you were trading SPY let's go to 5 day 5 minutes you were trading SPY um this past week on the 26th and calls means that you betting that the stock is going to go up in value puts means that you are betting the stock is going to go down in value so let's just do a really quick technical analysis draw right here we got a nice little trend line wedge forming let's just say that you took calls right here which is a great entry if you caught it but again this is just an example to show you how this works and you definitely do not need to use anything close to size on that $1,000 to make a difference again leverage you were trading the 126 date now you need to go to the trade tab this is on thinker swim and now you're going to look at the option chain so this is where options have tons of different variables you have a lot of decisions to make you got to choose what strike price what expiration date call or put all of these different things you have to take in consideration so again they're more difficult to trade and I'm on accidentally I'm on oil right now let me go to spy and there is the option change for spy sorry about that but let's say that it was the 26th and so you were trading the 29th contracts so we click these and let's go look at some calls so calls are going to be on the left here you see that right here you don't want to go too far out of the money again if you're brand new to options trading please go look up an entire tutorial on how to trade options if this is how you decide to go about your small account strategy and trading there's a lot that goes into learning options and today is not a course on how to trade them it's just giving you a simple rundown so you can make the decision for yourself so let's say that you were trading let's just go 487 here and we're going to chart out the 487 calls so I'm going to bring this over clear this up real quick and then we're going to look at the timing that you were looking to buy so let's say you were looking to buy around 10:25 contracts at $125 were around 50 so what this means is if you had a $1,000 account you definitely don't need a ton of money like I said a million times let's say that you were only going to use $300 out of that $1,000 and if contracts were $150 AKA $150 per so you've got $150 per contract how did I get that is because 100 shares equals one contract 100 time $150 equal 150 again if you don't know what I'm talking about after this video go look up in options trade tutorial $150 for one call contract that's all you need to know here right because you were looking to buy off of this break so you bought one option contract for $150 let's say you wanted to scale it up and you wanted to go big and you bought two option contracts that would cost you $300 so two option contracts you're in this trade for $300 so that's much cheaper than the fubo trade because that one cost you $771 to get into so you have a lot more leverage and a lot more opportunity to buy things cheaper with options is the again the simplified way to put this so those contracts went all the way up to over $2 even hit a high of like 220 so let's say that you went from 150 and you sold these at let's just say 180 there's no way you held through all of that so what that means is now you've got two contracts worth 180 so 180 * 2 means that you've got $360 and remember your initial cost was $300 okay so you made $60 off of a $300 investment which is really good okay this is trading is all percentage based if you want to do the percentage math on that you can definitely take the time to do so but the whole point here is options allows you to trade with a small amount of money because they are so leveraged but they are very volatile risky and complicated now the reason I say they're risky is because if you did not not take profits on these contracts and you let them go all the way back down you would not only have lost your initial investment but you would be negative so a green trade would have turned to a red trade because of theta the beautiful Theta means that options will Decay even if we are hovering at the price that we bought it at you can see we ended up coming back right here to where we bought it at on the stock chart but those option contracts were still down and negative at that point and that is due to Theta so one thing I need you guys to understand if you decide to go strategy number two which is options trading is you need to have a cash account not a margin account because you can day trade with whatever cash is settled so meaning if you took a $300 trade out of a $1,000 account you now have $700 left over that day to day trade with and then the cash will settle that you have used within 24 hours so my camera completely died on me and I do not have my extra battery so we are going to switch over to the computer camera to wrap up the strategy number three which is my absolute favorite in what I am currently doing in 2024 it's actually the reason I completely dropped options trading altogether and I am solely focused on number three which is Futures Trading now I have a full Workshop that's completely free 2024 Futures Trading that explains everything that you guys might be curious on in regards to the exact Brokers I use what prop firms I use Trading strategies how much money you need all of those things are covered in that free workshop and I will link it down below but just to cover some quick Pros versus cons here on why I chose Futures Trading so first being there is absolutely no PDT rule when it comes to Futures so regardless if you go a self-funded account route meaning you put money in it yourself like you might have traditionally done over the years with other strategies like options or stocks or prop firms so prop firms are basically something you can try out for and they will fund your account for you and give you money to trade with as long as you can prove you know how to trade so regardless of which one you do there are ways to start with small amounts of money and there's no PDT rule so meaning you do not have to have $25,000 to day trade there are less variables to trade so you have no Greeks no Theta like you would with options they're very liquid and volatile so remember with stocks and penny stocks I said that there might not be opportunities every single day which can hinder you in the the long run especially if you're looking to make daily profit off of this or replace your 9 to-5 job there are opportunities every single day when it comes to futur trading you can trade at 23 hours a day they are really flexible when it comes to trading hours where options you can't trade until after market open you can trade stocks in pre-market but it's more difficult Futures Trading you can absolutely trade before Market opens and that's mostly what I do and you guys already know why they're small account friendly because you do not have a PDT rule involved in Futures Trading there are high margin requirements on TOS which stands for thinker swim or TDM air trade the reason I bring this up is because some of your traditional Brokers might not allow you to trade futures or require tons of money that is definitely not the case as long as you are trading with a Futures friendly trading broker and I go over my two favorite in the Futures Trader Workshop but you can start with as little as $50 for Minis and 500 for micros if you don't know what that means just again go watch the entire Futures Workshop I don't want to make this video too long explaining all the details but you can definitely get around this with the right broker they can be risky with leverage so just like options have leverage and can be risky so can Futures this is actually one of the pros of using a prop firm versus your own money because you are only risking what you are paying for the prop firm challenge which limits your risk a ton this is a pro and con they're very liquid and move fast you have opportunities all the time because they are very liquid 23 hours a day however if you're brand new to trading in general you really need to make sure you take the time to paper trade and practice with fake money until you fully get used to how fast they move and how fast they are traded because that can cause number four you to lose money quickly which is like that with anything in trading if you are trading something leveraged and volatile and you don't have a trading strategy in place and you don't have proper risk management you can absolutely lose money quickly again going back to the prop firm and why I like them is because the only thing you're risking is what you put in and those are very small amounts of money considering that most prop fir challenges with coupons are around $30 to $50 and the last con here is their extra volatile with news so if you're trading in premarket make sure you're not trading any type of news drop which is typically 8:30 a.m. eastern you will definitely get hurt your stop might not execute and tons of prop firms don't allow you to trade alongside news so I just recommend avoiding that altogether by far Takes the Cake home runner for me is going to be Futures Trading I am absolutely obsessed with Futures there are no Greeks there are no extra Vari VAR Ables that options have but it still gives you the opportunity for leverage so just to give you guys an example on money involved here CU I know you're probably wondering that if you go and try out for a $50,000 evaluation account using a prop firm it can cost you on average about $50 so if you pass you're spending $50 of risk to access $50,000 in capital which on a $50,000 account you can easily make 2 $400 per day without taking tons of Trades and so I have members in the group doing it all the time so when it comes to where I wish I would have started in the beginning of my journey I wish I knew about prop firms and Futures Trading it would have saved me a ton of money and a ton of headache because trading is about how can you get the most experience with risking the littlest amount of money and how can you get around that stupid PDT rule that causes you to make bad decisions in the long run and futures for me solved all of that and more so once again if you guys are interested in attending that free features Workshop I linked it down below along with that free quiz I mentioned earlier hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did make sure to give it a thumbs up and with that being said I'll see you next time
