LV's Trading Academy guide.

Chapter 1 · 2:11

Before we start

Hey. It's LV.

If you are listening to this, you enrolled early, and I want to start by saying thank you. Not the polite kind of thank you. The real kind. You looked at something that scared you a little, and you said yes to yourself anyway. I know that feeling. I have said yes to myself a few times in my life when nobody else was saying it, and every single time it was the start of something.

So here is what this is. This is my guide to the basics, the same things I teach in the free course, Trade Tonight, but told the way I would tell you if we were sitting at my kitchen table with a coffee. No slides. No screen. Just me talking you through it. You can play it in the car, on a walk, while you fold laundry, while the kids are in the bath. Play it twice. The second time is when it starts to stick.

Before anything else, I need to say one thing clearly, and I am going to keep saying it, because it matters. This is education. It is not advice. I am not telling you what to buy, what to sell, or when. I am teaching you how I think, how I read a chart, and most of all how I manage myself, so that you can make your own decisions with your eyes open. Trading carries real risk. You can lose money. I have lost money, a lot of it, and I am going to tell you exactly how, because that is the part most people leave out.

Here is how the chapters run. First, I tell you how I got here, because it explains why I teach the way I do. Then we talk about the one thing that decides whether anybody makes it at this: managing yourself. Then the words. Calls and puts. Shares and contracts. Strike, expiration, and the clock that runs whether you are watching or not. Then how I actually read a chart, on a normal morning, from one laptop. Then the morning I did nothing, which is the most expensive lesson I ever learned, and the three rules that came out of it. And we finish with what to do before you risk a single dollar of your own.

I call the lessons miles, because that is what they are. Run your race at your pace. You do not have to be fast. You do have to keep going.

Okay. Let's run.

Chapter 2 · 4:19

How I got here

I did not grow up thinking I would be a trader. And I definitely did not think I would be teaching anybody how to trade. For fifteen years, my whole life was music.

I started when I was about eighteen, in Arizona. I would record anywhere somebody would let me. I was shooting in the dark, trying to figure out how you turn a dream into an actual career. A radio station in Phoenix took me under their wing, and that led to opening for some of the biggest artists coming through the city. Then my first major record deal. I packed up my entire life and moved to Atlanta, because I thought, this is it. This is my big break.

It did not go that way. I spent months being pulled in every direction. Change this. Look like that. Be skinnier. Do it differently. Instead of finding myself as an artist, I felt completely lost. So I did something that probably sounded crazy after working that hard for a deal. I walked away.

There was a second deal after that. Big shows, big stages, tens of thousands of people. Incredible experience. But I was singing on other people's records, and I wanted people to know who I was. So I asked for a release, and I made a new plan to bet on myself. I put my own money behind my career. New music, new videos, a whole rollout, ready to go at the start of twenty twenty.

And then the world shut down. Shows stopped. Travel stopped. Meetings stopped. Nobody knew if it was going to last a few weeks or a few years, and month after month, nothing opened back up. The plan I had spent all that time and money on was not a plan anymore.

Then, in early twenty twenty-one, I found out I was pregnant. I honestly thought I would have the baby and get right back to it. That is not what happened. Motherhood hit me like a ton of bricks. My priorities changed. My schedule changed. And I had to ask myself a new question: what do I want my life to look like now? I wanted to be present. I did not want to miss those years. But I also did not want becoming a mom to mean I had to stop being ambitious. I wanted control over my own time.

Around then, it felt like everybody was suddenly talking about the stock market. I had bought and sold shares before, a little. But options? I knew absolutely nothing. I had about five thousand dollars saved from music, and it was money that mattered to me. I did not want to lose it. So before I started clicking random buttons, I went back to the finest financial institution in the world. YouTube University. I literally typed in options for dummies, and I started learning. Hour after hour. Video after video. What is a call. What is a put. How do I read a chart. How do I get in and out of a trade. Which broker. Risk management.

And I made one big mistake at the start, which I will hand to you for free. I did not paper trade. Not because I thought I was too good for it. I did not know it existed. So I started with my own money, right out of the gate. We will come back to that.

