Home › Market News › Meet Funded Trader Magnum from Georgia
Meet Magnum, a tradesman and funded trader from Georgia, who has one of the most unorthodox trading styles we’ve ever seen. While he spends his day working construction, pushing dirt around in his skid-steer tractor, he’s also day trading in a Funded Account® on his cell phone! Magnum’s story is definitely unique, but his approach to preparing for the trading day is both practical and resourceful.
While Magnum has been trading for about six years, he has only been here with us at Topstep since November of 2020. After joining our community and taking on the Trading Combine, Magnum admits that most traders really don’t know what they need to know until they need to know it.
It’s unlikely that a truer statement about the reality of learning how to trade has ever been spoken. There’s a lot of information out there to absorb, and not all of it useful or beneficial. But, the more you practice and polish your skills, the more comfortable you will get with your own trading style. That’s when your ability to sift through the not-so-good stuff will really start to develop.
Are you familiar with the term, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?” Well, Magnum’s take on that old quip is, “I don’t know what I don’t know.” We’re going to take a shot and say this means that everyone has their own trading style. He knows what he knows, and that’s what he uses to trade. It’s the way he’s always done it, and it works for him. It doesn’t make sense to make trading decisions based on technicals or fundamentals that you don’t understand, so it’s really important to stick to what you know.
When it comes to getting set up for the trading day, we said Magnum’s approach is both practical and resourceful, and it is. He starts every day with a clean slate; clearing the previous days’ levels from his charts to make room for new ones. Then he goes through the market profile to identify those new levels and add them to his charts so he can hit the ground running first thing in the morning.
As for his trading style, the “Top-Down” approach is what has been working from Magnum. He gets a broader sense of what the market is doing by looking at the daily and 4-hour charts. From there, he moves down to a 5-minute chart to track the market profile. And, finally, he executes trades using 1-minute and 30-second charts.
Magnum’s ultimate trading goal is to get to the point where he can pick his own spots without having to rely on anything or anyone. In a nutshell, we’ll just call that what sounds like; complete independence. Until he’s achieved that end, Magnum has vowed to keep hustling and better every day.
The best advice Magnum has to give is to keep it simple. Under-leverage your trading and control your risk. You don’t need to trade your max position size every time you put a trade on. Save a few bullets so you can live to fight another day. The key to this business is sustainability. The way you trade will affect the way you trade tomorrow, so always trade for tomorrow!
Trade Well!
