Lessons Learned from 2025 | Podcast Episode #505

0:00
Hey, I’m Ryan Mallory and this is my Swing Trading the Stock Market podcast. I’m here to teach you how to trade in a complex, ever changing world of finance. Learn what it means to trade profitably and consistently, managing risk, avoiding the pitfalls of trading, and most importantly, letting those winners run wild.

0:19
You can succeed at the stock market, and I’m ready to show you how. Hey everybody, this is Ryan Mallory with shareplanner.com’s Swing Tradeing the Stock Market in today’s episode. It promises to be a good one and what I like to do at the beginning of each year, sometimes it’s at the very end of the previous year, but nonetheless, with one of those podcasts, I like to reflect on the year prior and what I have learned, the observations that I’ve made from the past trading year, some growing trends or developments that I noticed with trading, and I like to be able to reflect on those in an entire podcast episode.

0:54
So that’s what I’m going to do today. There’s no emails, no Florida redneck names given out to any of the listeners, just good old lessons from 2025. S 1st off, what I have learned to do in 2025, and I think it has made a huge impact on my trading, is to care less about what the market is doing and whether what the market is doing is justified.

1:19
So you take things like silver for instance, and we saw a huge rally in the last month of trading in silver. Was it justified? Perhaps was a little bit over the top when you’re seeing silver, you know, rally 10% drop 9%, rally 8% drop 9%.

1:37
Yeah, that gets a little absurd. It’s a little bit crazy. There’s a there’s a lot of emotion in the trades at that point. And whether or not the move that you saw where it went as high as $80.00 an ounce is justified doesn’t really matter. What you want to do in your trading is whether or not it can be traded.

1:55
If you can’t manage the risk on it, then go to another trade. For me, I didn’t play the silver trade directly because of that volatility. The overnight risk that was coming about from it, it, it wasn’t justified now. And by justify what I mean is like it wasn’t something that I felt comfortable with managing the risk on because I couldn’t keep it tight enough.

2:14
Take an 8-9 percent losses overnight or even the potential for that to happen falls way outside of what my desired risk tolerance is when it comes to trading. But it doesn’t have to be just silver or gold. It can also be like the AI trade, for instance, with with the just the, the radical move that the AI trade has made over the last few years, particularly with stocks like NVIDIA and PLTR and Broadcom AVGO, you’ve seen a lot of moves and you can say is NVIDIA really worth 4 1/2 trillion?

2:50
Is the semiconductor trades that are just going through the roof that are, you know, there’s seems to be a new trillion dollar company almost every day. Is that justified? It may not be, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not tradable. And so while I think the NVIDIA valuation is probably a little over the top, I’ve still traded it many times throughout the course of 2025.

3:16
And I think another area too, probably more for me over the over the past past years is that I will see the market making new all time highs. And it just seems a little bit over the top or it just seems a little bit unnecessary.

3:32
And I have a hard time buying those buying into the market when it gets that high when instead really I shouldn’t care about that. I shouldn’t care if the markets making new all time highs just as much as I shouldn’t care if it’s making new lows on the year. What I should be caring about is what is the next trade, what is the next move?

3:50
And I think I’ve done a pretty good job of that here, especially over the last year where you saw us clearly getting into a bubble in the market, but not necessarily saying, well, I’m done. I’m not trained this market till it becomes more rational or more rational to my liking. That’s essentially like saying the market needs to conform to how I believe and how I feel.

4:09
And rarely is the market going to conform to what you think. And so as traders, we, we can’t just simply wait until we like what the market’s doing in order for us to trade it because more than likely that time will never come. Instead, you need to be trading with where is the market at, what is it doing and how can I react to what the market’s doing and make a profit.

4:32
Another area that I think that I have struggled with in recent years, and I’ve even done podcast, I think I’ve done multiple podcasts on it and, and I’ve talked about is shorting dead. Is shorting something that we shouldn’t be doing anymore? Is something that we should just wait for sell offs to play out and then we jump back in once the bottom is in.

4:53
I had started leaning more towards that in recent years because I I had just seen time and again how many fruitless or I wouldn’t even say fruitless. I would say more opportunities that were setting up almost perfectly for them to not play out the way you would have expected for it to technically.