I tell you all of this for one reason. Nobody handed me a mentor. Nobody broke the words down into something I could actually use. I pieced it together alone, and I paid for a lot of lessons I did not need to pay for. The Run Club exists so you do not have to do it that way.

Chapter 3 · 2:36

The thing that decides it

I have been trading for six or seven years now, and if I had to describe it in one line, I would call it a wave of emotions. Up. Down. And sometimes contemplating your whole life.

Here is what I believe with my whole chest. Anybody can learn this. Anybody. What stops most people is not their brain. It is the words. You open a chart and there are numbers moving, abbreviations everywhere, names you have never heard, and if you did not learn this in school and you do not have a mentor, it is intimidating. It makes you feel like it is not for you. It is for you. It just has not been explained to you yet.

So go through this with intention. Do not have it on in the background while you scroll something else. The information only sticks once you see it working, with your own hands, on your own screen.

Now, the honest part. Losses are part of this. Anybody who tells you they never take a loss is lying to you. I take losses almost every single day. The job is not to avoid losses. The job is to keep them small. Cut them short. Keep your stop losses tight. And when something is working, let it run.

But here is the thing that actually decides whether you make it or not, and it is not the chart. It is you. It is the psychology.

When your money is on the line, your body reacts. There is adrenaline. There is euphoria when it goes your way, and it feels amazing, and that feeling is the dangerous one. Then there is the other side. Denial when it turns. Shock. That sick feeling in your stomach. And every one of those feelings wants you to do something. Do something fast. Do something right now. That is where impulsive decisions come from, and impulsive decisions are where accounts go to die.

There is no way to trade without emotions. I am not going to pretend there is. You are a human being. The work is learning to control them. And the way you control them is not by trying harder in the moment. By then it is too late. The way you control them is with rules. A set of rules you decided on when you were calm, that you follow every single time, and that you do not break.

Think about it like this. If you already decided where you get out, then when the fear shows up, there is nothing to decide. The decision was made before the feeling arrived. That is the whole trick. That is what the rules are for.

So when people ask me what the most important skill in trading is, my answer is always the same. Managing yourself. Read the market. Manage the trade. Control yourself. And the last one is the one that decides it.

Chapter 4 · 3:22

Phone up, phone down

Let's start with the two words you are going to hear more than any others. Calls and puts.

A call is what you buy when you think the price is going up. A put is what you buy when you think the price is going down. That is it. That is the whole vocabulary to start.

Here is how I remember it, and I have never forgotten it since. Picture your phone. When a call comes in, you pick the phone up. Up. Call. And when you are done, you put the phone down. Down. Put. Phone up is a call. Phone down is a put.

So if you think a company is going to have a great week, and the price is going to climb, that is a call. If you think it is going to drop, that is a put. And that is one of the reasons people like options in the first place. You can be right in either direction.

Now let me tell you about my first trade, because it taught me something I did not understand until much later.

My first trades were calls. I think it was things like Coca-Cola, or DraftKings. Which is funny to me now, because those are not names I would wake up and trade today without a real reason. And my first trade worked. It worked fast. I was sitting there in the afternoon thinking, oh, this is easy.

And I want you to hear me on this. That was a bad trade.

Not because it lost. It did not lose. It was a bad trade because I had no reason for taking it. I did not look at anything. I did not have a plan. I just jumped in blindly, and I was gambling, and I got lucky. And a win you cannot explain is more dangerous than a loss, because it teaches you the wrong lesson. It teaches you that you do not need a reason. It makes you want to do it again, bigger. And nobody tells you how fast the market can take it back, just as fast as it gave it to you.

So two rules come out of that very first trade, and I want you to carry them from today.

Rule one is size. Never put more than about ten percent of your account into a single trade. If your account is ten thousand dollars, that is one thousand dollars, and not a dollar more on any one idea. The point is not the number. The point is that one bad trade must never be able to take the whole account.

Rule two is your exit. Decide where you get out before you need to. If a trade goes against you, and it will, you already know where you are leaving. My stops are usually tight, somewhere around ten to fifteen percent. And here is the thing people forget. If you get stopped out and then it turns around, nothing stops you from getting back in. You can always take another trade. What you cannot do is reverse a loss.

