I Made 6 Figures My First Year Trading

Well, I've wrapped up my first year trading stocks and options and thought I'd share my most profitable trades with you. As you can see throughout the video, I was able to take advantage of less common conditions to make the bulk of the profit, since I also lost plenty of money along the way learning the ins and outs of stock options.

My goal with my trading accounts is to start them with as little money as possible. My TD Ameritrade account was started with just $1500, to which I later added another $6,000. My Robinhood had $8,050 in deposits over a 7-month period.

Biggest Winners After 1 Year of Trading

I recently put out a video going over my biggest losing trades after one year of trading the stock market, so I thought it was only right to show my biggest winners as well.

In case you missed my last video on losing trades, I’ve only been actively trading for a little over a year, and I mostly trade stock options. I have two main accounts, one on TD Ameritrade and one on Robinhood, so I’ll show you my biggest gains from both accounts. At times, I’ve gotten really lucky on some trades, making money without knowing what I was really doing. Finally, with my first year of stock options under my belt, I do feel like I’m starting to become a better trader. There have been a lot of things that I knew I should have been doing, but just didn’t for one reason or the other and some undisciplined trading in general, but I am very grateful that I was able to make a profit my first year, so let’s find out what trades profited me the most – including GameStop.

I have an account on a platform called TraderSync on which I imported all of my trades from each platform, so it's an easy way to sort my trades and keep track of my profit and loss.

ROBINHOOD

Let’s start with Robinhood.

SPY ($23,671)

I got into stock options at a perfect time last January. I had made a few profitable trades and was keeping an eye on the market when March rolled around. With Coronavirus starting to spread and a lockdown in the US looming, I decided to buy puts on the S&P 500 ETF Spy. I bought 10 put contracts on March 5th. The strike price was $270 with an expiration of April 17th and these contracts cost a total of $5,960.

The market started selling off pretty drastically over the next week, so I started scaling out of my position. On the 12th, I sold 3 contracts for a total of $9,075, locking in $3,115 in profit and leaving me with 7 contracts still running risk-free. The next day I sold 4 more for $10,356 and three days later on March 16thm I sold my remaining 3 contracts for another $10,200. Altogether, I profited $23,671 off of this trade. I was in the right place at the right time. Buying puts in just about any company would have resulted in pretty amazing profits at this time, so I certainly can’t chalk this up to skill.

SPY ($14,606)

While I was holding those contracts, I decided to go in even heavier. On March 11th, I bought 10 more put contracts with a strike price of $250. These cost a total $9,260. I sold 6 of these two days later for $10,518 to take my initial capital off the table and lock in almost $1300 in profit. Then, on March 18th, I sold my remaining four for a total of $13,348 for a total net profit of $14,606.

These two Spy plays resulted in a profit of $38,277. And soon after I withdrew $40,000 from Robinhood because I knew I was inexperienced and just got lucky and it would be easy for me to give that money back if I wasn’t careful.

TMUS ($8,830)

Next up is the trade that really kicked off my love for options trading. This was one of the first options plays I ever did, and it went really well. I knew T-Mobile was trying to merge with Sprint, so I decided to buy 20 call option contracts on February 7th of 2020. I don’t really remember why I got in exactly when I did, but once again, I was incredibly lucky. Just a few days later, a judge approved one of the steps needed to complete the merger and T-Mobile shot up almost $10. I sold 18 of my 20 contracts on February 11th for $10,350 and sold the remaining 2 for $1,280, resulting in a net profit of $8,830. This is what really kickstarted my Robinhood account and gave me enough capital to buy all of the Spy puts I bought in March.

As far as lessons learned from this trade, I honestly think it was just luck. I remember reading that the merger would likely be approved any day, and I just took a leap of faith on this play and it paid off.

QQQ ($6,600)

Back again to March with the Coronavirus Crash, I decided to buy puts on QQQ, which is essentially the Nasdaq 100 index, filled with lots of large cap tech stocks. I bought 5 of these contracts on March 6th for $4,835. And just like with the Spy puts, I started scaling out on March 13th, selling 3 of the contracts for $6,195 and then the remaining 2 on March 16th for $5,240, resulting in a net profit of $6,600.

Just like my other trades last March, this was just being in the right place at the right time. No special skill or talent here, just pretty lucky I decided to enter put contracts when I did.

SPY ($5,286)

You’re probably noticing a theme with a lot of these trades, but the fact of the matter is I decided to move most of my trading out of Robinhood after the market took a bath in March. But back on February 26th of 2020, I bought 3 put contracts on Spy with a strike price of $315. These contracts cost $1,914 at the time. My reasoning was the same as before: the market was looking weak, and it seemed like Coronavirus was going to have a big impact on the stock market. I think this was probably one of the first time I ever bought put contracts, so I gladly sold just two days later for $7,200, resulting in a net profit of $5,286.

