Closing the Books for 2025 GREEN

EDIT: I almost forgot the whole point of this post! I’ve started posting my trades and trade ideas over at our discord, you can join here for free: https://discord.gg/FWusPMhgqd - no promises of how active I’ll be there in 2026 but I’ll do my best!

Well, I came back to the game in August - August was a scratch loss, September was green, October was a scratch loss, November was VERY green, and December was also a scratch loss. In short, losing months are getting smaller and winning months are getting bigger. Giving it my all in 2026 to finally become the consistently profitable trader I’ve envisioned for 3 years now. Still enormous amounts to learn, and staying humble and wary at every turn - you have to be if you trade NASDAQ 😂.

Furthermore, in each losing month this year, I can point to just 1 or 2 failures of psychology that turned the month red. If I can do my damn job and eliminate these failures from my trading… I can see the light on the horizon. Losses are of course necessary and part of the whole game, but being an idiot and overleveraging / overtrading are unacceptable.

While I can say I’m pretty satisfied with my technical analysis efforts so far, psychology still dominates the struggle for me.

Been trading options recently, and for me an options trade is separated into 2 things:

• Entry signal → derived from technical analysis

• Exit Strategy → derived mostly from psychology

Some might say I should set a defined risk and profit target, but with options where fills and pricing can vary far beyond the expected pricing at purchase, I think this is a fool’s game. In my mind, the entire premium is the max risk (of course, I seek to cut losses earlier if possible, but I accept the full risk as soon as the contracts are purchased.)

Now, for closing, this is where the real psychology is in, and why I’m starting to realize even candlesticks themselves are nothing more than a historical display of what happened in the market. The volatility, rate, and speed of how things unfold are more or less hidden in everyone’s favorite chart - the candlestick chart.

I will also say my margin account (under 25K) on Robinhood has forced me to improve one thing: overtrading. When you can only buy a minimum of 1DTE options, you basically have no choice but to expand your trade thesis and time horizon, which led me to only taking three trades this week! I’m quite enjoying this, I must say. (To be honest, I think in 2026 I will start doing more 2-3-4DTE trades, I think there is way more time to be right, but then my execution and acceptance of when wrong / when right has to get even better).

Of course, not all is perfect, I’m still making PLENTY of mistakes too:

I lost some coin earlier this week predicting “finally a pullback” after the Thanksgiving week rip, which failed to materialize (and I should have seen also through market profile and just general price action that nearly everything this week was constructive)

And another example, that premarket selloff on Wednesday on bearish Microsoft news, that was anyway a gift that put my overnight puts deeply in green - but at market open, we choped for almost half an hour and couldn’t even take out that premarket low - in a normal emotional state, I should have closed as soon as I recognized this type of PA. In fact, looking back, I can’t tell you why I didn’t at least trim half of my position… a very good lesson in trimming!

In short, I know this setup, it’s one of my favorites, called “news failure,” and I failed to execute on it properly, turning a win into a loss. This trade alone was the determining factor in turning December green instead of red.

Take the following with a grain of salt. While I’m commenting on the markets, I’m off until January, so your mileage may vary! And of course, never financial advice!

Well, what even I thought was the big breakout to the upside on Friday turned out to be another fairly balanced day, back towards the upper distribution of this week’s balance. Still, it was a green day for the nas and there isn’t really much large PA to the downside to tell me to start getting short.

It’s December, Santa rally, blah blah blah (see why I don’t think it’s as fun to be a bull?). Despite the slow week (in terms of total range), we HAVE built value higher and higher each day, and indeed closed the week just over 1%. This is bullish, no doubt about it. Basically, until we get both a lower high and lower low on the daily (RTH daily), I guess the default consensus narrative holds. And even then, beware - this could be the type of market where any and all major dips get bought. Keep in mind as well that spooz is far stronger than NASDAQ; it’s just a mere 0.58% below all-time highs - the reach here for ATHs there can be supportive for nas.

If you’ve been reading all along, you know I hate poor structure and unfair auctions, which we have numerous of below (thanks to the Thanksgiving friends for those). I could definitely see at some point we will return down there. (600ish on the Q’s) In the trading room I’m in, some have started calling me a permabear, but I don’t know, these types of fading strategies made me a shit ton of money in November so…

I think part of the current “trader narrative” is a rally into year-end and then a selloff in January or February. I could likewise see a pain trade of us just continuing to rip all of Q1 next year - but this time I think it will be led by Spooz, not Nasdaq. Breadth is expanding (I don’t know why near all-time highs, but if it follows through, this can carry us way, way higher.)

That’s about it. I think the key things will be price action on higher time frames near, at, and above current ATHs (if we get there). We’ll find out if the past few weeks have just been a giant distribution or if we’re getting ready for another leg HIGHER.

• FOMC is next week, I assume they will do some sort of fadeable “heist” that traps a lot of folks - higher time frames are your friend here - don’t forget the long-term trend! (up)

• Volatility is cheap, but vol of vol (VVIX) is ticking up slowly - is this just an artifact of FOMC next week or a warning sign of something more? Let’s see…

As always, thanks for stopping by. Overall, I have to say 2025 has been a blast, these markets never cease to amaze me, and almost every week there is something new we’ve never seen before! Cheers to 2025 and looking forward to 2026! Happy holidays, enjoy time with friends and family, and best wishes!

-Chris