I got crushed.

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]I am down over $4,600 on my gold short that I took yesterday.

[00:00:07]I couldn't have been more wrong in terms of my short position and I'm probably going to take a loss on it today.

[00:00:12]However, I wouldn't do anything different if I took the exact same trade again because at the end of the day, a losing trade in terms of P&L has nothing to do with whether or not a trade was a good trade or not. No one, I don't care who it is, not even Warren Buffett, has a 100% track record of always calling everything correct in markets. No one does. And while this particular instance has not worked out, I would take the same trade if it set up again because I have a systematic approach that I've done for years and it's generated overall very nice P&L and uh outperformed the S&P 500. However, not every single trade is going to be a winner. So, what went down on gold here to completely wreck my trade? Again, I went short yesterday and pretty much immediately have been in draw down the whole time and this trade just has not worked well for me. Well, I think one thing to note about this particular example is that when trades typically work really well for me, it's the opposite. Typically, when an idea that I have is working, it very quickly starts to materialize into a profitable position showing green. Now, if we continue to move higher, then I'm going to stop out of gold and it's just a trade that didn't work. And at the end of the day, it's sort of like running a successful trading business in the sense that you're going to have uh profitable positions and losing positions. And it doesn't matter if you have losing trades. It matters if after many repeated iterations, do you come out making more than you lose? So, the question becomes, what's next? Am I going to take another gold short position? Am I going to reverse it? Am I going to go long? Do I think the dollar is going to start crashing? Let's talk about it in today's video. As we get started, just a quick reminder that this is not financial advice. Trading is high risk, and I'm just sharing my thoughts and opinions. Clearly, I can be wrong at times, and I often am. But at the end of the day, I have a style of trading that is low win rate with big potential winners when they want to run. And what that inevitably means is I'm going to have to sit through trades like this where they kind of go against me in order to capitalize on the eventual runners that I will find uh by repeating this same sort of setup and finding the winners eventually.

[00:02:26]So, since we're talking about gold for starters, let's talk a little bit about the technical analysis that went into this trade. So, we had a major level of support that we had been talking on the channel for a few days about, and it broke to the downside. Price then retested that area, and I decided I'll short it with a stop-loss above market structure. So, again, I wouldn't change anything about how I entered this particular trade. I've entered the same way for years. It's what works for me over the long term, but in this particular case, it has not worked. So, I will stop out, no questions asked, and I'll move on to the next trade. It's basically a try rather than a I'm certain it's going to work. I tried to get short gold, it has not worked, and so I cut the trade. I move on to the next position. My thinking here has been that inflation has generally been on the rise. And I still hold that bias, except that price is not currently agreeing with me specifically on gold. So, it's time to cut the trade and re-evaluate, resettle up, and figure out what I want to do next. I should also mention that the risk that is on my trade, of course, losing $4,000 is not a great feeling.

[00:03:30]However, it is proportional to my account size. Uh, I am working on a larger capital basis than the average trader, and I am, you know, not risking the farm by any means with that one particular trade uh that didn't work out. That being said, the dollar index is still holding up, generally speaking, pretty well. Uh, in terms of my support level here, I do also have a long position on UUP. This is a ETF that tracks pretty much what the DXY is doing. It's a dollar bullish uh ETF. And so, this trade is pretty much near break even. Uh, but what we can see here is that the idea of DXY uh still holding 99 looks intact for now. And so what I'm looking for is price to follow through back towards the upper end of this range. We had a big drop off yesterday.

[00:04:17]Uh at least for now, price seems to be trying to settle out around this area.

[00:04:21]And if we can hold that, then I am going to look for a continuation to the upside. Specifically looking for a break back up into uh the top end and out of this range that we've been looking at.

