Trading with a Full-Time Job | Podcast Episode #498

0:00
Hey everybody, this is Ryan Mallory with shareplanner.com Swing trade in the stock market. In today’s episode we’re going to talk about how realistic is it to be able to manage a full time job along with swing trading? Is it realistic to be able to do everything that it requires of you to be a successful swing trading while also holding down a full time job?

0:18
I have a lot of experience in this area of life, so I’m excited to dive into this topic. I know about it first hand and excited to share with it. My experience with you is here today. Now today’s e-mail comes from a person that of course I’m not going to reveal their real name.

0:36
I never do. So I just give them a good Florida redneck name. And in this case, she’s asking to be called a Texas name because she’s from Texas, but she asks to be called Texas Sunshine. Texas Sunshine, an interesting name. I wouldn’t have come up with that one myself, but hey, I like the uniqueness behind it.

0:55
Texas Sunshine writes. Hi Ryan, I found your podcast on Spotify a couple of months ago. Looking for a profitable, successful swing trader that enjoys sharing the things that made him successful. There are way too many gurus on YouTube with one indicator to rule them all. I think that’s a Lord of the Rings reference.

1:12
If I’m not mistaken. I started learning how to trade stocks around March of 2024. It has been a slow process including periods of frustration caused from the platform learning curves and not being able to devour the stock market all day every day. Without really knowing the difference between day trading, swing trading, long term trading, options trading, I decided to start jumping in anyways.

1:33
Of course I was using a paper account because I didn’t know what I was doing except for my Schwab learning. I was trying not to get over saturated with all the quote UN quote experts. Needless to say, my first successful trades happened to be swing trades.

1:49
Long story short, a year and a half later I’ve been looking to get into swing trading again. This time looking for a solid working strategy. Pits, bull flags, and consolidation breakouts. They seem to be my jam. I currently have a small account like $200.00 but working to build it up each month.

2:06
I’ve learned a lot from your podcast and still going through your new new and old past episodes. My question is this, how manageable is the research and the stock stock watch list making and have a full time job as well. Monday through Friday 9:00 to 5:00 if I was defined successful.

2:23
It includes the time to research and make watch lists and if I’m able to execute my strategy well to stay green more frequently than red. I did live in Florida for a few years for a Florida Texan redneck name. You can call me Texas Sunshine if it makes it to the podcast.

2:39
Oh, so I get it now. Texas and Florida Sunshine State be in Florida, Texas. And now this isn’t the first time I’ve read the this e-mail. It’s just the first time that it made sense to me. Either way, I love to hear your thoughts on what successful swing trading might look like with a full time job or if you have any other thoughts on this topic.

2:57
Thanks, Texas sunshine. OK, this is a really good e-mail, and there’s actually a lot of other things that we can address in this e-mail that wasn’t actually part of the original question. But one of the things that I love, it love that when readers send me their questions, they give me a lot of background because it helps me to understand your situation more.

3:16
And it allows me to pick it apart a little bit more too, to maybe help you in ways you didn’t even realize. Perhaps you needed to be helped. But in any case, one of the first things mentions that there’s way too many gurus on YouTube with one indicator to rule them all. IA 100% agree. One of the things that I’ve always tried to make sure that I don’t do is to be one of these people that are promising incredible riches.

3:37
I really just want to be pertinent to the stock or to the strategy or to the topic that I’m talking about on YouTube. Like if you’re watching me on YouTube right now, you know, for instance, I’m going to be talking about a lot of things pertaining to this e-mail. That’s going to be the focus. It’s not going to be to sell you an indicator.

3:54
That’s one to rule them all. And and I get what she’s saying there. They, there’s always this like fancy indicator that somebody’s trying to sell that. I remember probably about 1520 years ago, one of the popular approaches to trading was to have this red light, green light, yellow light strategy by when it was green and when you got the red light to say red, you sold.

4:14
And then when it was yellow, you just continue to hold the trade. That was always a weird thing because it was it was too basic and too simple and you really didn’t even know what the underlying reasons were for the different red light, green light, whatever. And one of the things I would say about trading too is that it doesn’t just come down to an indicator.

4:33
It doesn’t come down to just one particular oscillator or one particular pattern. It doesn’t, it comes down to a really a whole body of work. So you got to watch out there, most of them, most of the people that you’ll find out there, whether it’s on YouTube or on X or some other social media platform, they’re, they’re fly by nights.

