Lance Breitstein

Breitstein opens with his career at Trillium, one of the oldest prop firms, where he achieved the highest annual trading P&L in the firm's history. What looks like a success story is actually a lesson in retrospective analysis. After years believing his edge came from technology and data, a deep post-career review revealed the real pattern: his best trades were always aligned with the trend across timeframes, and his worst trades — the painful, expensive ones — were fights against it. That single discovery became the organizing principle for everything he teaches.

"I'll never be long if a stock is steadily holding below VWAP."

Before applying trend to trading decisions, Breitstein forces a precise definition: a stock in an uptrend makes higher highs and higher lows — the slope of the line is positive. Without that clarity, the concept stays vague and useless. He pushes further: even mean-reversion trades, which appear to go against the trend, can be structured to be 'with the trend' if you understand what trend means at the right timeframe. The implication is that the framework applies universally, not just to momentum plays.

The reference price is the last unaffected price before a news event or catalyst — the level from which the new trend begins. Breitstein uses it as a real-time test: if a stock is holding above its reference price, it's in an uptrend from that event; if it fails to reclaim it, the trend is down. This makes 'is the stock trending?' an objective, testable question rather than a matter of interpretation. Getting in close to the reference price with a tight stop is categorically different from entering 10 points away.

Breitstein's rule: size 25% larger when the intraday and daily trends simultaneously align. When a stock breaks out on the intraday chart and is also moving on the daily, weekly, and monthly, every participant category is on your side — momentum traders, fundamental longs, and shorts who need to cover. He uses the AVGO breakout on Nvidia's AI earnings guide as the example: multiple timeframes firing together is rare, and the multiplier is how you capitalize without changing your risk management structure.

"When you identify these trends properly, you can really start to apply it into your trading with these rules."

Trends don't just stop — they exhaust. Breitstein identifies the signals: capitulation volume on the flush, an extended prior move, and the setup following exhaustion where the counter-trend trade becomes viable. The GME example shows the full sequence: prolonged uptrend, exhaustion flush, then counter-trend bounce. The bigger and more extended the prior trend, the cleaner the counter-trend setup. More aligning catalysts on the flush — fundamental and technical together — the stronger the opportunity to size up.

Breitstein walks through his own trading history including a short of WorkHorse after a fraud reveal that sent the stock into sustained decline — a trend trade in disguise. He then takes a viewer question about finding mean reversion candidates: the filter is stocks down the most without news in a broadly weak market. When the market is down but a stock is hitting without a specific catalyst, the capitulation is 'clean' — pure price exhaustion rather than narrative-driven selling. A news-driven flush can also work but requires judging whether the selling is structural or temporary.

Risk management was Breitstein's biggest weakness despite his career success. His core rules: every trade must have a structure that allows a stop — if it doesn't, find one or don't take it. Second, know how much to risk in different setup qualities and never risk so much that a few losses become demotivating. He introduces the A+ setup framework: rate setups by quality and commit capital proportionally. The more variables that align — volume, extension, catalyst strength, short positioning — the higher the grade and the larger the position.

The most durable edge is a written playbook: for each trade category (breakouts, mean reversion, breaking news), write down every relevant variable and rank them by importance. Breitstein walks through the breaking-news category — headline strength, quality of short interest, positioning going in, the stock's technical setup. The exercise forces traders to articulate what they're actually looking for before markets open rather than reacting on feel. Committing things to paper is what turns fuzzy intuition into a repeatable process.

A viewer asks why Breitstein uses two-minute bars. His answer: technicals are fractals — any timeframe works — and two minutes simply fit his style as a day trader. The real question is how to locate the exact entry. He focuses on the two-bar high at the turn: the reference price just above the low after a flush. Getting in close to that structure with a tight stop is what makes a trade high-quality; entering 10 points away from the reference price is a fundamentally different — and worse — trade even if the ticker is the same.

Before taking a mean reversion trade, Breitstein places small probe positions to anchor his focus on specific names and see how they behave at the first bounce. He maintains a live watch list of stocks down the most, filters for names without news, and refreshes it in real time. The mental process during a flush: don't chase — wait for the turn, monitor volume, verify the structure. His instruction to traders: have your list ready and know your criteria before the move, not during it.

A common scenario: the stock flushes, forms a structure, undercuts slightly, then makes the real move. Breitstein's rule is unambiguous — exit at your stop if it gets breached. The reasoning: the best trades don't require heroics. If your setup was truly A+ quality, you'll be in position before the undercut becomes relevant. Giving extra room because you 'think' it'll recover is a risk-management failure disguised as a judgment call. Taking the stop and re-entering if the structure reforms is the disciplined response.

"If those lows are getting breached, so often the answer is yes, and I think the more important point is if you're in the really best setups, that shouldn't happen."

Breitstein never reviewed every trade — with 25-30 tickers on active days, it wasn't practical. Instead, he identified the standout tickers from each day — whether he traded them or not — and reviewed those specifically. The discipline: every single day, analyze the charts, find one thing to improve. The traders who develop fastest also study missed trades, not just losing ones. Missed winners are future wins waiting to be recognized, and ignoring them is leaving the most actionable feedback on the table.

When a major event approaches — Fed minutes, CPI, any macro catalyst — Breitstein's default is to position with the prevailing trend. He pre-builds a list of tickers most likely to be affected and his question going in is always 'how can I go with this trend?' He also notes that panics cluster at market open and close, and that pure technical flushes without a specific catalyst are more reliably tradeable than news-driven ones — less narrative noise, cleaner price exhaustion to read.

Each year brings different themes and the traders who thrive are the ones who identify and adapt. Breitstein asks himself annually: what is the market offering the most rewards for trading? Hot IPO years, he becomes an IPO trader. AI momentum years, those names are his focus. He rejects the advice to 'stick to one product' for most active traders — watching the same liquid instrument every day means trading noise 99% of the time. He closes with halt management: be flat or short going into a limit-down stock, never long. Being on the right side of volatility is itself a trend decision.