Ted Zhang

Ted Zhang was on track to become an oral surgeon, having completed a premed/predental track and earned dental school acceptances, when COVID sent him home in spring 2020. With time and his dad's CNBC in the background, his curiosity pulled him toward the markets. He started with money from Uber Eats and DoorDash — around $5–10K — and plunged it all in, turning that initial stake into at least 15–20x in 2020–21. The gains came fast, but so did the inevitable giveback that followed.

After his 2020–21 run, Ted gave back roughly 50% of his gains — but not all at once. It was a gradual erosion of paper cuts, which he credits with keeping the experience survivable. A critical factor: he had to step away to study for and take the dental admissions exam, which forced a trading hiatus and prevented a full destruction of capital. That combination of enforced discipline and a softer drawdown gave him the time and clarity to study systematically before returning with a real framework.

Coming out of the 50% drawdown, Zhang read the core O'Neal books and converged on a style he calls thematic catalyst momentum — a form of trend following rooted in CAN SLIM principles but modified. The key modification: the team doesn't strictly require earnings and sales for every trade, since sectors like crypto have no earnings but still carry the same momentum characteristics. The style sits within trend following as the broad category, with growth and fundamentals as a useful but not mandatory filter. The goal is to find the biggest movers in the hottest themes and ride the cycle.

Ted joined Reverd Asset Management under Don, whom he cold-DM'd on social media asking for a job. Don's defining characteristic is extreme data discipline: he tracks every statistic in elaborate spreadsheets and builds systematic models to manage risk. His biggest rule in portfolio management — which Ted cites repeatedly — is don't lose money: define open risk before entering any position and plan for what happens if the thesis is wrong. The mentorship crystallized Ted's understanding that asymmetric risk-reward isn't a vague concept but a structure built around a specific price floor. If you can identify where a stock is very unlikely to trade below, you can size accordingly.

Ted walks through the books that form the intellectual foundation of his trading. The Daily Stoic (Ryan Holiday) instilled the core practice of focusing on what you can control — a philosophy he reads a page of daily for over four years, eventually buying the leather-bound edition. O'Neal's How to Make Money in Stocks is the literal foundation of Reverd: Don built the firm's system from it after a family loss in the 2000 bear market. Jesse Livermore's How to Trade in Stocks, which Ted is rereading for the third time, reveals that every modern trading principle — market leaders, sister stocks, themes, record-keeping — was discovered a century ago. Stan Weinstein's Stage Analysis is foundational for framing where a stock sits in its cycle.

Ted highlights Nicolas Darvas's How I Made $2 Million in the Stock Market as a model of process: Darvas was traveling the world, not staring at quotes, and his discipline against impulsivity is the lesson. Ed Seykota's observation echoes the same truth — a quote monitor becomes a slot machine that makes you overtrade. Ted pushes the habit of rereading the same great books rather than racing through many: when you come back to a book as a more experienced trader, you find layers you missed. Heraclitus's river analogy applies — you're not the same trader as when you last read it. Druckenmiller's interviews and Minervini's books round out the list, alongside 48 Laws of Power as a surprising addition on understanding competitive dynamics.

"Ed Seykota says if you sit in front of the quote monitor, it just becomes a slot machine."

Ted describes how he filters the flood of podcasts, books, and online content without losing his own framework. The key is confidence in a core style: he can take small pieces from any source — a nuance here, an entry variation there — test whether it works, and discard what doesn't fit. Excessive information consumption only becomes a problem before a stable foundation is built. He also credits the competitive instincts from soccer and video games as directly transferable: both markets and sports are player-versus-player, with strategic thinking under pressure and a scoreboard that holds you accountable. Robert Green's Mastery supports the idea that trading aptitude reflects a passion rooted in childhood, not a skill chosen in adulthood.

Ted and his partner Conor took CAN SLIM and modified it into what they call the magic elixir — a checklist of characteristics that define a super stock. The criteria start with liquidity (no getting trapped, especially with client money), then high ADR/ATR (stocks moving less than 1% a day require too long to produce gains), strong fundamentals tied to a growth story or catalyst, and chart confirmation. The name is deliberate: no single ingredient works alone, but when all criteria converge — liquid, high ADR, earnings growth, theme, setup — the resulting trade has a qualitatively different character than stocks meeting only some criteria. The framework is rooted in O'Neal but adapted for a more volatile, theme-driven modern market.

Not all themes are equal: secular themes (tech revolutions, AI, rare earths) produce multi-year compounding moves because underlying earnings growth is structural. Cyclical themes (housing, financials, retail) rise and fall with the economic cycle and interest rates. Zhang focuses on secular themes for the big sustainable moves. When two stocks both clear the magic elixir criteria, the tiebreaker is linearity: how consistently does the stock trend upward without violating prior lows? A stock that makes new highs without breaking the previous day's low, day after day, is categorically different from a choppy stock. GDX vs. the choppy version of that same chart two years earlier is his go-to example of the distinction.

Reverd's risk framework starts from the portfolio level: they typically risk no more than 50 basis points per trade, and increasingly closer to 15–25bps, determined by how many magic elixir criteria the opportunity checks and their conviction level. Position sizes are capped at 12.5% in Turbo (the aggressive fund targeting accredited investors) and 8% in Protection (skewed to retirement accounts). All three funds — Turbo, Grow, and Protection — include an index overlay in 1x, 2x, and 3x S&P that is dialed up or down based on trend-following signals, ensuring broad market exposure is always sized appropriately alongside individual stock positions.

