A whopping 97% of day traders lose money in less than a year, and day traders lost a total of $1.14 billion during the pandemic. That’s why Apex Investing equips day traders with the tools and support they need to succeed. In this episode of The Agent of Wealth Podcast, host Marc Bautis is joined by Darrell Martin, a self-taught futures day trader and Founder and CEO of Apex Trader Funding and Apex Investing.
In this episode, you will learn:
- What day trading is, and what makes a day trader successful.
- How day traders can put a plan in place to avoid catastrophic losses.
- How psychology and mindset impacts trading decisions.
- How to start day trading.
- And more!
Resources:
Apextraderfunding.com | Apex Investing Institute | Code: SAVE50 | Bautis Financial: 8 Hillside Ave, Suite LL1 Montclair, New Jersey 07042 (862) 205-5000 | Schedule an Introductory Call
Disclosure: The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity and content. It is not a direct transcription of the full episode, which can be listened to above.
Welcome back to The Agent of Wealth Podcast, this is your host Marc Bautis. Today, I’m joined by special guest Darrell Martin.
Founder and CEO of Apex Trader Funding and Apex Investing, Darrell is a self-taught futures day trader.
Darrell began in the industry 15 years ago when he found out he was going to become a first-time father. Eager to learn and develop in the industry, he attended a motivational seminar where a speaker discussed using options to profit from market moves. This piqued his interest despite his lack of investing experience. He took every course and attended every seminar he could find, and eventually, he connected with accomplished forex traders and market makers who showed him how markets truly operate.
Darrell Martin became a consistently profitable trader, but gaining the funding to scale his trading was challenging. This led Martin to establish Apex Trader Funding to give aspiring traders the opportunity he wished for early in his career.
In addition, he founded Apex Investing, a trading community with more than 30,000 traders in more than 150 countries. He coined the phrase “diagnostic investing” and has designed multiple algorithm-based trades.
Darrell, welcome to the show.
Hey, thanks for having me.
This is the first time we’re covering day trading on The Agent of Wealth. For those who don’t know, what is day trading?
What Is Day Trading?
Day trading is just trading. If I showed you a five minute chart or I showed you a one year chart, they would look the exact same. Okay, so you wouldn’t know the difference. You’re just making decisions faster. If you trade in the futures market, which is what I focus on now, you can trade 23 hours a day and that means some 6:00 PM Eastern to 5:00 PM the next day. So you can trade any time you want to and most day traders trade for maybe a couple hours. A lot of people think day trading is sitting in front of a computer for eight hours, so you can do it when you get home from work. You can do it at night after the kids have gone to bed. You can do it early in the morning, whatever your schedule allows. But it does take discipline, especially in futures markets.
You’re not looking at individual companies and trying to pick from 20,000 stocks. There’s maybe a couple dozen futures. I only trade a couple of them. I trade Nasdaq and the s and p is the main two things I trade and I just focus on that every day When I trade and I go in and I make my decisions based on price action, which is basically what the market movers are doing, and I follow the big fish so I can get crumbs, I’m following the sharks so I can get crumbs off of the sharks and those crumbs, they can add up to a lot. So I’ve had my great years, I’ve had my bad years, all that and day trading at the same time can be very risky. I’ve probably heard that if you heard anything about day trading, it’s hard to do. It’s risky, all that, and that’s the big benefit of where Apex Trader funding comes in is because you pay for an evaluation and show Santa a $50,000 count that you can make 3000 without losing 2,500.
If you lose 2,500, you just start over and take it again. Once you’ve accomplished that goal, then we put you into a funded account where it’s a performance account and we pay you out the first 25,000 you make, plus we pay you out up to 90% of the profits that you make after that. And if you blow the account, you just start back over at a valuation and go through the process again. So it really takes away that fear of losing your retirement, losing your kids’ college savings account, risking the mortgage payment, all that stuff and day trading is made for, it’s not an investing thing where you’re trying to grow a big portfolio. It’s made for income. So if you’re looking to do something for income day trading is something you can do as your own boss.
