One of the GOATs of day trading: Steve Spencer @sspencer_smb. Co-founder of @SMBCapital, with nearly 30 years of experience in the markets. What impresses me most about Steve is his ability to read the market, adapt to changing conditions and consistently find opportunities. It was a real pleasure catching up with him at the SMB Capital Summit in NYC. If you’re serious about day trading, Steve is someone you should absolutely be learning from. Huge respect for what you and @MikeBellafiore have built at SMB Capital. Thanks for everything you do for the trading community! 🙏 #trading#

We can greatly improve our odds of trading success by learning that builds experience and expertise. When we learn the right way, we don't struggle with emotional disruptions of performance: @MikeBellafiore @SMBrecruiting

🚨 Desk Alert: Today’s PlayBook Review — DOCS Short Squeeze 🚨 If you want to build a seven-figure trading business, you don’t do it by blindly buying dips or taking random punts on whatever is popping on social media. You do it by finding asymmetric institutional imbalances, sizing up when the math justifies it, and executing with unyielding discipline. Today, Brian F., during SMB Inside Access, is stepping into the hot seat to deconstruct a monster momentum setup: The DOCS Short Squeeze from August 7, 2026. DOCS sat at the exact crossroads of beaten-down healthcare software and an AI narrative shift. After earnings, it didn't just gap—it surged over 200% premarket, printing a staggering 1,660% RVOL and squeezing through a heavy 20% short interest backdrop. Brian caught pieces of this move for 47% of a daily stop, but what makes this PlayBook exceptional is his brutal self-honesty about the trade he didn't fully maximize. What You’ll Learn Today: - Anatomy of a Structural Short Squeeze: Why price-insensitive buying must eventually exhaust, and how to spot the structural turn when a stock is trading 15 ATRs above its prior close. - The "Shark Rule" & Intraday Anchors: Indicators like RSI (which tagged 90+ on DOCS) can stay overbought for hours during institutional mania. Learn why you never short into the frontside until price confirms a failure below the 1-minute 21 EMA and Anchored VWAP. - The "A+ Sizing" Lesson You Can’t Afford to Miss: Brian banked a solid green day, but his review shows how missing the primary A+ blowoff entry cost him an extra 1.83 daily stops (~5x his realized P&L). We’ll discuss how to eliminate hesitation so you don't trade A+ setups with B- piker size. - Level 2 & The Tape Before the Open: How to read the premarket book when speed accelerates from 200k shares over three hours to 15k shares per minute right into the 7:16 AM blowoff top. - Next-Gen Desk Tech: Brian breaks down his automation stack—using Claude Code to build custom Python scanners, running strategies through QuantConnect, and piping real-time execution alerts straight into Discord. None of us are born with an innate ability to read a tape or short a blowoff top. You build edge by diligently reviewing real trades, finding where you left money on the table, and improving for the next similar trade. Come support Brian, learn a trade in detail, bring your questions, and let’s see what grade he earns from me. 📍 Where: 🗓️ When: Wednesday, 1:30 PM EST One Good Trade, Bella

Love seeing my talk from the SMB Capital Summit crush it on YT! Every year a bunch of the talks from the @smbcapital conference go viral. The attendees and environment are even more amazing in-person. Get your butt there live next year!

