As a brand new pediatric dentist in town, I had to face the fact that there is no securities in any job. I always believe that I won't be without job as health care worker.  Covid 19 has changed my believes. Our dental office, where I had just started working as primary pediatric dentist for 4 months was closed, opens only for true emergencies only. The whole staff and I went from full time employees into furloughs. We all signed up for Unemployment Insurance. I am lucky that I was approved because I went directly from residency without any gap to employment, I got only very little fractions of my usual income every month. 

Having to come from Indonesia, finished dental school there, went to multiple schools here in the US, from orthodontics, Advance General Dentistry, and finally pediatric dentistry, it was such a struggle and long journey, because I had to re-do training all over again to be able to practice in the US, and the competition to get in the dental school was outrageous. I stayed home to save lives. I am a sole provider for my 2 teenage children with asthma, allergic to cat but have one because I am a good mom LOL, I was terrified financially.  Thank God, I have my savings. I started to look into some possibilities of money making. I applied for Census job, and I decided not to pursue it. As I checked into my bank account, I stumbled into "opening investment account". I had no idea what is that. I do have fidelity accounts and I have no idea what's in it. I only know, the money will grow for my retirement. 

I then went to Amazon, to buy kindle books about stocks, after reading few books, I learned about penny stock. I searched penny stocks on internet, and found Tim. When I first watched his video, I thought he was just a guy like everyone else, trying to sell a dream of financial freedom to suck the money out of your pocket. I did not stop there, I dig more and found out he is legit. I went to his homepage, clicked on challenge. I got interviewed 2 days later by Chace, and I was up to it to pay big lump of money to take the challenge. I thought this is a lot of money, but I paid over $85k for my Master's educationI considered this as tuition, cheaper tuition, which I am sure I will learn more than that Master of Science education I did.

I signed up on April 3, 2020 in the afternoon. The next day, April 4th, I started studying. A lot of studying. The set up is perfect, because I stay home, pretty much since 7 weeks ago. My children are on board with me trying to be financially independent. I studied 10-13 hours a day. I was up until 4-in the morning.

Today is marked the 27th day of my journey as Challenge student.

What did I learn so far with +300 hours of studying?

1. Make is simple. KISS. I believe it takes 10,000 hours to make you good in what you do. It will get easier. You have to be organized and love it, not because you want to get rich fast, it all take your hard work and be persistent.

2. My first trading was disaster, I got so much in panic, not only because I was afraid to lose money (which I did), but because I was not familiar with the platform. 

3. You learn to be humble very fast. The income which was taken away from you, the money you have,  will be gone in the blink of the eyes, while you are watching it. In slow motion. You can't stop it. You are paralyzed. I had dream about it few days later, in my dream, there was a hacker went in my account and changed all my dollars into $0. In real life, it will happen. Lesson: know your exit plan. Do not over trade, your will lose. Do not short on Green Day, do not long on red day. Take advantage of Friday afternoon short squeeze. Never buy on midday spikes, wait until afternoon. Do not short in the morning. I learned that stop orders saved me for so many times, sometimes stock dipped in a blink of eyes. 

4. Start small and exponentially grow it.  I lost big because I put too many shares into the trading while I am not experienced yet, and without enough knowledge. Tim told us multiple time, but I was stubborn. Lesson: don't be stubborn. Trade small because if you blow up your account, you can’t recover. Trade with the account you can recover. Set up your risk, how much you are willing to risk your money, then aim for 2-3 times of what you risk. 

5. Follow the rules. Those rules are made to help you. If you stick to the rule, it will be profitable. You will be the $5 winner, not the 95% loser. 

6. It is not what we assume, make easy money. It is not easy money. It is fast money, but you have to earn it, that means, you need to study (a lot of study), prepare for your trading plan, and stick to it. Trading ONLY when you know the patterns, if you do not see the pattern, don’t do it. A lot of small gains over too many trading in a day will not be as high as when you wait for the good trading with good pattern (let the pattern comes to you). 

7. Play like a robot, without emotion, no hoping, that price will go the way you want it. I have done the emotional trading, believe me, it gets ugly. Steven dux say: "close your eyes, and click the button". Close 1 eye to click for profit, close both eyes to click on losses. Then don’t look back. Move on. Get what you have, do not keep re-enter the trading either to get more profit or to gain your losses. Trust me, you will get burn.

8. Chart will not go 100% the way you predict from what you learned. You need to learn to accept losses. No one is perfect trader. Get out quickly when you think things do not go as planned.