[00:04:32]I'm also still short the pound versus the US dollar. This trade has been going on for a couple days now. It's really gone nowhere. Uh but I am looking for the pound specifically to weaken against the dollar. There was some commentary from the Bank of England's uh governor um Governor Bailey and he made some comments that were actually pretty doubbish today talking about how he thinks inflation due to the Iran situation uh is temporary in nature and that slowdown in the economy for uh the UK ultimately is going to keep prices from going higher. And so that synopsis actually was met with a little bit of doubbishness in the British pound. So the pound has been a little soft and so too has the dollar been recently. So that has resulted in kind of a choppy price action setup here. And I'm showing all of my trades today. I'm also short TLT. This one's not working out very well either with the idea basically being very similar to gold. Uh price has rebounded up into a level of resistance around this 85.32 level. And the idea here is I think yields could continue to the upside. However, we are at the breaking point or decision point for this idea that I have. We have a 61.8% retracement taking place on the US 10-year yield, which is really where I base this idea. I'm looking for continuation to the upside. If we get it, I'll stay in the trade. If we fail, I will stop out of my TLT short position. Now, I'm bracing myself for the comments today because when I show losing positions, typically people tell me all about how wrong and how obvious it was that my trade was going to be a losing one. But I'm trying to do what I think most content creators are not going to do in trading space, which is talk openly about trades that are not going well and trades that are going well because I think we can learn from both on this YouTube channel. And again, I've I've heard it all for for years.

[00:06:18]All the hindsight warriors telling me, "Oh, you should have done this. It was obvious it was going to do this." But at the end of the day, focus on your own trading. I'll focus on mine. I'll share my ideas. And if I'm wrong, feel free.

[00:06:27]Let me have it in the comments. I welcome it. However, I'm not going to change what I do because I know it works. I've made money over the markets in the last, you know, 10 years by sticking to a system that was not delivered to me through a YouTube comment, but rather through my own, you know, hard work in terms of building a trading strategy that fits my style and my way of approaching markets, which is swing trading and fundamentals. Taking a look at the dollar in terms of a macro outlook perspective, which is kind of central to all of my analysis today. My thesis for gold, bonds, and my dollar position are all kind of centered around what's going on in the US dollar. And I have to say, uh, at least for now, the dollar score has backed off a little bit within edgefinder. Inflation is still a strong catalyst for potential strength in the dollar. But what's not so strong is, of course, the economic growth metrics, which have been coming in light, right? Right, we had GDP and PMIs. All three of these metrics come in lighter than anticipated. That is dollar bearish. So we have some offsetting here with uh technicals being positive. But then you have economic growth kind of negative for gold here. I'm sorry for dollar recently and inflation data bullish for for dollar. So I'm kind of in the camp of moving back into neutral stance for the dollar index. But I'm going to let my trade play out and stop out as necessary. Meanwhile, stocks continue to rip. No surprises here. This thing is on a green trend for sure. I mean, look how green all the candles are on this chart. Uh, very hard to try and fight this. And so, when I look at the S&P, when I look at the NASDAQ, um, really, it's not something I want to trade at all because I'm not really willing to short it, but I do have more of a cautious stance on it. And to be fair, I've been cautious on it for the last like month and a half, which has been the wrong play. But you don't have to catch every move in markets. And while the moves that I have been catching have not been great recently, I'm going through a bit of a draw down.

[00:08:16]Uh it's still very mild and I have plenty of room to bounce back and continue to uh take the trades that I'm supposed to. And that's the thing when you are, you know, let's say this is your P&L graph, right? So if your P&L graph over time uh is looking like this, right, where you are taking small losses and then catching the big winner every once in a while, what matters very very much to a strategy like this is that these periods, these draw down periods, you have to keep them small. Because if your size is too big, what this ends up looking like is this. And you could very well go bust trying to take big winners and swinging for the fences in terms of position size too. So I don't elect for this. I am a fan of keeping your size very small so that you can go through these draw down periods gracefully and then when the big runner comes it kind of makes back and all of it count uh by simply being able to survive. Right?