Say that one to yourself a few times. You cannot reverse a loss. You can always take another trade.

Chapter 5 · 2:40

Shares versus contracts

This next part is where most beginners get confused, so let's slow down.

There are two different things you can buy. A share, and a contract. They are not the same thing, and they do not behave the same way.

A share is a small piece of a company. You buy it, you own it. And here is the important part. A share can wait forever. There is no date on it. If you buy a share at three hundred dollars and it drops to two hundred, you have not actually lost anything yet, not until you sell. It can sit there for years. Nothing is won and nothing is lost until you decide to sell.

A contract is different. A contract has a date on it. When you buy an option, you are not buying the shares. You are buying the right to buy or sell them, at a set price, for a limited time. And when that time runs out, it is over. The move you were waiting for has to happen before the date, or it does not count.

One more thing about contracts. One options contract represents one hundred shares. Always one hundred. That is why contracts move so much faster than shares do, and it is why size matters so much more than beginners expect.

Now, here is the way I explain what you are actually buying, because once you see it this way, it clicks.

Think about renting an apartment. You find a place you love. It is fifteen hundred dollars a month. You are not ready to sign yet, so you put down a five hundred dollar deposit to hold it at that price.

Now, a few things can happen. Maybe the neighborhood takes off, and suddenly places like yours are going for way more. Your deposit is holding that apartment at the old price, so that hold is worth a lot. Or maybe you change your mind and walk away. What did you lose? The deposit. Five hundred dollars. Not the apartment. Not fifteen hundred a month. Just the deposit.

That is exactly the shape of buying a call. What you pay for the contract, the premium, is the deposit. And the deposit is the most you can lose. Every time. You never lose the apartment. You only ever lose the hold.

That is a comforting thing to know, and it is also a dangerous thing to forget, because deposits add up. Losing the whole deposit, over and over, is still losing. Which is why rule one, size, never goes away.

So here is the difference I want you to feel in your body. Shares wait. Contracts do not. When you hold a contract, the clock is running. And that brings us to the clock.

Chapter 6 · 3:33

Strike, expiration and the clock

When you buy a contract, two choices set its price. The strike, and the expiration.

The strike price is the price your contract locks in. Think of the number printed on a gift card. Whatever the store charges later, your card still says that number.

The expiration is the date and time your contract runs out. Think of the use-by date on a coupon. The day after, it is worth nothing at all.

Let's talk about the expiration first, because it is the one people underestimate.

A longer expiration is like buying insurance. You are buying more time for your idea to work. And like any insurance, the more cover you want, the more you pay. A contract that runs out next month costs more than one that runs out on Friday, because you are paying for all those extra days.

There is a kind of contract called zero D T E. That stands for zero days to expiration. It dies at today's closing bell. Not tomorrow. Tonight. They are cheap for a reason.

Now here is the part I really need you to understand. Time is not free. You are buying it, and it is draining while you watch. There is a name for this. Theta decay. Your contract loses value just because time is passing, even if the price does absolutely nothing. It is like holding an ice cube in your hand. Do nothing at all, and it still gets smaller. And it melts faster near the end.

Let me ask you the question I always ask. It is three in the afternoon. You are holding a contract that expires today, and it is not working. Who is going to buy something from you that expires in ten minutes? Nobody. That is theta decay at its most brutal.

So here is a rule that sounds simple and saves people a lot of money. Match the expiration to your actual life. If you cannot watch the screen today, do not hold something that dies today. If you are going to be at work, or at the doctor, or picking up the kids, and you cannot look at your phone until tomorrow, then you either should not be day trading that day, or you need a much longer expiration. Your contract does not care that you are busy.

Now the strike. My habit is a strike just a little outside where the price is right now. Here is why. Say a stock is at three hundred dollars. You could buy the three hundred and two strike, just outside the price. Or you could buy the four hundred strike, way out there, because it is so much cheaper. It feels like a bargain. It is not. It is cheaper because it needs a huge move before it is worth anything, and it moves slower on the way. Further out is cheaper for a reason.