5:12
I think some of that is the market not playing out the way you expect it to, like in the previous point that I made. But I think too that probably my views have shifted more towards, I do think that shorting is still relevant, but I think you have to be very timely and how you short the market.

5:32
I think that there should be in most cases a period where you’ve gone to cash and it doesn’t have to be a long period. Maybe it’s only like a couple of days or something like that. But there should be a period where you’ve gone to cash, not necessarily gone from like being 100% long to 100% short.

5:59
Because if you were 100% long going to 100% short, that doesn’t really tell me that the chart was supporting that move prior to you making that decision.

6:16
Now, of course, you could have like a Black Swan event that takes the market down 10% overnight out of nowhere. That’s possible. Likely. No. And we wanted, we want to find ourselves trading in probabilities in areas of what’s likely to happen.

6:36
A massive, you know, 10% correction overnight isn’t likely. It’s possible. It’s always possible, but it’s not likely. And so if we start saying, well, I’m going to get short because I think the market you know is going to crash one day, well, you could be holding that short position into a a very bad loss.

6:58
So I think if you were long the day before and you were, you know, significantly long, you were expecting that the market was going higher. And then all of a sudden if you’re just like, oh, well, I’m now bearish on the market, I’m getting short that that tells me that there’s probably not as much of A technical basis or even a fundamental basis for that that reasoning.

7:28
So I think shorting is not dead. I, I’ve, I, I’ve changed my views a little bit on that over the past past couple years where I was migrating more towards the just wait it out and, you know, go to cash, wait out the, the, the, the sell off to end and then get back in.

7:48
But I actually think that it is not dead. I just think that the approach has to be a little bit more measured and how we short going from long to short, like I said, that’s that’s raises questions being cash and saying hey, that long is is no longer a viable option at this point, I’m going to wait for the right short setup to emerge.

8:07
So for me, I don’t try to time the tops of the market. Usually when I try to time the tops that it ends miserably for me. What I like to do is I like to see a breakdown take place, which means if I’m waiting for the breakdown to take place, I’m not I’m not getting in on that initial breakdown.

8:22
I want to see the breakdown start to play out some for the bears to show that they can make it play out some and then to try to jump in on that bounce back or the dead cat bounce that fails to turn into a sustained rally.

8:40
So that’s where you want it, at least for me, where I want to get short at. I, I think it can work well for others as too, depending on your trading strategy. But I don’t think unless we’re in like a period of 2022 that you want to make shorting and into an integral part of your, your strategy.

9:06
There’s times and places for it, but I don’t think that there’s a lot of opportunities when you’re in a bull market for shorting. You really have to pick and choose those moments where there’s a sustained amount of selling.

9:22
The other thing is I think a lot of people give themselves trouble with is they they short dole markets and shorting A dull market is never the ideal thing to do because there’s not a conviction behind that.

9:40
Now the markets can rise on low volume, but it’s very difficult for a market to sell off on low volume because there’s a lot more emotion and that fear component of trading than there is with greed.

9:56
So you saw a, a pretty significant amount of downside to the market, but if there’s not volume to it, it’s probably not going to stick. And that has helped me out a lot to not just jump into every time the markets trading lower to think, OK, this is the time for me to get short.

10:12
Now I like to see a, a sustained amount of selling pressure start to unfold on the market. And you take like the the last four trading days of the year where we traded lower, didn’t trade lower by much. And if you look at the volume, the volume wasn’t that strong, very, very light volume.

10:30
One thing that I think getting older, I’m 45 now, I started SharePlanner in my 20s. I started the podcast in my 30s. I guess I was probably what, 37 when I started this podcast.

10:46
I haven’t done this yet, but it would probably be interesting to see what I look like in my first podcast versus now. I’m, I’m sure there’s a lot more Gray on the beard, a lot more lot, lot less hair on the head.

11:02
But one of the, one of the things that I’ve learned though, versus when I first started SharePlanner, I was able to survive off of four to five hours of sleep at night. Didn’t even bother me. Now it’s like 7 hours.

