VWAP

Additional trend definitions: holding above VWAP all day (Nvidia on May 18th before blowout earnings) and holding above key moving averages (First Solar weekly chart). Lance emphasizes a core principle: all technical concepts are fractal — they apply identically whether you zoom into a one-minute chart or out to a monthly chart. The same structure that defines an intraday trend defines a secular bull market.

Once you have defined trend clearly, mechanical rules naturally follow. Lance shares one rule he and another eight-figure trader independently discovered: never be long if a stock is steadily holding below VWAP, never be short above VWAP, and never trade range-bound or consolidating stocks. These simple, binary filters eliminate an enormous number of losing trades before they can be taken.

Asked about additional characteristics he looks for, Gon reveals the sparseness of his chart: 9 EMA, 21 EMA, price, and volume — that's it. No VWAP, no ADR, no additional indicators. He is strictly price-and-volume based. On a given day he sets up his watchlist in pre-market and watches those names closely, but as the day progresses and new names appear with the right volume signatures, he adds them. He doesn't predict which stocks will move — he waits for price and volume to tell him, then reacts.

"I don't have VWAP or ADRs or anything like that. I'm strictly price and volume based."

Ariel came home from his prison sentence on April 1, 2020, and started trading full-time on June 1 with a $30,000 account. He learned the absolute basics from scratch — what VWAP was, how to place market and limit orders, how to use a gap scanner. He tread water for months (June through September), then found successful day traders on Discord. While the top traders were making $20,000–30,000 a day, their friends were making a more relatable $800–900 a day, so he latched onto what they were doing. The breakthrough came from sympathy plays — buying related stocks when a leader made a massive move — combined with aggressive scalping of 10–15 trades per day. He compounded from $1,000 to $3,500 daily, turning a $60,000–90,000 account into a growing base. His nothing-to-lose mentality — having just been sleeping in prison — fueled the aggression that turned $30K into $3.5 million in 16 months.

"Mentality wise, I had nothing to lose. Just months earlier, my situation in life was I was sleeping in prison. So I didn’t have anything to lose — this was either going to be a career or I was going to find out quickly that it wasn’t going to be. And within 16 months I found out that you could change your life and flip it upside down pretty quickly."

Ariel’s early P&L was comically small — $3, $5, −$8, −$10 days — because he wasn’t risking anything, just figuring out the platform. There is no single book that tells a new trader how to do everything: how to add a moving average to a chart, how to find gappers, how to read level 2. You either ask people or figure it out yourself. Once he committed, he had no other job and still hasn’t had one since. He put in 10–12 hours a day — at his desk 90 minutes before the open, an hour or two after the close, sometimes at night — buying courses, joining chat rooms, studying successful traders on FinTwit. The core discipline was simple: focused on not losing money, buying dips, cutting quickly if wrong, and compounding the frequency of small wins. He got kicked off his broker for exploiting midpoint fills with too many market orders.

"My P&L some days was like three bucks, five bucks, lose eight, lose 10 because I wasn’t trying to risk anything. I was just trying to figure out what the heck was going on in the markets. What is VWAP? How do I even put a moving average on my chart?"

Luk describes himself as a swing trader and trend follower who holds working positions for one to three weeks. He risks up to 5% of the portfolio per trade, varies that down when he is struggling and up when he has a profit cushion, and caps any single position at 35% — or 25–30% for small and micro caps because of gap-down risk. He uses a tight-stop, low-win-rate approach: stops are limited to less than 50% of a stock's average daily range and never more than about 5%, which pushes him toward fast-moving stocks with ADRs above 5%. In 2024 he had 104 winners and 319 losers, a 23% win rate, a 15% average win, a 3% average loss, and an average five-day hold on winners; his tools are the 9, 21, and 50 EMAs, dollar volume, and anchored VWAP.

"104 winners and 319 losers... average win around 15%, average loss around 3%, win rate 23%... I hold my winners for longer."

Luk's COIN trade was not a conventional breakout. He bought near the low of the day as price tried to reclaim it, because Bitcoin had formed an inside day and was breaking prior-day highs; he expected COIN to follow. Waiting for COIN's own prior-day-high breakout would have made the stop too wide, so he used the low of day and an anchored VWAP break to define risk. He later panic-sold instead of following his sell rules, then watched COIN set up another breakout without him — a reminder that even a good entry can be wasted by poor execution.

"I didn't wait until COIN gave me a proper breakout setup... I'm just using the low of day when it's trying to reclaim back from the low of day... the stop would be too wide."