4:57
They, I, I see most of these people, they’ll stay for like a year and then all of a sudden they moved on to something else to take advantage of people with. And obviously I’ve been doing this since SharePlanner has been around since 2007. So I’ve been doing it for a while. It’s coming up on 20 years. That’s a long time.

5:14
But anyways, I’ve I focus really on the entire concept of trading, not one particular strategy, because it comes to trading, it’s not just about charting, it’s not just about your understanding of technical analysis or Japanese candlesticks. It’s really the mental aspect, even more so in having what I use as a top down trading strategy that helps me to know when to buy, when to sell, and when not to to do anything at all.

5:38
Kind of like that Kenny Rogers song, The Gambler. You got to know when to hold them, when to fold them, when to walk away. That’s a lot of what trading is. And so you can be good at all the charts and, and drawing the lines on the charts and, and figuring out the risk management. But there’s also a mental aspect of the game too, that you have to be cognizant of and that you can’t just go throwing your chips in the middle of the pile and play in every hand that’s out there.

6:00
So this this person here, Texas Sunshine started trading in 2024, in March of 2024. Not a bad time. She’s really been booked and did by rally. So you start March 2024, you’re in the middle of a of a rally that’s continued from 2023 following the the huge sell off that took place in E2.

6:20
You got the AI craze, you got the mega caps just blowing up, doing incredible things. And then you get into 2025, you get the Trump presidency, things are looking pretty good so far. And then you get that whole tariff liberation Day sell off. And so Texas sunshine here has seen a lot, has actually seen good action in the market, both to the upside and to the downside cuz that sell off was pretty extreme.

6:45
It didn’t last long. It was only like I want to say it was like 4 or five weeks there, but bottomed out in early April and then it just took off ever since then. So we’ve been rallying, you know, going on about six months now and this market and the market has hardly taken a breather really since about mid-May.

7:02
It’s just been a steady stair stepping climb higher ever since. I would hardly any down days in between and and to that the the further that there really hasn’t been many significant down days where you’re seeing 1 or 2% sell offs in the overall market.

7:19
So Texas Sunshine has seen a good amount of trading activity doesn’t make you an expert just because you’ve gone through a bear market and a bull market, but it does help to be able to see what a bear market looks like and the panic that can ensue because it helps to keep in perspective when times are really good that those times can also change quickly.

7:43
Another thing she mentioned is not, you know, as as a full time trader, she’s not able to devour the stock market each and every day. And there’s pros and cons to that honestly, I mean, there’s pros and cons being fixated to your screens each day. For one, I’m fixated to my screens and I know what some of those consequences and drawbacks can be. 1 You can often times over analyze charts.

8:04
You can stare at them long enough to where all of a sudden you’re your opinions changing about them without even realizing it. I think. 2:00 One thing that people get themselves into a lot of trouble with is start watching every tick or they start watching the minute chart. I would say especially if you’re going to swing trade, look at the the market from a 5 minute candle no less.

8:25
OK. I would probably even say from a new trader viewpoint, maybe even push it up to like 30 minute candles, 15 to 30 minutes. It eliminates a lot of the noise. I won’t touch A1 minute chart. And the reason for it is that there’s so much volatility in those charts that it doesn’t make sense for me to allow myself to get worked up about something.

8:48
I, I, I told people in the trading block today too, because this is what happened to me this morning when I looked at the market, the market initially sold off and my chart on the S&P futures, yes, was zoomed in too much. So I go and look at the chart and all of a sudden I just see this big old candle to the downside.

9:06
And even though I was incredibly zoomed in, my eyes just fixated on this massive candle, not realizing that I was really zoomed in. It looked like there’s this really dramatic sell off in the beginning and I had to catch myself and I was like, wait, wait, it’s not as bad as it looks here. It just got to zoom out, press the minus button on the magnifying glass and it zooms you out and gives you a little bit more of a sense of reality.

9:25
But doing the stock market all day every day and not really getting up or giving yourself some breaks, it’s not the healthiest thing. It’s good to get up. It’s good to to go make yourself a sandwich. It’s good to walk around the block for 1015 minutes.