11:19
If I’m not getting 7 hours, I feel it and I’m, I’m usually groggy in the morning and I, I don’t feel good. So I think that’s one of the things that I’ve had to come to grips with is as I’m getting older, I need more sleep.

11:36
And I’m even finding myself eating healthier. I think that that helps me to think clearer eating more berries. And my wife even has me on on Greek yogurt.

11:53
That’s a relatively new thing. But I’ve been eating it in the morning and I’ve I’m finding a lot of things like going from a pork sausage to chicken sausage, which sounds hideous on the surface, but after a few times of doing it, I actually don’t mind it anymore.

12:14
I actually feel better after I eat it. It’s like I watch my, my two boys, they’ll eat and when I when I watch them eat, they eat with total abandonment.

12:30
Like they will stuff themselves to no end. And then they complain about how they don’t feel good afterwards, you know, like, oh, I ate too much or whatever, but they don’t really care when I do that. I, and I used to do that for for a long time I would just eat till I was completely stuffed. But now I kind of know when, all right, I’m starting to get to that threshold to where if I go any further, I’m going to have some regrets. And I don’t really want that regrets of being too full.

12:48
Now, how does that all play into trading? I think the, the mindset that you’re in, you think about when, when you overeat and so forth, you don’t feel good when you’re eating not good. You, you mentally don’t feel as well. I’ve noticed that just eating healthier has been a, a big improvement just on my mental clarity.

13:07
And, and, and that translates obviously into the stocks where you know, you’re going to be able to, to see things with less emotion. They see things with a, with a more rational mindset. I don’t know if I, I think this is a, a good, that it is a good thing, but it, I, I have noticed a trend with my trading and this is a new point. We’re not still talking about healthy eating or healthy living for that matter.

13:33
I’ve noticed a little bit of an indifference between my wins and losses, almost to the point to where I don’t feel any excitement over my wins and I don’t feel like any frustrations from my losses.

13:51
I, I, it’s really just indifferent. There’s sometimes where trades will just annoy me while I’m in it to where you know, you’ll go up to like a resistance. I was like, golly, it just does not want to breakthrough that level. And you’re like, man, if it could just breakthrough that level, I feel like there’s a huge leg higher that it would attract a lot of buyers.

14:11
And then it, you know, it, it reverses and doesn’t. And that, that, that can be kind of annoying. But then when I close it out, does the, does the loss bother me now? I would say the loss doesn’t bother me as much as the wind doesn’t, you know, really excite me.

14:38
It’s just, you know, another win or another loss, depending on what side of the trade I I end up closing it out on. But I think that is good too. I don’t think that it that it’s a bad thing to be that indifferent towards it.

14:57
I think some of that comes with like the diminishing margins of returns. You know, you take a Pizza Pete, if you’re hungry and you have a piece of pizza in front of you and you eat that slice of pizza, that first slice tastes the best in the first bite of that first slice is going to taste, taste the best.

15:12
But then as you get on to like slice 7 and slice 8, yes, you’re filling up, you’re starting to have some regrets and it’s not going to taste nearly as good. Now winning trades I don’t have necessarily regrets over, but, but when I start to get as many trades as I’ve made, and it’s probably in the 10s of thousands at this point.

15:29
I mean, I, I don’t know how many of that is exactly I’ve I’ve made, but if I had to guess, I would probably say I’ve made 10s of thousands of trades in my lifetime. And so I think some of that just having done it so much over time, I’ve seen big winners.

15:51
I’ve seen most of the time manageable losses. I’ve had some big losses in life, you know, and that was more so in my earlier years, but but I’ve learned from those And I, I think now when I experience it, it doesn’t create like a huge emotional response.

16:08
Just like the winning doesn’t create a big emotional response. So I think it’s good that happens. I think it allows you to be, have more clarity when it’s, when it comes to managing your trades and knowing when to get in or get out.

16:36
Research in the evenings. I, I, I think that is such a, a better and I know some people can’t do it depending on where you’re at in the world. I know it’s harder from the East Coast perspective to do research in the evenings versus in the mornings.