Want to know how elite traders catch massive, high-reward reversals without blowing up their accounts? Hint: They don’t blindly short every stock making new highs or try to catch falling knives [03:24]. They wait for true capitulation—where forced market structure, margin calls, and pure exhaustion create historic imbalances [00:15, 34:16]. @theonelanceB took the stage at the SMB Trading Summit to break down the mechanics of one of his most profitable trading setups: The Capitulation Fade. Lance was an 8-figure-a-year producer when trading full-time. Today, he mentors traders on our desk, steps in part-time to trade the biggest asymmetric opportunities, and directs his incredible philanthropic work through the Impact Competition. When a former 8-figure trader reveals his exact 10-variable mental checklist, you grab a notebook and pay attention [04:33]. Here are the heavy-hitting lessons from Lance’s masterclass: Trade the "Right Side of the V": Amateurs jump in front of trains trying to guess the exact top or bottom [03:24]. Elite mean-reversion traders let the euphoria or panic happen, wait for the turn, and execute on the backside of the move [00:46]. Slope Over Distance (The Asymptote): It’s not about how far a stock runs—it’s the rate of change [05:33]. Linear moves can trend for months and bust short sellers [06:24, 07:49]. You want an asymptotic, parabolic curve where price accelerates into a vertical wall [05:49, 06:52]. Extreme Extension From Equilibrium: Lance uses Bollinger Bands (2 standard deviations off the 20-period moving average) as a visual ruler for price expansion [09:37]. The further price stretches away from the moving average, the bigger your potential reward back to equilibrium [10:48]. Never Fade Day 1 Fresh News: Fresh news means a fundamental repricing—equilibrium has changed [12:03, 12:30]. Lance avoids fading fresh catalysts; his biggest edge is when price goes parabolic days after the news on pure emotion and technical momentum [11:55, 15:48]. Wait for Later Legs & Massive Volume: The biggest capitulations occur on 3+ consecutive extended legs and multi-day runs [08:31, 19:20]. Watch for volume that completely dwarfs historical averages, signaling that participants are getting aggressively flushed out [16:38, 18:08]. Boring > Speculative: A diversified giant (like Berkshire Hathaway or an entire index like the Nikkei) that panics on noise has massive institutional gravity pulling it back to fair value [30:04, 32:10]. A beaten-down microcap biotech can easily go straight to zero [30:35]. Spot the Footprint of Forced Liquidations: When a stock goes 9x higher and someone is stubbornly bidding millions of shares on the tape at the highs, they aren't buying because they want to—they're buying because their broker is liquidating them on margin [36:33, 36:53]. When that forced buyer breaks, the bottom falls out [37:30]. Trading is a challenging sport, but edge in this game isn't found by spraying and praying across 50 different charts. Real edge comes from stacking significant variables in your favor and having the supreme patience to strike only when the market is completely unhinged. Study the nuances, respect your capital, wait for the market to prove the turn, and get your work done! #DayTrading# #PropTrading# #SMBCapital# #TradingStrategy# #RiskManagement# The 10 Rules That Catch Big Reversals (BEFORE They Happen) via @YouTube

🚨🚨🚨"I continue to find that the single greatest mistake that developing traders make is focusing on their mistakes and losses and not clearly identifying and studying what they do right." 👇✍️👊

Most traders think an elite prop firm wants one thing on Day 1: make us millions of dollars. What we actually expect may surprise you. Over Sarabeth’s UWS breakfast, I was checking my inbox when I saw a response from @robertoclaroar1. Roberto is one of the most likable developing traders you will ever meet—you root for him the way a New Englander roots for the Patriots. After years of relentless training and building out an impressive Breaking News systematic strategy, he officially earned a seat on the SMB desk.👏👏👏👏👏 His response to the invite? "Thank you Mike. And I will show my gratitude with results and progress." In the past, new invites often came with vows to make the firm millions. Roberto’s response gave me that familiar gut check: it’s time to set the record straight. When you earn a seat on our desk, we do not expect immediate P&L fireworks. We expect you to: 1) Collaborate. Build an alert for a peer. Share an idea that fits a senior trader’s PlayBook. Dissect a missed setup openly with the desk. 2) Master the daily inputs. a) Build a PlayBook b) Daily Report Card c) Trading Journal d) Build technology e) Collaborate with colleagues f) Bring your best self to markets- eat, sleep, exercise, breathe. g) Backtest trading ideas 3) Make progress. By Year 1 build a PlayBook of your best setups, show PnL progress, and have real relationships on the desk. Do that, and you've earned your next year. 4) Be curious, open-minded, and resilient. If you do all of these and lose money we will NOT be disappointed. We will help you transition into another job where your experience with us will be valued. 5) Accept mentoring and coaching. Trust the process. We’ve been developing star traders since 2005. Lean on our capital, tech, and team. Giving your best professional effort is all that is expected. Doubling and tripling down on a solid process that has yielded results for many before you is all that is expected. The rest will take care of itself at SMB and in the markets. Amazing work Roberto! #PropTrading# #TradingProcess# #SMBCapital# #DayTrading#

Our YouTube channel just had its highest week ever: 1M+ views. Still surprising. This is niche short-term trading content not built for the masses. 2,500+ videos covering the craft: setups, process, psychology, mistakes. Grateful to everyone watching.

“The important thing is curiosity first. I want curious people. People that ask questions, that want to figure things out, figure out new ways to do things. That’s the most important thing.” Kobe sounds like @steenbab, sharing one of the qualities of elite traders.