Two more words while we are here. When the price has not reached your strike yet, your contract is out of the money. It is like a voucher for fifty dollars off a thirty dollar coat. It is a real voucher. It is just no use to you today. When the price passes your strike, your contract is in the money. Now it is a fifty dollar voucher on a two hundred dollar coat. That one is worth walking into the store with.

Strike, expiration, and the clock. This is the lesson most beginners skip, and it is the one most beginners end up paying for.

Chapter 7 · 3:18

Reading the picture

I want to take the mystery out of what a trading morning actually looks like, because I think people picture a wall of ten screens and somebody yelling into a phone. That is not my life.

My morning goes like this. The kids are up. Breakfast. The school run. Then coffee, and one laptop, at my kitchen table. That is the whole setup. You do not need ten screens. You need one screen and your full attention.

The market opens at nine thirty in the morning, Eastern time. The first two hours after the open are where the movement is. That is where I do my work. Most days I am finished by eleven, eleven thirty. Then I close the laptop and I go live the rest of my life.

Now, when you open a chart, there is a lot going on. I want to tell you the three things that are actually worth your attention, and you can let the rest go for now.

The first is candles. A chart is just a picture of what a price has done over time, like a heart-rate monitor for a company. You are reading the shape, not every little beat. And the picture is made of candles. Each candle is one slice of time. On a fifteen-minute chart, one candle is fifteen minutes. On a daily chart, one candle is one day. The body of the candle shows where the price opened and where it closed. A green candle closed higher than it opened. A red candle closed lower. And the thin lines sticking out of the top and bottom, the wicks, show how far it swung in that slice of time. Think of it like one day's weather in a single shape. The high, the low, where it started, where it finished.

The second is volume. Volume is how many people were actually trading. And it tells you whether a move is real or whether it is noise. Here is how I think about it. Ten people arguing about a price is not the same as ten thousand people. If a stock jumps three percent on almost no volume, that might just be a few people, and it can fall right back. If it moves on big volume, the whole street is repeating it. That is the difference between one person telling you a rumor and everybody you know saying the same thing.

The third is support and resistance. These are the prices where the same thing keeps happening. Support is a floor. The price keeps falling to about the same place, and buyers keep showing up there and stopping it. Like a bouncing ball that keeps coming back to about the same spot. Resistance is a ceiling. The price keeps rising to about the same place, and sellers keep showing up there and stopping it. Like a low doorway you keep hitting your head on. Same height, every time. Between the floor and the ceiling is a range.

So if a price keeps dropping to ninety-eight dollars and bouncing, ninety-eight is support. If it keeps getting to one hundred and five and turning around, one hundred and five is resistance.

That is it. Candles, volume, support and resistance. That is technical analysis. People make it sound like rocket science, and it is not. It is a picture, and now you know what you are looking at.

Chapter 8 · 2:36

The morning I did nothing

This is the chapter I would rather not tell. It is also the one you need most.

There was a stretch when NVIDIA was running. Every day, it seemed like it just kept going up. And here is what happens to your brain when something works enough times in a row. You stop thinking, this has been working. You start thinking, this cannot stop working. That is a very different thought, and it is a very dangerous one.

One morning I was in a position on NVIDIA, and it went my way fast. Within minutes, I was up more than I had ever been up in my life. It was the kind of number that makes your hands shake.

And I did nothing.

I did not take anything off. I did not close it. I just sat there. And the reason I sat there is simple, and it is embarrassing, and I am going to say it anyway. I had never decided what good looked like. I had no plan for the win. So I had nothing to measure against. There was no number where I had already said, that is enough, I am done. So my brain just kept saying, more. Let's go for more.

Excitement and euphoria both point in one direction, and that direction is greed. It does not feel like greed while it is happening. It feels like confidence. It feels like you finally figured it out.

Then it turned.

And when it turned, I did the thing I tell every single one of you never to do. I bought more on the way down. I told myself it was cheap now. I told myself it would come back. There is a name for that. It is called catching a falling knife. Buying more of something while it is falling, hoping to average your way out of a loss. It is like digging a deeper hole to get yourself out of a hole.

I could have taken a paper cut that morning. Instead, a hole became a crater. By the end of it, the position went to zero. That trade cost me close to three hundred thousand dollars.