16:52
But for me, living on the East Coast where it closes at 4 PMI do think that it’s a lot easier to do my research in the evenings because it allows me it allows me to not feel rushed to say, OK, we got a market opening up in an hour or whatever.

17:12
I got to figure out, you know, if I’m going to be buying or selling or whatever in the evenings. You’re you, you can probably turn on. For me, I like to turn on Orlando Magic game or a Houston Astros game.

17:38
But we don’t really try to watch Dolphins games because they they they ruin, they ruin your day if you do. And thankfully it’s only 16 weeks out of the year, but I try to turn in turn on something that that’s kind of like leisurely and I can, I can go through my charts on my laptop.

18:12
That’s kind of a nice thing. I’m not feeling rushed. And I feel like that there’s more opportunity to, to evaluate things without feeling like you have to respond to whatever is going on to that morning.

18:35
Sometimes if you see the futures running, you know, 50-60 points higher in the morning, you’re like, oh, crud. I, I feel like I need to get into something. So you start looking at stocks in their charts and you might say to yourself, oh, I’m going to buy that one.

18:57
And you may be justifying rather than really doing honest analysis, but one thing I would encourage you to do, and you can do this in the evenings as well as check out the self-made trader.

19:14
This is my comprehensive training course that I’ve been about four years putting together. It was a it was a long journey, but it’s about 100 hours of of or not 100 hours, 25 hours of videos, 100 hundred different modules.

19:29
And with it you’re going to get everything that I’ve learned in trading over the last 30 years, all the lessons. I’m going to start you out from the very beginning in the basics and take you through more advanced strategies.

19:48
I’m finding myself more skeptical of market moves. I think for one is I’ve seen plenty of rug pulls in my lifetime. I’ve seen a lot of of people get super euphoric about the the market’s prospects only to see the rug get pulled out from underneath them.

20:08
I’ve had that happen to me as well in the past. And so I get a little bit more skeptical. I’ve I’ve noticed that as being a little bit more of a trend. I see these moves and I’m like, OK, I don’t think that this move is going to last very long.

20:31
But I think too, one of the things that I do is I, I don’t necessarily take advantage of the move that’s taking place right in front of me. And that move may only last three or four days, but that’s a move that over three or four days where there could be at least some small profits to be had.

20:50
And so most of the time when I’m, I find myself being skeptical of a market move, it does play out the way that that I tend to expect it. Sometimes it doesn’t. And then I’m I’m late to the party at that point.

21:17
An observation though, that I have made is that it’s very difficult to trade without some kind of at least swing trade. It’s very difficult to swing trade in this market without some exposure to the mega caps.

21:37
One of the things I tried to do throughout 2025 was to always have some kind of mega cap exposure. I would say 80% of the time I had something in either Amazon, Apple, Google, Tesla.

21:54
Actually I don’t think I traded Tesla, Maybe I traded it once, I’m not sure. But those big mag 7 stocks, right and NVIDIA, Broadcom, those guys and they, they produce some really solid gains for the most part.

22:24
And there was plenty of times where the market didn’t necessarily rally outside of those stocks. And it, and so that was a huge benefit there because you might get it to where you’re running, running strong on NVIDIA and there’s -3 to one breath in the market. And that’s a good thing that that I was able to be able to make money in some of those times where the market was just very uncooperative with everything else.

22:43
A lot of your others and I called them the everything else trade, they have not done as good in 2025. I mean, if you look at like the T21O8 indicator that I use on TC2000, love that indicator.

23:01
It showed that there was we closed the year, you know, near all time highs on SPY. But if you look at where we were at on the percentage of stocks trading above their 40 day, 40 day moving average, we were like at 40, 344%.

23:31
If you look at the 200 day moving average, it was below 50% as well. So that’s not really a sign of healthy markets. What it sells you is that these Max 7 stocks were absolutely dominant throughout the year.

23:53
And so having some exposure in those in the swing trades was, was critical. The good chance that it’ll be critical in 2026 as well, unless the market changes its tune.

24:11
And in that case, in 2026, when I’m doing one of these reflectionary podcast, I’ll be like, hey, that, that, that Mag 7 trade wasn’t the same quality and you had to get away from that in order to find any success. That’s possible that that happens.