How do you know when you have made one good trade that just happened to lose money? How do you know when to push size in an A+ opportunity? How do you know when to pump the brakes on pushing size in a market that is not paying your A+ trades? These are issues regularly covered in our monthly team reviews @smbcapital. I heard Team SWang members compliment SWang for encouraging them to push the $IBIT opportunity last month. I heard Max review pumping the brakes quickly last month after a drawdown to preserve a huge month. From my seat, as @steenbab suggests in his post, answering the questions above takes trading experience. If you are doing some of this too slowly at the cost of PnL, don't expect to fix it all in one session, one week, or one month. It takes time. What matters is identifying the issue, developing a system to improve it, and executing the changes immediately. Ex. Don't push size in an A+ trade unless your RVOL requirements are met. Ex. Don't push size in an A+ trade if the stock is in the middle of a longer-term technical range. The rules you develop after review and thought drive future improvement. But I will say one more thing, and I say this in almost every post: all of this is so much easier if you trade on a team. @TheOneLanceB calls it finding your pod and has been banging the desk for all of you to find one. When there is an experienced trader on your team who has seen enough markets, they can let you know when to push and when to hit the brakes. And I will add that the experienced trader does not need to be a star like @MaxGanik or SWang or Shark or Raf or Dan. G. We see veteran traders never reaching 8 figures a year and who only hit 7 figures a year in the best markets, adding so much value. They have seen all the markets. They know when to push and slow. @sspencer_smb identifies a changing market regime faster than anyone at our firm because he has sat in a trading seat actively trading for almost 30 years. Maybe they don't execute and load up like the stars, but they see it, share it, and contribute massively with their experience. In summary: 1) Develop rules to improve your performance 2) Lean on a team to help 3) Include an experienced trader on the team 4) Make progress session by session, without expecting an immediate fix. From all of us @smbcapital, we hope this post adds value to your trading. #proptrading# #trader# #stockmarket#

Why You Keep Getting Chopped Up (And How to Fix It Today) Want to know why you keep getting chopped to pieces even when you pick the exact right stock and the exact right direction? Hint: Your timing isn't broken—it’s just not yours yet. There is no YOU yet as a trader. At our Annual SMB Trading Summit in NYC, Jeff Holden, our Head of Trader Development, took the stage in front of a packed house to break down one of the most liberating truths in professional trading: The 3 Trader Archetypes. Jeff has trained hundreds of traders on our desk. He’s taken guys from raw summer interns and mentored them into consistently profitable, seven-figure, and even eight-figure producers. Point of personal privilege please...If you are a hungry, bright, and ambitious developing trader looking at trading as a serious career, you need to understand something fundamental about SMB Capital: We don't try to clone traders. Since 2005, our firm has backed active traders across equities, options, futures, and automated quantitative systems on proprietary technology. We provide the capital, the custom technology, the elite coaching, and the seat alongside star traders pulling multi-millions out of the tape. But most importantly, we give you the mentorship and environment to discover your own authentic trading DNA. (Okay back to Jeff's presentation.) As Jeff showed a packed room of traders, top performers make money in completely different ways across the very same chart: The Players (The Early Turn): These are the traders who naturally see turns before everyone else. They excel at "stuff scalps" and rubber-band trades off key failed levels. If this is your DNA, your edge is playing that structural failure—not trying to ride a multi-hour trend. The Runners (The Momentum Drivers): These traders feel the momentum building and strike on the breakout. Their edge is entering when volume confirms and holding through the meat of the move until the tempo slows and the momentum officially dies. The Finishers (The Late Structure Masters): These traders hate early noise and are comfortable missing the first 70% of the move. They wait for the range to break, let the structure hold for 10–15 minutes (what we call a "Puppy Dog Consolidation"), and then aggressively size into high-probability continuation moves when the war between buyers and sellers is already decided. The Multiplier? Trading Teams. When you force a Finisher to trade like a Player, they bleed capital. But when you put a Player, a Runner, and a Finisher into the same trading pod—backed by institutional capital and proprietary tech—they feed each other real-time edge, eliminate blind spots, and expand each other's P&L exponentially. Trading can be a beautifully brutal game. You will feel frustrated at times. But as Jeff reminded everyone: Frustration is proof you've actually learned the rules of the game—it's a foundation you can build greatness from. Stop trying to trade like someone on TickTok. Figure out who you are, anchor to your unique strengths, surround yourself with an ecosystem that brings out your best, and go put in the work! From all of us at SMB, we hope this presentation adds value to your trading. #DayTrading# #PropTrading# #SMBCapital# #TradingMindset# #TraderDevelopment# The 3 Types of Traders (How Each One Makes Money) via @YouTube

