Growing Consistent with Trading NQ, feat. Kendra

For this discussion, Kendra leads about how we are pushing ourselves towards our most consistent selves! This episode was recorded at the end of November 2024, and that had Kendra reminiscing that last November of 2023, she had first started learning to trade NQ futures. As we’ve shared before, when Becky and Kendra first started learning to trade, we dabbled in many instruments, like Gold, Crude Oil, Russell 2000 aka RTY, and Natural Gas. We also did a fair share of swing stock trading and options. However, once we moved onto new mentors and advanced our trading education strategy, ES futures or S&P 500 index became the main focus. Looking back, that was really the best thing we could have done, because that tunnel vision can be so helpful when you’re trying to master something extremely challenging such as day trading.

For Kendra, after about a year of learning Market Profile and building her trading edge with ES, she decided to try her hand with Nasdaq. Her trading community had been trading NQ for many months and seemed to really be into her, so the curiosity definitely crept in. Kendra started out in micros then worked to full size, and she thought she would still trade ES with the idea that she would see which index gave a better opportunity each morning. But that turned into her forcing a trade on both some days so she ended up backing off of ES and very much fell fully in love with NQ. Kendra now says she’s just so glad she made that move because she’s had her most successful trading year yet and she thinks that by challenging herself to expand and leave her comfort zone played a huge role in her growth.

Becky started trading a new instrument this year as well, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, aka YM. She was in a place of struggle with her trading around May/June 2024 and similarly, many members of her trading community had begun trading YM just that spring and had really found consistency and enjoyment with her. So Becky decided to fully make the switch and exclusively began studying and trading YM for her daily futures trades and has not yet looked back. We agree that primarily focusing on one instrument when still dialing in our consistency has been very valuable for our progress.

Another thing that stands out to Kendra this year is how she’s defined and refined her personal accountability for trading and sticking to her plan. Earlier in the year, Kendra would make post-its during her premarket prep in which she would outline specific levels that she would only execute at. This was very helpful to try and simplify her process to stay on track. On days that she would hesitate or abandon those plans completely, it gave her so much clarity on the importance of having our playbook and respecting it regardless of how we’re performing on the day or how challenging of conditions the markets are presenting.

After reading one of our favorite books One Good Trade and learning from the successful trader Carmine Rosato, the post-its then evolved into her IF-THEN statement charting. For her, and likely many traders, we have multiple levels of interest and potential targets marked out on our charts collected from previous data and it comes together to form our understanding of market context, which is fixed and objective. Once we’re beginning a live trading session and the fresh and subjective data starts to flood our minds and our charts, the navigating between those two to make our best winning choices becomes the task.

Kendra never has forgotten one of the tips her mentor gave us on market navigation which went: “Market profile is the map and VWAP is the traffic.” Essentially we have the tools to understand where and explain why miss market may go where she goes but how she gets there is the beauty of market sentiment and how all our opportunities are created being intraday traders. The truth is, anything can happen at any given time and as the famous quote says “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” That speaks to the unpredictable nature of this business despite how much effort we as traders put in. However, what we know is something and it’s undeniable. For Becky and Kendra, most days when we are consistent in following our trade intention and accountability to stay in sync with miss market, we are consistently profitable traders (CPTs). Kendra’s IF-THEN statements keep her calm, cool, and ready to explain at any given moment what actions she’s taking or not taking, decisions, and personal opinions she’s forming that all contribute to her being consciously competent about her trading abilities. Even on the days she didn’t take the best route to her destination, there’s always so much more to learn and improve that we’re grateful for.

“I believe in terms of possibility and potential. Today could be the day I take my BEST trade yet. Why not? No really, it only makes sense that I continue to improve. My future is bright and I have a strong trajectory. I am going to attract the best trades. No idea when and how often they will come, but I trust what is for me is FOR ME!”

~ Kendra, Market Mama

Another part of Kendra’s development that she learned to own and allow to strengthen her overall is leaning into how she sees and feels the market most and allowing that to serve her. As she’s shared before, Kendra has a preference for trading long continuation. This would get her in a lot of trouble in the past when she either hesitated and then chased a target that was already achieved or she failed to recognize when instead price was about to rotate back down. This blind love for the bulls and desire to ride them to the moon needed some major work and refinement. One of the things Kendra did for herself was create a presentation slide show called Kendra’s CPT Long Continuation Setups. Since she keeps a screenshot record of all her trade executions, she went back a year and started pulling the best of those trades. Then she created a column in which she listed all the supporting conditions and data that gave those setups the highest probability. Things like opening location, if VWAP was angled up with an established rhythm to the left, if standard deviation was expanding out, significant hidden bullish divergences within an uptrend, and cumulative delta volume supporting buyers as price went up, to name a few.

