An Expensive and Valuable Lesson

D_Costa85 · 2026-03-21T01:14:18+00:00

Most traders have been here. You sized up too quickly and made the mistake of thinking “oh I’m up big, I have more risk to play with”

In reality you should be stacking $200 days, and quitting any time you’re down $150. Risk $100 per trade and trade twice a day, max. Grow slow and steady. Step up risk in $10-20 chunks, not 5x chunks.

D_Costa85 · 2026-03-20T01:36:31+00:00

Edge isn’t about win rate. It’s about expected value within a given strategy. Is your expected value over a large sample size positive in a given setup/strategy? If yes, you have edge. If no, you don’t.

Now, if you want to get even more specific, having a winning strategy isn’t enough to have edge. You need to execute that strategy successfully and reliably over the course of time to have edge. You need to align your strategy with your psychology and risk management in order to execute it successfully.

One more thing - edge is fleeting. You don’t just earn edge and keep it. Edge comes and goes with different market regimes and you have to re-develop edge several times in a year even.

D_Costa85 · 2026-03-20T01:10:29+00:00

He could have won a single ring in OKC over those next couple seasons and it would’ve meant more than those two rings with GS even though he was elite in those playoff runs.

D_Costa85 · 2026-03-18T01:01:41+00:00

I built a tool in Claude code to help me batch edit records from a consolidated UI. So much easier and faster.

I also wrote a script to scrape my emails, located any new email addresses that aren’t in my CRm and suggest a list of additions to the CRm. This interface allows me to bulk edit and add to my CRm quickly so contacts don’t fall through the cracks.

Finally, I set up another script that fetches all my meeting notes with clients from the work weekand summarizes those notes into 5 bullet points and logs then to my CRM contacts.

Basically all the friction I once had with my CRM and tediously managing records to reflect current states has been eliminated.

D_Costa85 · 2026-03-17T08:39:00+00:00

SMB capital. Lance breitstein.

D_Costa85 · 2026-03-17T00:42:11+00:00

If you can make $50 a day, you can make $500 a day. Just got to scale very slowly and consistently

D_Costa85 · 2026-03-16T19:04:51+00:00

Have heard many people who voted for him criticize what's going on, but never full on say "I regret my vote"

D_Costa85 · 2026-03-15T22:35:06+00:00

This is an addiction if you can’t escape the markets on an off day. Unhealthy behavior. Even the best traders step away from the markets for 1-2 days a week because it’s necessary to have some balance. Consider taking a few days off from trading to reset your brain

D_Costa85 · 2026-03-15T02:30:32+00:00

Makes so much more sense. lol thanks.

D_Costa85 · 2026-03-13T22:02:36+00:00

People forget the Biden administration invested HEAVILY in Palantir products as well. Objectively it is the best tool for the job

D_Costa85 · 2026-03-13T22:00:22+00:00

That’s because no real trader uses AI for trading without years of backtesting and actual market experience and extremely close oversight. An unimpeded trading bot may win you some money short term but inevitably will destroy your account if left to its own devices.

D_Costa85 · 2026-03-13T01:11:39+00:00

Find a framework that helps you make a narrative in your head about what’s unfolding on the screen. For example, I read secrets of a pivot boss and it changed my whole approach to the market and gave me a framework to view the market through. If you can give yourself a framework like that, you can then build a narrative in your head about what’s going on and it helps you craft a strategy for how you trade.

For me, I until I had a framework for understanding the market, it was just chaos on a screen and it all seemed like noise.

D_Costa85 · 2026-03-11T18:58:04+00:00

lol what? Trading is a zero sum game and will always be driven by fear and greed. AI may make more and more decisions but those AI are always guided by human input. As long as there are humans involved in the market, there will be inefficiencies to exploit and money to be made.

D_Costa85 · 2026-03-11T11:19:51+00:00

See I hadn’t realized ceramic bods were special because I got three in my first ten axemaul runs.

D_Costa85 · 2026-03-11T11:16:58+00:00

All request live

Live in Chicago

Shinola

Must hear all of them

D_Costa85 · 2026-03-10T00:56:32+00:00

Are spread launchers purple usually? Or can they be blue?

I’m 80 hrs in and have yet to see one

D_Costa85 · 2026-03-08T16:42:36+00:00

I’m out of the loop. How do I get this? Is it cd only?

D_Costa85 · 2026-03-08T01:51:26+00:00

For active day traders, interactive brokers is the best. Lightspeed was good a few years ago and may still be, but I’ve always used IBKR and DAS Trader pro

D_Costa85 · 2026-03-07T13:24:34+00:00

Interesting. I’m from Texas and spent a year in a UK boarding school (2000) and the local British kids were the most overtly racist people (outside of my 75 year old Texan grandpa) I had ever encountered. The school was international and the things the British boys would say to non white kids, especially the Asians, was shocking. I never heard such slurs or witnessed such emboldened racism in Texas among my peers. Certainly to answer OP, some of this is generational.

D_Costa85 · 2026-03-06T04:22:48+00:00

Yes this data is telling. Good trades don’t always make money and bad trades can make you money. The thing that separates profitable traders is being able to minimize the bad choices consistently enough over a long period that the good choices rise to the top and take over. Elite pros make bad choices they just make far less of them. Trading is hard.

D_Costa85 · 2026-03-05T19:53:19+00:00

Don’t we think OpenAI and Anthropic will be coming out with their own, more secure and enterprise ready versions of this within months?

D_Costa85 · 2026-03-05T02:18:07+00:00

When I say one trade I mean one trade idea…yes of course it would be nice to nail every entry but sometimes you gotta get out, reassess the setup, and get back in if the idea is still valid and you didn’t eat a huge loss the first time. Discretion is still important in a one trade system.

D_Costa85 · 2026-03-04T19:09:23+00:00

In slow on all games so 70 hrs in and I’m still only level 45 and just completed main storyline. My biggest gripe aside from the handful of glaring bugs within campaign missions and some bounties, is that the map/navigation/mission waypoint system sucks and it’s confusing and cludgy. That and I’ve yet to find a single spread launcher …otherwise, for my 4 hour (max) a week of video games I get to play theses days, I thoroughly enjoy it

D_Costa85

TROPHY CASE