Ted walks through the SNDK trade starting from the fundamental setup: it was a spinoff with a base on the chart, and the trigger was Micron (MU) earnings, during which the conference call flagged a severe supply/demand imbalance in memory. When the fundamental thesis (supply shortage → pricing power) aligns with a hot sector group and the chart shows tight base action with volume, the group move becomes high-probability. Peer names MU, WDX, and STX all worked in parallel, confirming the group rotation. Ted shows the 137% move that followed and emphasizes that paying attention to a group move when you already know the fundamental story is the highest-conviction entry posture.

After an extended move, SNDK gave a breakdown signal that Ted reads as a two-level lesson. At the position level, a negative expectation breaker — a large reversal candle, a lower high, and reconfirmation below a key shelf — is the signal to exit or trim aggressively. At the portfolio level, when the strongest stock in the strongest sector breaks down, it is a canary in the coal mine for the broader market: it typically precedes a choppy or declining environment for growth stocks generally. The timing coincided with geopolitical tensions and a government shutdown scare, underscoring that top-down context and individual chart behavior must both point the same direction for confidence.

After a pullback in SNDK, Ted explains his framework for re-entry: he waits for the stock to reclaim all key moving averages with all slopes rising before adding. He specifically uses the 20 SMA rather than the 8 or 21 EMA because the SMA keeps him out of false starts and reduces frustration — a principle he frames as maximizing reward-to-aggravation, not just reward-to-risk. The inside day low-volatility contraction, confirmed by his RMV indicator flashing below 5, is his precise entry signal. He never adds to a loser — averaging down is explicitly rejected. All position additions come into winning trades with confirmed momentum behind them.

As SNDK extended into a parabolic move, Ted's approach was to build a position cushion through partial sells at technical resistance and ATR extensions rather than holding everything for maximum gain. The mindset: 2.5% per month compounding equals roughly 35% per year, which is world-class portfolio management — the goal is to protect gains so the cushion allows more aggressive positioning later. A 10 ATR extension above the 50-day was his trim signal; a bearish engulfing candle on high volume warned of a potential reversal. His acknowledged lesson: he was undersized in this trade (one of the two best opportunities of early 2026), and a pyramid to 7.5% would have made the year in a single position.

When managing a late-stage parabolic position in SNDK, Ted switches to a 5-minute chart to time partial sells. The technique: watch for the stock to push into pre-market highs, reject them on a 5-minute candle, then use the 5-minute open range lows as the trim trigger. He sold 14% of the position at 647.81 when the stock broke the 5-minute open range low — a level that coincided with a half-Livermore level breaking at 650 and the intraday opening price. For managed accounts that can't short, he uses parabolic short entry criteria as his trim signal: if this were a short setup, that is where you'd sell a long.

Ted walks through the GLD trade as a case study in a non-earnings momentum setup: gold has no EPS, but it checks every other magic elixir criterion — narrative (de-dollarization, debt, geopolitics), liquidity, high linearity, and a 10-year cup-with-handle base. He initially passed on an earlier base feeling it was too slow, then re-entered when gold reclaimed all moving averages with tight volatility. Partial sells were triggered by ATR extension signals, and the final exit came when gold closed below the 10 EMA — coinciding with futures closing below the same level and a macro shock (hawkish Fed chair nomination + CME margin hike) that forced a liquidation cascade. The lesson: commodity trade exits require cross-referencing the futures chart, not just the ETF.

Ted quickly applies the same magic elixir framework to three more positions. Nugget (a leveraged GDX product) was a small starter at a 20/50 moving average reclaim with an RMV flash; it worked immediately and he pyramided into strength as a prior high became support. Silver (SLV futures) exhibited near-perfect linearity — consecutive tight flags holding the 10 EMA — and his one regret was not pyramiding more aggressively at all-time highs; a bearish engulfing triggered his first trim but he held through two 10-EMA undercut-and-reclaims before the final new high squeezed shorts. Palantir was an episodic pivot trade off a guidance beat: he bought the gap up and held a linear trend above the 10, trimming at the measured-move target.

Ted's pre-market routine takes 30–45 minutes when efficient: he runs a DV leaders scan, an up-in-volume scan (most big catalysts surface here), and a highest-volume-ever scan to catch unusual institutional activity. For fundamental research he uses AI directly in his browser, with a prompt asking what drove a stock's move, all news in the last 90 days, themes, and competitors — output in about 20 seconds versus 30–45 minutes manually. He also maintains a short watchlist for stage 3–4 names breaking down, a combined position list across all client and personal accounts, and a universal pre-market scanner for early movers. The discipline: only build from what's on the focus list — unknown movers aren't seen until after the close, which prevents impulsive chasing.

Ted's journaling practice is built around a stoic principle he adapted specifically for trading: accept that the market will do whatever it wants, and only fear abnormal action. He repurposed the serenity prayer — grant me serenity to accept that markets will do what they want regardless of what I want — and recites it before each session. The journal includes quotes from market wizards he rereads when struggling: Bruce Kovner's 'undertrade, undertrade, undertrade,' Livermore on patience, and the cheetah analogy from Mark Weinstein. The principle from Annie Duke's Thinking in Bets is also woven in: judge decisions on process, not results. His focus list constraint prevents FOMO and overtrading by design — he simply never sees stocks he's not already tracking while markets are open.

Ted's post-market journal has distinct sections: market notes with subjective trend assessments (momentum, breadth, new highs/lows), post-trade analysis asking whether the process was sound and whether it was a fat pitch, a situation awareness section monitoring inter-asset correlations (stocks, bonds, crypto, commodities), and a stock trading environment summary with reminders like 'you'll be in drawdown 99% of the time.' He reviews his last 5–50 trade stats and current position health, asking whether he's earned the right to size up. The weekly journal uses an organic chemistry analogy: start from the desired end state, then reverse-synthesize each step required — minimal viable process. He also uses Notion AI to query his entire multi-year journal history for pattern recognition: 'summarize my strengths and weaknesses from this date to that date.'