We have a huge community of traders where you can hop in and learn with them. We have like 15,000 people on our Discord channel. We have hundreds of people inside of our trade room every day. We have step-by-step training at Apex Investing. The company I made about 15 years ago teaching how to trade, you sort of mentioned I made that one for my daughter when she was being born, and then one of my friends got ahold of the videos and then said, Hey, let’s make this into a website. And so we just grew from there and now we’ve paid out over, I want to say last month we paid out $12 million and we paid out over 60 million total in the last two years. So it’s definitely ramping up half of that in the last 90 days. So we have a lot of traders that are doing well.
We have traders that have obviously a lot of challenges and they use it for education to learn how to trade without blowing their own accounts and having to refund them all the time. It can be a career, side hustle, or what you do for a living. If you’re going to do it for a living, you need to be consistent.
Is that the typical story of a day trader – someone who starts while holding a job, then eventually day trades full-time?
I’ve seen it all. Everything from a homeless guy that made over a hundred thousand dollars, to people blowing accounts like crazy for six months and then making over a million dollars the next six months. I’d say for the average person, day trading probably takes about a year to get down. If you’re brand new, give yourself time to learn.
We have a community that’s very friendly to help you learn. We have videos that help you walk through every step, every single aspect of trading. But yeah, I mean I’ve seen people come in their first thing that they pass, they get a payout, they’re good. I’ve seen people fail hundreds of times and then finally make it big and I’ve seen people that haven’t done it at all. So they’ve tried and tried and tried and a lot of that is usually due to impatience and lack of discipline and they’re just hitting keys and they’re not trying to have a system of how they trade.
What Makes a Day Trader Successful?
You mentioned discipline, but what other characteristics make a day trader successful?
One, they’re very patient, so they wait for the right trade setup. They don’t, they’re not even there to make hundreds of trades. They’re there to make a few good trades a day and be done. They’re committed to becoming a professional at it. They’re passionate about it. It’s not just some little side thing that’s going to go in and make money in five seconds. They know it’s going to take time to learn. So they’re dedicated to learning. They’re dedicated to education. They have patience. They have discipline. They have a system where they know where they’re going to get out or where they’re going to get in, where they’re going to get out if it goes against them, where they’re going to get out if it goes for them. They don’t have this incessant need to be right. They’re more about trading well than they are about making money. And if they trade well, then hopefully the money comes. Just like if you’re playing football, I mean you can’t play to win the game. You gotta play that. Play it the best you can and hopefully all the plays add up to a winning game. Trading’s the same way. You gotta play your plays and hopefully all the trades add up to a profitable day. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. The goal is over a period of time you have more winning days than losing days.
To clarify, when we say day trading, does that mean getting in and out of every position every day?
Yes, day trading is getting in and out on the same day. For me, 10 minutes is considered a long time to be in a trade. Usually, I’ll get in and out in 10 minutes.
What is Diagnostic Investing?
Earlier, we talked about diagnostic investing. Can you explain what that is?
It’s looking at the market like a market maker. You’re looking at statistical expected moves, which we just draw on the chart. You don’t have to do any math like how far the market’s going to move. You’re looking at any news that’s going to come out that if you’re trading oil, you want to know that there’s an oil inventory report every Wednesday. You want to know that report and when it’s coming out, if you’re in during that report, you can get slammed. Or when non-farm payrolls or the Fed funds rate comes out that can make the market go crazy. You want to be out during those times. That’s the fundamentals that you look at. We show you a website where all those are listed so you don’t have to guess and try to find them. We even have a list of them on our website, and you’re also looking at the price action and you’re looking at volume, so to see how much is actually pushing the market or if it’s just a light move. So it’s sort of stepping back and analyzing the market in four separate areas, but they’re all drawn on the chart so you know what to be aware of versus just trading off your gut.
You mentioned that you focus on three futures markets. Is that the amount you typically recommend?
I’d recommend one to three. You have to learn a market, and learn how it moves.