9:41
The stock market will still be there. If you’re using stop buses, which you should be, you’ll have the ability to get out of the stock if something happens. But being at the computer all day every day isn’t always what it’s chalked up to be. That’s why I think too, being part of the community can help.

9:57
Like what I do with trading block and I’m not just trying to plug it, but what I what I tried to try to do with the trading community is it it provides accountability so people are able to say, hey, you might be trading a little bit too much here. Some some other stuff that I thought was pretty interesting and Texas Sunshine’s e-mail 11 was to say my first successful trade happened to be swing trading and that doesn’t surprise me at all if you’ve listened to this podcast for any time, a lot of people will be able to know don’t get started in the stock market by day trading.

10:30
Fine if you want to do long term investing, but that’s not really trading, that’s investing. But if you’re trying to get in trading, I would not do options trading and I would not do day trading. Day trading is very difficult. It’s causes you to reach for dollar amounts that you feel like you have to get each and every day. And if you don’t get them somehow it’s a failure.

10:48
It also causes you to often times, especially among new traders over trade or all of a sudden you’re finding yourself trading hundreds of times during the course of the day. You’re getting in, getting out, you have a couple of losses. You feel like you got to get back in. As soon as you see that stock start to reverse course, you see it reverse course, you get back in and it completely dumps on you again.

11:06
I always say that because I’ve done that stuff myself. Reason where I’m at today is because 1. I did not have a mentor, so I had to make a lot of these mistakes on my own. I’ve messed up a ton of time. So I’ve, I’m self-taught, really had to learn the hard way with the stock market because when I started trading a long time ago, a few decades ago now, there wasn’t community, there wasn’t people that, that I could, you know, follow and to be taken under their wings and to, to learn a thing or two.

11:36
Instead, I was having to learn these lessons the hard way for myself, losing a lot of money, you know, not getting getting out when I should have, being too greedy, not being aggressive enough, being too fearful. And what you want to make sure is that you’re not starting off in in your trading career with too difficult of a strategy.

12:00
I really, I will day trade here and there, you know, if it looks like a no brainer setup, but I don’t do it much. And the reason why is is because I’d rather put my focus on swing trade, find the ones that you know, I can hold for, you know, a few weeks to a couple months and really try to get a lot of profit out of them.

12:19
Things that I can’t really do in day trading unless I’m willing to take massive amounts of risk. Now looking for solid work strategies that work for you, especially if you’re working full time, you want to make sure that strategy goes beyond the chart.

12:36
Now charting is very important to me. I, I think charting is, you know what I, I feel like I’m really good at, but I also think that equally as important, if not more so, being disciplined. No, understanding yourself, knowing how you view money and how you react to when things don’t go your way as it pertains to money is going to be very important in your trading because you can have all the trading plans in the world, but if you’re ignoring your stop losses, it doesn’t matter if you’re doubling down, it doesn’t matter what your trading plan is.

13:03
So you want to clearly define rules that you can actually follow and that you you’re going to know your position sizes, that you’re going to know how aggressive you’re going to be and your profit taking. You want to have all that stuff figured out and your strategy has to fit your personality.

13:19
And if it doesn’t, you’re in trouble because no, no, nobody else’s strategy is going to fit you. Even if somebody takes takes my trading strategy and, and many people have done, you want to make sure still that it fits your personality. And so being able to talk through what you’re seeing on the charts.

13:38
And I have to do this everyday myself. I see a stock it’s trading, you know, 5% down or something. And I can look at that terms like, oh, crud, it’s down 5%. But then I look at the kind of run it’s been, it’s like, it’s not even testing the five day moving average. What am I getting worked up about? It hasn’t hit my stop loss. Don’t get worked up about it, you know, and it may not even be a 5% move.

13:57
It can be like a 2% move, but I can find myself getting antsy about it. Just be honest with yourself sometimes. Tell yourself, hey, it’s not as bad as it looks here. You know, there’s nothing that’s disqualifying this chart saying that you need to get out of it because it’s falling apart. It’s just having a a mild pullback.

14:14
And I see that with a lot of traders this red day, they’re like, oh, crud, we need to get out. And that’s not necessarily what you want to do because often times you got to have that initial pullback before it can take the next leg higher. Now another thing that I would do is go to shareplanner.com and check out myself made trader course.