24:34
But right now that hasn’t been the case. And of course, we’re only on our first trading day of the year. Finally, I would say defensive stocks are changing and the the lines are blurring.

24:55
In the past, the the defensive stocks were when the market started selling off, you’d see a rotation from like tech and discretionary industrials and to more like your utilities, real estate and staples, you know, and the whole thinking behind defensive stocks is that, well, waste Management still going to collect trash.

25:18
People are still going to need water. People are still going to go to Walmart, probably even more so and then going to like Kroger’s or, or, you know, some of these other ones are going to go to Walmart. They’re going to go to Sam’s, they’re going to go to Costco where they can get better deals.

25:37
Dollar Tree, even that that used to be the defensive mindset. You know, it’s like when things start to, you know, hit the fan, let’s go into these defensive plays. But now the, the lines are starting to blur a little bit more.

25:54
You’re seeing where Apple’s becoming more of a defensive stock because people are still going to have their iPhones, which is true because you look at, you know, like welfare recipients, for instance, they all have iPhones.

26:09
If you look at homeless people, they’re, they’re usually, I’m not laughing at them being homeless, but I’m laughing at the fact that, you know, people who call themselves homeless still running around with like $2000 phones or, you know, in some cases you have people who are on that, that can’t feed themselves, but they, they, they have a, they’re watching TikTok, you know, so it’s the whole notion that iPhones are an absolute necessity in life.

26:26
Yes, they’re, they’re very convenient, but I think I, I would like to think that I could get by on a flip phone if I had to, which is far less cheaper. But anyways, I’m not trying to get into social aspects of life. Far be it for me to to to jump into that, that area right now, but nonetheless, you’re seeing a defensive nature in Apple.

26:43
You’re even seeing it a little bit at times with NVIDIA, like when things get really bad, you start to see some people start to, to transfer money into NVIDIA. I’ve, I’ve noticed it a few times in 2025 that kind of raised some questions like wow, are we now treating NVIDIA as a defensive play?

27:04
But definitely Apple utilities have have certainly blurred the lines. There are some because you have a lot of AI trades that that are taking place in utilities. So if the market selling off as a whole or AI trade selling off, you’ll see a pullback in utilities too.

27:24
I’ve also seen it some with communications with the introduction of Meta platforms and Google or Alphabet, I guess they call it into that particular sector. That sector has become more of a growth oriented, even though it has names like Comcast and Verizon and AT&T in it.

27:45
It also has Netflix, Google and Meta to offset it and and usually be the dominant influence on that sector. So to answer the question at the end, is the market in a stock market bubble, AI bubble? Yes, absolutely.

28:05
I, I firmly believe that we are, but it doesn’t matter. Going back to my first point, I don’t really care what the markets doing, but is it in it bubble? Absolutely. But I still plan on trading it both to the long and the short side and and whatever way the market provides me the opportunities to take part in.

28:28
If you enjoyed this podcast episode, and I hope that you did, please be sure to leave me a five star review and even leave some comments too. I would appreciate that on whatever platform you’re listening to me on.

28:44
If it’s on YouTube, make sure to like and subscribe and check out the self-made trader at shareplanner.com and go to Academy and click on that and you can get all the information there.

29:02
Really a a cool feature and you’re supporting the podcast in a big way. If you find that that training course suits you, plus send me your questions, ryan@shareplanner.com. I’d love to make a podcast episode out of it.

29:18
I’m excited about 2026 got all sorts of new things that I’m rolling out here. Hopefully don’t overwhelm myself, but I’m excited about everything that the new year is set to bring.

29:34
Thank you guys. And remember, especially in this new year ahead, Jesus Christ, these are the way, the truth and the life. Nobody comes to the Father except through him. Thank you guys.

29:49
God bless. Thanks for listening to swingtradingthestockmarket.com. If you’d like to trade alongside me each day, I invite you to join the SharePlanner trading block where I navigate that markets in real time with traders from around the world.

30:06
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30:22
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30:38
And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me directly at ryan@shareplanner.com. All the best and I look forward to trading with you soon.