I also think the type of market will depend on your personality. I like fast-moving, so most of my trades are placed in the NASDAQ. By comparison, the S&P moves very slow.
But one to three markets is pretty much all a singular day trader can handle.
Strategies for Day Traders
Earlier, you mentioned that you look for the crumbs from some of the big players. How do you follow their trades?
Yeah, so I’m actually, what we’ve done is we’ve taken all the algorithms that track all the orders that come in, and then we just draw certain things like a box with a blue thing inside of it that just means trapped Xbox, it means trapped orders. So people put it like people buying at the high or something like that and exhaustion happening where the market’s running out of steam on a move and it’s ready to reverse and then we’ll just sell below that and then buy back lower or we’ll buy above that and then sell back higher. We just go for say 10 ticks, 20 ticks, which just means like 10 cents or a dollar move if every move is 10 cents. So as we go for very small moves, take the profit, be done after the next trade.
And over time, that compounds?
Exactly.
Do you always go long on trades, or do you go short as well?
We go both directions. We don’t care what direction the market’s going. I mean, I may go long on one trade, short on the next trade long, on the next trade. And what that means for anybody who’s new to that is in the futures markets really in all the markets, but you can buy and then sell higher, which is what everybody’s used to buy low sell high, right? You hear that. But you can also sell high and buy low. So if the market’s going down, you can sell and buy back at a lower price. If you sold it higher and bought it lower, then that’s the same as buying lower and selling higher. You make the difference in that profit there, which is great because you can have it up day, a down day or a sideward day where it’s just going up, down, up, down. You’re just going in and grabbing the up, and then you go in and grab the down. Then you go and grab the up, then you go and you grab the down because the markets don’t move just in a straight line and they’re not always just up. So you don’t want to be dependent upon the market improving for you to be able to make money. You can make money in book directions.
How to Prevent a Catastrophic Loss
How does a day trader prevent a catastrophic loss?
Yeah, you want to know one of the things you want to do is it’s just like I heard it just explained once, like whitewater rafting. You can’t go down the river and say, “I want to get out…” Your boat is going to keep moving. So, you have to have an exit plan.
Anytime you get in a trade, it’s just like getting into a whitewater raft, you want to know exactly when you are going to get out, and you have to be disciplined enough to follow the plan.
How Psychology and Mindset Impacts Trading Decisions
As you mentioned, controlling your emotions is probably just as important as reading the markets. How does a day trader learn this skill?
I actually have a whole course on how to deal with all of the psychological mind games. I’ve worked with floor traders, market makers, market movers and trading psychologists… In the course, I teach students what psychological challenges they will face, and how to overcome them.
How to Start Day Trading
Now, let’s talk about the funding piece of day trading. I’m sure to a lot of listeners, this sounds great, but they may not have the funding to start. What do you recommend to them?
First, start learning. Go to Apexinvesting.com and begin learning how we trade. Then, when you’re ready to actually start trading, take the evaluation. Go slow, go small.
Are actual trades happening during the evaluation period?
No, they’re not. It’s a simulation account. When they go into a PA account, it can be simulated, live or copied. Depending on how the investor’s equity curve looks, we decide where to put their trades.
So at some point, they have to pass the evaluation to get to the next step?
Exactly. A good chunk of traders pass.
That’s great. Well, that’s just about all the questions I have for you today. Darrell, I want to thank you for being on The Agent of Wealth Podcast. You gave some great information on the world of day trading. How best can someone reach out to you to find out more about Apex Trader Funding and Apex Investing?
Your listeners can go to apextraderfunding.com. On the tools page, you can click into Apex Investing. Your listeners can use the code SAVE50 on funding evaluations, which will save them 50% of the cost.
Great, we’ll link to those resources in the show notes. Thanks again, Darrell. And thank you to everyone who tuned in to today’s episode. Don’t forget to follow The Agent of Wealth on the platform you listen from and leave us a review of the show. We are currently accepting new clients, if you’d like to schedule a 1-on-1 consultation with our advisors, please do so below.