14:29
Now this is my flagship course. It’s my life’s work. I spent over 4 years putting this together. It’s over 25 hours of video training with me. I edited videos, I shot the videos, I, I scripted out exactly what I wanted to say. I made sure that everything we know about trading and everything that I find pertinent as it pertains to trading is in these videos and, and in this course.

14:50
And so it’s, it’s mapped out, it gives you activities, it gives you lessons. It’s it’s very in depth. It’s going to take a lot of work if you choose to do it. It’s a really, really good course. And I know I’m plugging this here, but I feel like this is also something that can go really good hand in hand with what we’re talking about this episode.

15:05
So you go to shareplanner.com, you check out or you click on the trading Academy and then check out the self-made trader. Again, really good course. I think you’ll get a lot out of it, but see for yourself, see if it works for you. And if it does, you know, you’d be supporting the podcast in the process of, of becoming part of the self-made trader team.

15:27
Now, there’s a few more things here. Texas Sunshine working with a small account, How small of account, you ask, $200. There’s going to be a lot of stocks that she can’t buy on that. And that’s OK. But she’s trying to add more to the account, which is important.

15:43
But when you’re only trading with $200, one of the good things and one of the things that’s a benefit to to her on this, she can afford to make mistakes and learn from them without it costing her dearly. If you inherit $1,000,000 and you don’t even need to put that $1,000,000 to anything, you have your house paid off or whatever and you want to start trading, I would not say, hey, you should start trading with that $1 million out of the gate.

16:08
I’d probably say do something like Sunshine here is doing and trade, trade with a, a small dollar amount. Maybe it’s only $1000. Now are you going to get rich trading $200 or $1000 or $10,000? No, you’re not. You’re not going to make much at all, but what are we doing this for? Yes, we’d like to make some money, but you’re wanting to become a trader so that ultimately you can have long term lasting success and sometimes you have to give up the idea of making money in the short term.

16:33
Now, prior to all these new deals in college, why do people go to college often times as football players or basketball players or baseball players? Because they wanted to make it to the next level and this was the path to getting to the next level. If you try to make money in college sports, and now I know it’s not the same anymore, but it back in the day, a few years back, if you try to make money in college football, what happened?

16:54
You got kicked off the team where you know, your team got suspended, you know, from bowl eligibility or something else, but there was some penalties. There’s no consequences to it. It wasn’t worth the risk. Likewise in trading, if you have $1,000,000 doesn’t mean that you should just go trade that amount of money, get comfortable with it and get comfortable with who you are with what how you react to know how you react.

17:18
Like I understand how I react to certain events. You know, I know that where I’m prone to overreact AT. And so knowing that I have to talk myself through those situations and and say, Ryan, be aware that this is not a huge sell off here. You know, it’s not even breaking below the five day moving average.

17:35
It’s not even breaking below the previous day’s candle chill. And that’s that’s part of trading is learning a lot about yourself and being able to react to the situations that mentally impact you in a negative way, but not but by doing it with a small account.

17:55
Because when you do make those mistakes, and you will when you’re first starting off, the only way you learn is by by doing these stupid mistakes that can happen out there. And when you do them, at least you’re doing it with a small account. At least it’s not costing you 10s of thousands of dollars.

18:11
It might cost you 5 or $10. The question is, is it worth it? Is it worth it to try to become a successful swing trader as a full time employee? And I say yes, I’d, I absolutely think it would. It, it, it, it is. I wrote, I actually wrote a book on this.

18:26
Like I want to say it’s almost like 15 years ago, probably about 12 years ago. I’d never written a book before. I think they gave me two months to write it and I was just blazing through it as fast as I could. I mean, I put some good information on there. I just, I wish I would have presented it a probably in a little bit different way, but I, I essentially talked about how when I was working full time in corporate America, I was also trading and I was trading successfully, but it, it took a lot of work.

18:51
I love trading. I love the stock market. You know, people can talk to me about the stock market outside of the stock market and it doesn’t bother me because it’s something that I know a lot about and I enjoy talking about it. It’s a passion of mine. You have to make it a passion of yours. I mean, there’s things that I could do besides trading that would probably make me money.

19:11
But would I enjoy it necessarily? Wouldn’t enjoy it at all. My wife is in the school system. She teaches. She’s taught for most of her life. She loves it. Could I do what she does? No. But she’s good at what she does because she loves what she does. And that’s, that’s the difference here.