So what’s interesting is she did all this to help her take better advantage of these setups and when conditions are favoring her game, and it did! But on the flip side and what I feel like helped me the most is it made things so much more clear for her to identify when conditions were not ideal and because of that, she was able to eliminate many of those losses she previously took from wanting to force how she wanted to trade at that time. Accepting this led her to actually understanding other conditions better, accepting and being way more open to other opportunities!

Accepting risk fully and playing full out has been a process we’ve been working hard at all year. Kendra was still hitting a wall in not allowing herself to take more and limiting herself. But as of late, her ability to be more selective and uphold her trade intentions has made significant progress. However, her position sizing was just lack luster. She found that more often than not, she was not adding to her best setups that she had waited for, had the most confluences and higher success rates with, and hence was still selling herself short. She had some issues with going between trading 50K eval accounts to 250K evals, and finally setting on only wanting to trade 250k accounts but still treating her risk like she was trading a 50K account. So it took some time to iron that out.

One of the things she started doing that helped her so much was always entering with 2 contracts to start because that took the potential lag time of extra thinking or doubt out of the equation. The goal was for her to get comfortable with that size as a new baseline and then when she believed the trade had proven itself, she could add onto her position and potentially hold further, depending on her IF-THEN statement and market conditions. Overall, this has greatly increased her average wins, which has been a great feeling as it’s only right that as we improve, our P&L should reflect that too.

One of Kendra’s self-coaching mantras she’s read every morning goes: “I believe in terms of possibility and potential. Today could be the day I take my BEST trade yet. Why not? No really, it only makes sense that I continue to improve. My future is bright and I have a strong trajectory. I am going to attract the best trades. No idea when and how often they will come, but I trust what is for me is FOR ME!” She loves that because it keeps her open to receive the abundance of the market every day.

We’ve found that there is the reality and really annoying factor that in order to continue stepping fully into a CPT, we actually need to become better losers. We also fully believe limiting participation and not feeling like trading everyday is a requirement to be a profitable trader is hard for us to accept. As amazing as these winning streaks feel and the potential they represent, winning is only part of the game. For us, it feels like it was easier to accept hits when we just weren’t very good. It’s like you finally figure out the game to win consistently then need to turn back around and figure how to lose again. Because ending a day red is just not the usual outcome, and it’s more like we either have clean and green execution day or maybe we misfire a shot or two but get in better alignment and end strong. We’ve learned from the beginning that losing is the only guarantee in this game but speaking for ourselves, we still haven’t fully mastered how to win through losing.

Taking small hits and walking away or following a hard rule like 2-3 losses in a session and done type of thing. It’s tricky because we fully believe that since losses are part of the game and timing the market is extremely challenging, it’s a great skill to be able to stay neutral and stay in the game even if you initially take some L’s but your plan is still playing out and you’re focused enough to still execute from a steady and sound state. However, that’s a slippery slope too, as it can reinforce attempting to come back from losses instead of walking away and it’s a lot to manage to know what the right move at any given moment is and you never really know until it plays out.

To be fair, we don’t think there necessarily is a 100% right or wrong way to go about this, because it's going to look different for everyone and any system needs to fit your own personality and psychology to actually implement effectively. However, when we watch and study the super successful advanced traders and they share their trading stats, they are not only consistent in their profitable days but also consistent in their losing days and of course they are always smaller and don’t bleed out. This is a major growth opportunity as we’ve been able to on occasion walk after respectable losses, but a tilt day or multiple days where we are fearful of a drawdown have too often ended with us flushing away so much hard work and progress. It’s like the concept of doing less and being more needs to take over when these days occur. Instead of trying to make it up in an instant and not take an L, we need to recognize the wiser and CPT choice is to walk away and protect our progress, not leverage it at the worst time. We know we need to reframe how we experience losses in real time so we can practice playing like a professional that has risk accounted for, expected, and respected as the cost of doing business, not just when it works in our favor!

Thank you to everyone who is subscribing to our podcast, reading our blogs, and providing us feedback! We have learned over these past three years how easily our confidence can rise and fall based on our performance, but we are dedicated to the long game and showing up each day for this work towards our goals. We know and want you all to know and own that we are all worthy of this pursuit and have so much more value to bring forth during this lifetime. We hope that you all will believe that whatever you feel called to do has already been given to you. Just keep at it one day at a time, and watch all the pieces fall into place. Our best trading days are ahead! We wish you all the very best for your lives. Take care!