Want to know what actually separates a trader who gets completely wiped out by a brutal market drawdown from an 8-figure inspiring trader? Hint: It isn’t that the superstar never loses, never feels the sting of a losing streak. They lose. It hurts. Frankly, it sucks. It’s that they use their worst drawdowns as a catalyst to rebuild their process and improve their edge. @MaxGanik is currently heading toward his second consecutive 8-figure year. He sits on the top trading team at SMB Capital—a group that pulled in ~$50M in trading profits in 2025 and serve as an inspiring role model for what collaboration can do for your P&L. Max is easily one of the best active discretionary traders in the game today, and yet, still pushing to get better. At the SMB Annual Event, Max pulled back the curtain on "The Drawdown That Completely Changed How I Trade." He walked our community through the painful 2022 bear-market slump and a painful personal drawdown that fueled him to reinvent his entire approach: Respect Market Shifts (Dynamic Playbooks): The market changes fast—often by the month. You cannot trade a dead, mid-range tape with the exact same PlayBook and aggression that worked in an explosive momentum market. When relative volume drops and ranges contract, your edge drops with it. Top traders recognize that environment quickly and pump the brakes. Systematize Your Setup Grading: Max evolved from relying purely on intuition to building a rigorous, structured grading system. When you define your A+ trades with absolute clarity, your equity curves improves dramatically. Treat Each Strategy Like a Separate Business: Max doesn't use a lazy, blanket risk number across the board. His swing trades, mean-reversion ideas, intraday scalps, and small-cap setups are completely distinct businesses with their own custom risk parameters and sizing. Protect Your Mindset Like Capital: Warning! Warning! Warning! Your trading psychology is an asset that must be protected. Taking undisciplined, sloppy losses in dead conditions ruins your mental capital, sabotaging your confidence when the next genuine A+ opportunity finally hits your screen. Earn the Right to Scale A+ Risk: Sizing up is earned. By strictly categorizing setups, executing your PlayBook with discipline, and letting winning trades expand your mental comfort zone, you build the foundation to scale risk safely from $300k to $500k+ on your highest-conviction ideas. Trading can be an unforgiving sport. The market will pummel your poor decision-making, and your past winning PlayBooks will fail you at times. But your ultimate ceiling is never defined by a bad streak—it is defined by your willingness to adapt, decode underperformance, surround yourself with awesome and curious teammates, and relentlessly refine your process and edge. Take advantage of this rare live masterclass from a thriving young trader sharing what the market really demands. From all of us at SMB, we hope this video adds value to your trading. #DayTrading# #PropTrading# #SMBCapital# #TradingMindset# #RiskManagement# The Drawdown That Completely Changed How I Trade via @YouTube

The next day, I visited SMB’s office on Fifth Avenue. I sat at the conference table and listened to the legend @MikeBellafiore explain how he viewed the current market. As a trader, it was one of those surreal moments you don’t forget.

STOP SETTING SMALL TRADING GOALS! Want to know the most dangerous mistake ambitious developing traders make when setting career goals? Hint: It isn’t aiming too high. It’s setting the bar way too low. Let me share a story from our prop desk. During a recent monthly review with Team Max, one of our traders announced his numbers: he pulled in $1 million in net trading profits in August. When he first sat on the desk, his lifelong dream was to make $1 million in a year. Last month, he did it in 21 trading days. Max had an even better month, and I wanted to get his reaction to his monster performance. After the meeting, I reached out to Max directly on Gchat: Me: "You ever think when you were starting you would make 2m plus in a month?" Max: "Def not lol" A couple of years back, we actually kicked around the idea of publicly tracking Max for the trading community to see if he could break $1M in a month. At the time, he hadn't broken this level yet. We ended up scrapping the project as we were worried it would focus on the wrong things. Fast forward to today: Max cleared over a couple of million dollars last month alone and is heading into his second consecutive 8-figure year. For him now, a million-dollar month isn't even close to the benchmark he aims for. Yet during that exact same review, a couple of our younger traders who made solid six figures were lamenting their month. They felt dejected comparing their numbers to the seven-figure producers on the desk. Three years into their careers, an outcome that would stun 99% of independent traders felt unsatisfying to them. That psychology reveals a critical truth about trader development: Arbitrary P&L Goals are Self-limiting: When you fixate on a dollar target early in your career, you anchor your ceiling to who you are today—with your current limited skills, risk tolerance, and PlayBook. The Process Multiplier: When you double down and triple down on your daily process, build technology, trade alongside elite traders, collaborate, and push size on your A+ setups, your growth becomes exponential. Your early career goals end up looking comically small in the rearview mirror. Happy, But Never Satisfied: As Chris Mullin, former NBA Hall-of-Famer, used to say, and as we preach to our desk constantly. Even after pulling millions out of the market, this desk spent the meeting dissecting where they left money on the table: leaving 25% on the Bitcoin breakout, breaking down what worked on MRNA, and focusing on pumping the brakes during low-opportunity tape. Trading can be a tough game at the start, but the upside is limitless when you stop capping your potential. Don't let arbitrary dollar targets limit what you can accomplish. Double down on your process, surround yourself with peers who raise your standards, pump the brakes during slow markets, and aggressively press your A+ setups. Your ceiling is far higher than your wildest imagination. #Trading# #DayTrading# #SMBCapital# #PropTrading# #TradingPsychology#