[00:09:13]During the draw down periods my goal is survival. My goal is to keep my losses at bay, under control, and then be there for the next big runner, but I don't know exactly when that's going to be with my style of trading. And so, there is a bit of, you know, patience that plays into it. Today's video is sponsored by Ola Prime, which is a prop firm that I recently found out about and have been very impressed by. Their team is incredibly professional and they have some of the greatest offers on the market that I have come across. Check this out. So, Ola Prime offers fast payouts within 1 hour of request. They also offer up to a 95% profit split and they have the largest number of trading platforms allowed that I've seen across the prop firm industry. They offer things like MetaTrader, which traders absolutely love, as well as several other trading platforms. And for those of you guys who are looking for a more flexible prop firm for swing trading and news trading, they do allow both news trading, weekend holding, and several other things that I'm not seeing all the other prop firms offer. They offer both direct and challenge accounts available now. They also have a 247 human customer support available for any questions or needs you may have. They have trading plans that are available for forex traders, futures traders, and even crypto traders. And in my personal opinion, this is the best prop firm if you are looking for something to tailor something specifically to your style of trading. Whether you're a swing trader, whether you trade futures, whether you trade forex, whether you're looking for a direct funding option or uh willing to go the one or two-phase challenge parts, they have all sorts of different things that might fit your criteria and what best suits you as a trader. They're also recognized by Forbes for excellence, which is just a cherry on top. And for my subscribers, they are currently offering 35% off. I'll leave all the information down below in the description for you to check out for yourself to see if it's the right fit.

[00:11:03]Thank you to Ola Prime for sponsoring today's video. Now, back to the content.

[00:11:07]And back at the end of 2025 into 2026, I had my best trade ever on gold. And many people told me for weeks on end, you know, to take profits on my gold longs and that it was going to crash. It was going to reverse. And it just didn't for so much longer than anyone, my self-inccluded, uh, thought that it would. Now, when it ultimately did roll over, I was able to cut the trade, get out of there, uh, and reverse course.

[00:11:33]And, you know, again, I made some money on the short side over here. Of course, now I've taken a loss on the short side, but it's just one more in the record book. Again, when you are looking at your strategies or ideas or analysis in markets, you have to look at a conclusive full picture look. You can't just look at one trade and draw the conclusion, oh, this strategy is the best or this strategy is terrible.

[00:11:55]Because if I only looked at my scenario on gold when I had that crazy runner, I would have seriously uh miscalculated just how good my trading strategy is.

[00:12:04]Those sorts of moves are so rare on gold. But again, patience plays out.

[00:12:10]Eventually, I catch that next runner and it kind of pays for all the losses. It's not a style for everyone because again, going for the giant runners requires a ton of patience because most of the time the market chops back and forth resulting in small wins. if you are the sort of person who takes profits quickly or small losses if you're the person who tries to trail stops or trend follow big moves in the markets. This is why I always say that when it comes to trading strategies, every strategy can work really well in certain environments and really poorly in others. Taking a look at the volatility index, volatility continues to shrink here. We are seeing markets quiet down here from the uh initial onset of the Iran US stuff which really caused a lot of buzz in markets.

[00:12:52]We've really seen things quiet down in recent times. Nowadays, the drift higher in the NASDAQ is thanks to a lot of excitement around all the data center buildouts, the semiconductors, the the the memory chip stocks. Uh there's a lot of buzz around those names right now.

[00:13:07]Take a look at like stocks like Micron or uh the semiconductor ETF SMH. These things are rocketing higher. However, my cautionary tale on stocks right now comes from the idea that when we look at let's just take a look at the Dow Jones for example. When we look at the fundamental score for the US stock market, we do have kind of a more bleak macro environment than we previously had. Economic growth metrics, GDP specifically, PMIs, these things have come in lower than anticipated. How does it impact stocks? Well, stock earnings are impacted by the state of the economy. And so, if the economy is in the process of slowing down, could that materially start to challenge some of the earnings of key stocks within the market? something to think about. And we also have inflation which has been rising and more so than anticipated, right? We've had a positive surprise on inflation. Meaning positive in the sense that more inflation than expected, which in the case of stocks is a negative. And let's just think logically for a second.