I want you to sit with that number for a second. Not because I want your sympathy. Because I want you to know that this happens to real people, people who know the rules, people who teach the rules. Knowing a rule is not the same as holding it when your money is on the line and your heart is pounding. That is the whole reason the Run Club exists.

So what did I actually do wrong? Not the chart. I could read the chart. What went wrong was me. I had no plan for the win. I sized too big, so the swing was big enough to scramble my head. And when it went against me, I broke my own stop and fed the loss instead of cutting it.

Every one of those is a psychology problem, not a chart problem. And every one of them has a rule that fixes it. That is the next chapter.

Chapter 9 · 2:08

Three rules

Three rules came out of that morning. I follow them every day, and I want you to write them somewhere you will see them.

Rule one. Size. No more than about ten percent of your account in any one trade. On a ten thousand dollar account, that is one thousand. I know it feels small when you are excited about an idea. That is exactly the point. When your size is sensible, a loss is a paper cut. When your size is too big, a normal swing in the price turns into a feeling you cannot think through. Size is what keeps your head clear. And it is what keeps one bad morning from being the last morning.

Rule two. A plan for the win. Decide where you will take your profit before you are in the trade. Not when you are up. Not when it turns. Before. Think of it like deciding what a bonus is for before it lands in your account. If you do not decide, it just disappears. Some people take part of it off at their target and let a small piece run. Whatever you choose, you choose it while you are calm. Because I promise you, when the number is moving your way, calm is not what you are going to feel.

Rule three. Knowing when not to trade at all. This one is my favorite, and it is the one nobody talks about. If you are sick, do not trade. If you are distracted, do not trade. If you had a fight, if you did not sleep, if you are driving, if the baby is screaming, if you are at work and sneaking a look under the desk, close the laptop. Nothing obliges you to be in the market today. And here is the most freeing sentence in all of trading. You cannot lose money you did not put in the market.

There is a fourth thing that is not really a rule, it is a habit, and it holds the other three together. Your stop. You decide where you get out before you get in, and you do not move it because you have a feeling. If you get stopped out, fine. You can always take another trade. You cannot reverse a loss.

So, read the market. Manage the trade. Control yourself. Say it until it is boring to you. When the rules are boring, you are ready. When the rules still feel exciting to break, you are not, and that is okay. That is what practice is for.

Chapter 10 · 2:22

Before you risk a dollar

Remember the mistake I told you about at the start? The one I would hand you for free? Here it is.

Paper trade first.

Paper trading is practicing with fake money on a real broker, before you risk your own. Most brokers have it. It is the same screen, the same buttons, the same charts, real prices moving in real time. The only difference is that the money is not real. It is like a driving lesson in an empty parking lot. Real car. Real steering wheel. Nothing to hit.

I did not do this, because I did not know it existed. I went straight in with money that mattered to me. Please do not do what I did. Practice the mechanics until you do not have to think about them. How to pick a strike. How to set an expiration that fits your actual day. How to put in your stop before you do anything else. How to take part of a win off at your target.

And while you practice, practice the rules too, not only the buttons. Size like it is real. Set your plan for the win like it is real. Close the laptop on the days you should not trade, like it is real. Because the habits you build with fake money are the habits you will have with real money. If you break your rules on paper, you will break them for real.

Here is how you will know you are getting ready. The rules start to feel boring. You stop wanting to break them. You get stopped out and it does not ruin your day. That is when you are ready to take the next step. Not when you have a hot streak on paper. When you have a boring streak.

Now, a few things before I let you go.

This will not always feel good. There will be days you do everything right and still take a loss. That is trading. The goal was never to never lose. The goal is to keep your losses small enough that you are still here tomorrow, still learning, still running.

You are not alone in this. That is the whole point of the Run Club. You have your lessons, you have the glossary, you have the ten sins to stay away from, and you have me and the team every week. When it goes against you for the first time, and it will, you will have somebody to talk to about it. That matters more than any chart.

And please, keep remembering what this is. Education, not advice. Your decisions, your account, your results. My job is to teach you how I think, and how I manage myself, so that you can decide for yourself with your eyes open.

Run your race at your pace. I will see you at the start line.

It's LV. Talk soon.