RCL ($5,050)

Another obvious play I took around this time was puts on Royal Caribbean Cruises. On March 5th I bought 5 contracts for $1,625 and about a week later, I sold these for $6,675, for a net profit of $5,050. This was a great trade, but I would’ve been better off scaling out of this trade, because Royal Caribbean continued selling off another $37 before my contracts would’ve expired, so I could’ve made an absolute killing if I held a little longer.

So that sums up my biggest Robinhood trades, mostly done last March with put contracts. Now let’s head over to my TD Ameritrade account and talk about GameStop.

TD AMERITRADE

GME ($128,492)

So, GameStop. Lots have been said about it in the past month, and it was an absolutely crazy trade to be in. I’ve never experienced such a blend of adrenaline and anxiety trading before.

I ended up buying shares of GameStop, starting on January 19th with 400 shares for a cost basis of about $38. I added 100 shares on the 20th for $37.64 per share, another 50 the next day at $40.39 per share and another 50 at $58.73 per share. I made a video about the short squeeze with GameStop and mentioned I’d probably buy more shares the following Monday, which I did. I bought 50 shares for around $103 on Monday. So you can see, as my conviction in the trade started to become stronger, I started scaling into the trade, buying more and more shares as it became clearer that a squeeze could happen.

I sold 100 shares on January 27th when the stock shot up to $340 per share. Since I spent around $29,000 on shares, this took all of my risk off the table and secured $5,000 in profit. When the stock sold off to $141… I bought the dip, snatching up 50 more shares. Then, on Friday the 29th, I didn’t want to have so much anxiety over the weekend with so much unrealized profit, so I sold 325 shares to lock in $100,000 in profit so I could actually get some sleep over the weekend.

Things weren’t looking so good for GameStop on February 2nd, so I decided to close out of the position by selling my remaining shares at a price of $101. Overall, my net profit on this GameStop trade was $128,492. Obviously, I wish I would’ve sold everything when the share price was in the $400-range, but this was still a successful trade and my biggest one ever. I am glad I scaled in and out of the trade and taking risk off as I went, so I knew I wouldn’t lose money. This short squeeze situation combined with massive retail hype seemed like a unique, once-in-a-decade type play, and I’m glad it worked out.

I really do feel bad for retail traders who got in too late when the price was so high. Generally, when you see it all over the news and you have your grandma asking about GameStop, I would say it’s too late to enter the trade.

LVS ($13,920)

My second biggest trade here was put contracts on Las Vegas Sands. This was another Coronavirus play, betting Vegas would have to shut down and the casinos would take a hit. I got in around March 2nd, 2020 with 20 contracts for a total of $2,140. I held these for two weeks before I started scaling out, so on March 16th, I sold 14 of the 20 contracts for $11,200. I sold my remaining 6 on April 3rd for $4,860. After all was said and done, I netted a profit of $13,920.

SPY ($11,351) + ($7,887)

The next biggest plays were yet again Spy puts last March. I feel like I’ve covered that pretty well, but here they are for a combined profit of $19,238.

FB ($5,577)

On the morning of May 20th, I bought 10 call contracts on Facebook, expiring in just 9 days with a strike price of $230. I bought these because Facebook announced Facebook Shops which was an e-commerce feature that allowed businesses to easily sell their products on Facebook and Instagram.

Facebook shares were trading around the $225 at this time and it closed around $230 that day, making my call options in the money. I sold 5 contracts the next day around market open for $4,630 and sold the remaining 5 a couple hours later for $3,990 for a total profit of $3,043.

Usually, the adage is sell the news, not the buy the news because it’s often too late to hop on a trade once the news comes out, but in this case, it worked out.

Final Thoughts

I had some other trades that worked out well with Crisper, Zoom, Beyond, Snow, and Palantir, but as you can see, my biggest trades were taking advantage of these less common market conditions. First with the March 2020 crash and then more recently, the Gamestop short squeeze.

I was lucky that buying puts paid off last March and gave me the bankroll to make mistakes and learn without losing my shirt in the process.

Going through both my winners and losers have been helpful to see where I’ve had success and where I’ve made mistakes. It makes it easier to see where I can improve and become a more consistently profitable trader. I would definitely recommend at the very least, having a trade journal spreadsheet where you track every trade and even note why you entered the trades you did. At the end of the week, you can review your trades, see what you did right and see what you did wrong and can learn from them.

I will try and put out a video next week recapping all of the lessons I’ve learned so far in trading so hopefully you can avoid some of the mistakes I made.

Thanks so much for watching this video. Do me a favor and hit the thumbs up button on this video – it’ll really help this channel out. Consider subscribing if you haven’t already, and I will see you in the next one.