[00:14:06]Why would high inflation be bad for stocks? Well, two main reasons. One, it erodess the purchasing power of consumers. If gas prices are high, if costs of everything are going up, consumers may choose to pull back on their spending. That hurts corporate earnings. And the other big reason is that high inflation makes the Fed want to keep interest rates elevated, which also contracts the ability for consumers to spend money, hurting corporate earnings. So that's why I'm just not a big fan of when I look at the US indices, I'm really not a fan of chasing these things higher right now. I would much rather wait for a dip, even if I don't get that for a while. We just launched a free Discord channel that is actually completely free to join. Inside of the group, you can chat with other people who watch this channel and are a part of the A1 Trading community. We have all sorts of people from around the world in there chatting. We also offer free market analysis on ideas being shared from our top traders including myself uh and a couple other notable names within our team. We also do special giveaways for various prop firms and brokerages and our own products. And we also share coverage on what is going on in financial markets from a macro and sentiment perspective to help traders stay on top of things. Like I said, it is completely free to join. So, if you would like to take advantage of the free access Discord channel, the link will be down below in the description, and I hope to see you in there. And I actually did a podcast episode talking about all of this inflation worries and more details about the Bank of England, which I briefly mentioned earlier in today's episode, but also uh the Federal Reserve and where this inflation is potentially taking monetary policy, not just in the US and UK, but globally. So, check out this clip where Johnny and I discussed this in more detail. you know, we have seen uh this this story play out before in 2022 where inflation spiked. Uh but again, going back to the the dialogue having uh been said over in the US where they're not so willing to look at this as transitory. Um it is uh kind of a difference there from the Bank of England's Governor Bailey in the sense that that is sort of a like having tolerance for higher inflation in the here and now. That is sort of a variation of saying I think that this could be transitory. Now granted in the UK's circumstance as you've pointed out uh economic slowdown has been a a stronger theme there than in the US. Now in the US we have also seen just to list off a few variables here um off the top of my head in the US we have had both the services and manufacturing PMIs miss expectations retail sales was in line and GDP numbers came in uh significantly lower than expected in the latest round of economic data. So we're seeing it to a degree here as well where economic projections are being missed. And so when you look at that, you say, okay, um, economic projections being missed is a sign of like maybe a little bit of contraction in the US economy. Same in the UK's, right? We're seeing some economic contraction, which what what does that do to inflation? Well, that potentially lessens it. Um, actually, he cited uh I'm I'm going to paraphrase here because I don't have it exactly in front of me, but he uh mentioned well, here it is. Uh, quote, firms were telling us it was difficult to raise prices. Uh and he also mentioned quote bond market tightening has bought us some time. So what's going on there?

[00:17:23]Well, let's think about that. If we have from Governor Bailey the idea that okay firms businesses unable to raise prices competitively that's telling you the state of the consumer. That's telling you that there may not be that price inflation uh simply because firms and and consumers uh can't justify it. So maybe there is that case to be made that we have energy focused inflation right now but we expect that to at some point come to an end uh and we don't see the producers and the consumers really going out uh and and bidding things up aggressively. remember that the the dynamic that we have to think about in 2021 and 2022 at least in the United States uh and and again I don't know the specifics about how it went in the UK Johnny but in the US obviously we had the sweeping uh stimulus checks that really suddenly injected significant amounts of capital into the all levels of income. Right? you had suddenly people who, you know, did not have uh enough money all of a sudden had a nice stimulus check and and sort of all these sorts of um grants, these considerations, these things that made it easier for them to then go out and spend it right away. So, you had energy inflation, but you also had people with money going out and spending it aggressively. So, these are things that we have to think about in regards to just how inflationary all of this could be. Trading fundamentals can be a lot of hard work, but we actually made a pretty cool free Telegram channel where we are publishing constantly updates on what is going on from a macro fundamentals perspective. And no, it's not AI. It's not written by a robot. It's written by a real person on our team. His name is Allan. He puts together a report each day on what is going on on things like gold, currency pairs, commodities, indices, etc. on a global financial fundamental analysis basis. It's a really cool newsletter where you can basically stay on top of things by reading for like a minute per day. If that would be interesting to you to join the free Telegram channel, there is a link in the description down below on this video that you can join and get into the action there. We also offer special discount perks for our products as well as for funded accounts and for brokerages, etc. And we also do some giveaways as well. So definitely take a second to join the Telegram channel in the description down below. I also want to take a second to just genuinely thank you for supporting my content here. Make sure to subscribe and hit the thumbs up button if you have not already. And I do hope that more videos in the future will continue to help you on your trading journey. Good luck. Thanks for watching.