After a hilariously bad start to the Millionaire Challenge program, I stopped trading the last month because I realized that I didn't at all know my material and needed to get my act together and take this seriously.

Like some (maybe a lot) of other traders, I was overexcited to start trading and totally arrogant about what I knew and was capable of. After joining the Millionaire Challenge back at the end of August 2017, I basically only watched Pennystocking, Pennystocking Part Deux, and TimFundamentals Part Deux before I decided "Oh, yeah, I can totally do this." Whoops.

For the last month I've been devoting as many hours as I can muster towards purely learning. In the mornings, I'd wake up and research stocks and watch the markets / chatroom without actually trading. My commutes are now spent listening to the SteadyTrade podcast and audiobooks of trading books (Reminiscenses, Market Wizards, etc.). When I return home I continue the dive through all of the DVDs.

Finally just this last week, I made my first solid, deliberate, and planned paper trade for a 33% profit. It's a shame I didn't trade actual money on this because it was a solid win, but I desperately needed to get away from my account and focus solely on my education.

On Monday evening 01/22/2018, I was making my watchlist for next day when SIGO popped onto the radar. It was mentioned in Tim's watchlist, but it also popped up on my StocksToTrade scan. The immediate thing that caught my attention was that SIGO's chart looked like a possible 6-month cup.

From here, there were two possibilities:

-There could be a clean breakout into a supernova, with tons of volume, in which case it would be a buy

-It could consolidate into a cup & handle, in which case it's not yet a play, but might be

Next day, I watched in the morning and saw that it had a morning panic and broke through its late-afternoon support from the day before. It reversed near its next level of support in the $1.70s and tried for a bounce before failing.

So at that point I figured that this probably wasn't a play that day, so I got off the computer and went to work. Later that night when I was building my watchlist for 24th, I took another look at SIGO and saw that although it failed to fully break out and failed a bounce, it was consolidating and maintaining steady pace within the high $1s range. So the possibility of this becoming a cup & handle was still there.

The next day, price action further went downward and broke past its previous support, hitting a low in the $1.50s before ending the day a little higher near the same support it broke @ $1.76. Okay. At this point it's possible to turn into a cup & handle, or it could just break down entirely.

I set a notification @ $1.90, which would indicate a returning upward trend, and basically forgot about this stock for the rest of the week until Friday the 26th.

That morning, I was sleeping in when I received the bleep that it had crossed the $1.90 threshold. At that point I got a little excited and kept an eye on it through the morning. At around Noon EDT, it spurted to $2.50 before going back down and finding stable support @ $2.25ish -- its breakout level.

At that point, I knew it was a buy, and I jumped into a paper trade of 450 shares, or a little more than $1,000.

Of course, it was paper trading, so I just decided to ride it a little while and forgot about the stock until end-of-day, getting out right @ 3:30pm EDT @ $3.00/share for a solid $0.75 gain per share. If I had been trading actual money I likely would have jumped out at around 2pm EDT when it was around the $2.75 range for only a $0.50 gain per share. But for a tiny, tiny account like mine, a $225 gain in my account is huge.

Although it was only a paper trade, I'm really happy about this particular incident because of two reasons:

1) This is the first trade I made that was 100% deliberate, planned, and prepared for. I would have been okay walking away if it completely broke down, but I was 100% prepared to take the gains had I actually been trading with real money.

2) This stock had such a clean and obvious pattern, and it really made me realize that, as Tim Bohen states on his SteadyTrade podcast, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes".

I'm still not sure at this point if I'm ready to necessarily make real trades again yet, but I do know for a fact that if I find something this obvious again, I will definitely hop in with real money. Here's to hoping my skills and knowledge continue to increase - I wanna become a damn good trader.