19:28
I can tell you that you can do swing trading and you can do it successfully. Even if you work a nine to five job, you have to still love doing it or you’re probably not going to like doing doing it and it’s not it’s going to feel too cumbersome. You got to want to do that rather than sitting down and watching the latest special on Netflix or the latest documentary.

19:48
You got to want to do trading over. I don’t know anything, of course, the obligations and so forth. And you got to always put those first. But when it, when it comes to trading and, and trying to balance a full time job with trading, you got to like what you’re doing.

20:05
You got to like the action. You got to like the experience of learning and of gaining that knowledge or you’re going to hate the time commitment that it requires. I would say this, there’s a lot of tools out there now that wasn’t there 20-30 years ago. There’s a lot of tools that can help you to become or to balance trading and.

20:28
Working full time now, one of the things that I always said, and I said this when, when I wrote that book, and I don’t recommend you going out and buying this book. Honestly, I’ll make a million more podcast episodes instead of you having to go buy that book. But on the subject matter, if I have to.

20:43
But one of the things that I, I did say was make sure that you’re taking care of your work obligations because what you don’t want to do is because you’re sucking at your job and become a full time trader when you weren’t expecting to because you lost your job. That’s not an ideal situation there.

21:00
So you got to take care of your job. You got to take care of your work. You got to make sure that if the boss came in and said, Hey, what are you trading for? At least the boss wouldn’t have an argument and say, well, you’re, I guess you’re doing pretty good at your job, your requirements, then they really don’t have a footing a foot to stand.

21:19
I mean, they may still raise a sting, but I’m just saying at the bare minimum, make sure that you’re taking care of your work responsibilities and don’t let those get interfered. I think nowadays, I mean, based on what I know, most people that are sitting at a desk, they’re looking at the market.

21:35
And it’s become such a bigger deal than when I was in the workplace that people are looking at the markets all the time, whether it’s on their phones or on a second monitor or whatever it might be. They’re paying close attention to the stock market. There’s other things too, like conditional orders.

21:52
You can dictate what time you want to put your orders in. You can have your orders go into where it breaks the highs of the day. You’re getting into that trade and so you can develop trading strategies around your lifestyle and that’s, that’s the key to it. And then an order sends another order. So if you get filled, another order goes right behind it and make sure that there’s a stop loss.

22:11
And then you can also send another order that cancels the other order to where it was up 5%. You’re selling 1/3 and if it goes up 10%, you’re selling another third. And if it goes up, you know a whole bunch more, you’re closing out the order. You can have stop losses, you can have profit targets, but you can do conditional orders in, in the the software out there is getting really good and getting really advanced to really be able to accommodate really any lifestyle or or work life that you may have that would normally interfere with trading and make trading impossible.

22:41
It’s out there now. And so I would encourage anybody who’s trying to balance work life with trading to look at and, and to really dive into, and we don’t have the time on this particular podcast to do that, but to look into the conditional orders, to look into how to submit orders at a specific time and to how you can develop a trading strategy that fits your lifestyle.

23:03
And then at that point, if you love what you’re doing and you love trading and it’s, and it’s a good area, like I love trading. I think a lot of other people do too. And for obvious reasons, it’s it’s challenging it mentally, It’s one of the toughest things that you’ll undergo.

23:21
You’ll learn a ton about yourself and how you approach money and how you react in in situations where you find yourself getting greedy or getting fearful. It teaches you a lot. And I think if you put the time into it and you love the time that you’re putting into it, I think that you will find that it is worth it.

23:38
If you enjoyed this podcast episode, and I hope that you did, make sure to leave me a five star review on whatever platform you’re listening to me on. If it’s YouTube like and subscribe so you can be notified anytime that I’m doing one of these videos and also check out the self-made trader.

23:53
Again, my life’s work teaches you everything that I know about trading and one of those things that I’m excited to finally be offering to the general public, finally, send me your questions, ryan@shareplanner.com. I’m the only one that reads them. I want to hear from you.

24:08
I want to know what’s challenging you, what’s giving you problems to send them to me, ryan@shareplanner.com. Thank you and remember Jesus Christ. He’s the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Him. God bless.