9. LEARN YOUR CANDLESTICK YOURSELF. It will help you significantly while you are trading. There are multiple indicators you can have to move faster or to predict, Candlestick is the most important thing. you have to know what is strong candlestick, weak candlestick, doji, and which candlestick showing you when the bounce is about to happen, or supernova will likely to happen, or if the day will be uptrend or downtrend. You can learn from books (I use kindle) and youtube. There is this guy, Jared wesley, from livetrading (find him on youtube). He taught so much in his videos about candlestick, 3 or 4 play bar candle. Trust me. You will thank me for this. I also watch STT from Tim Bohen's video on youtube. 

10. Read as many as you can from books, and videos. The more you study, the better trader you will be. As Tim said on his book, there are 3 factors: Knowledge investment, money investments, and experience investment. You need all three of these to be a better and successful trader.

11. Recognize the pattern. Do not trade when you are not sure about the pattern. The less you are trading while the trading pattern comes to you, the more profit you will have in compare to the too many tradings with small gains. LOOK AT THE chart as whole, not only intraday, but years, daily, months to see the history of the stock you are interested in. Be a retired trader. Only trade when the pattern makes you trade. When you don't have plan, you are a gambler, not a trader. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO TRADE EVERY DAY. Take a break, especially after big loss (don't try to trade to make up your loss for that day. Get out, never come back, because you will lose more. Trust me. I have been there, done that. learn the pattern that you work for you, stick to 2-3 only. 

12. Nothing wrong to be a swing and day trader. I took some of my money from fidelity into my broker account, so I won't have any restrictions on how many PDT I have in a week, but I do not touch that money because I want to trade small first. I usually read news to see SP500 companies that I can buy intraday and sell in few days when it is profitable. I am not comfortable to leave penny stocks overnight. Not yet.

13. Prepare ahead of time at night time, do your research, screen your watchlist for play the next morning, and recheck your watch list 30 mins before the market opens. Look at the premarket pattern, you may guess if the stock worth playing or not, or help to predict what will happen in the future. Not always work, but it worth the try. 

14. Keep the journal: Free ones you can use are excel, evernote, and stocktrader.com. Paid subscription: Tradervue or Tradersync. I am using trader sync, excel, and evernote. 

15. Do not just study from Tim's material, but expand your knowledge searching for your own strategy, everyone is unique, things work different way for each person. Things which are working for Tim Sykes or Tim Grittani, or other successful traders not necessary will work with you. You find your own way. Sharing your knowledge in this community is a great way, it is not competition, but I call it : "We are in this together, we will be successful together"

16. Know which one is the legit and related news which make stocks run. Tim is very valuable resource as you later on will learn and be sufficient by yourself. 

17. Broker: I signed up for Robinhood before I signed up as Challenge student. I later found out Robinhood is not the good one. So I signed up for TDAmeritrade (I really like the mobile platform of Think or Swim), and E-trade. I also opened up Interactive Broker because Tim recommended it. I opened 4 because of the PDT rule, but now I have to close some of them and working on the platform you are comfortable with. Again, everyone is different, just because others used certain platform you have to follow it. 

18. READ about psychology in trading. It is one of most important books you need to know, and you need to strictly apply it in your trading skills.

19. Aim for 2:1 or 3:1 of your RR. Not be greedy. Greedy will make you loss money, in seconds! good execution is the key. I had experienced that I waited too long, I lost all the profit and ended up with losses. 

20. Do not blindly follow the alerts. I learned my lesson by following Tim's alert blindly, and they are the biggest losses I had. It is not that Tim's alert is bad, but it is your fault. Tim is very experienced trader, and you are beginner. So follow your own plan. If you see alert, do quick research, make your plan, and stick to it. The alert will come to you few minutes after it was made, so you will lose your timing already. Very important: FOMO is dangerous, do not chase the trading. 

21. Chat room is very valuable, as well as webinar and Live trading. It is a breath of air when you just started as Student, overwhelmed with so many materials and videos, you do not know where to start. These are bits of review from all the materials just like little snacks and candies you have when you have long and abundant study material you have to go through. 

22. Start with paper trading. It make sense, until you are comfortable enough to do real trading. I do paper trading sometimes. I started live trading as soon as I have my platform set. I want to feel the psychologic effect when you are trading for real. I feel that I learn so much more from my mistakes. ]

23. STUDY CHARTS. I study the charts I traded, what Tim trades, and other top students. Learning the pattern, why we take it, what time, how, what is the reasoning, and search the news. In research, we call this Cross Sectional Study. Make the spreadsheet from it, and analyze it. 

24. 24 is my birth date, so I will stop here. Most important thing, don't be arrogant and say you can do this easily. This community is amazing. Make friends. Learn from each other, and DO NOT GIVE UP. Be persistent, be passionate about this, and learn from your losses and winnings. Do not get angry and frustrated from your loss, use it as a tool to make you better trader. Learn from each other. Do not be afraid to share your knowledge to others and afraid others will be better than you, no it is not a competition, everyone will find their unique set up what WORKS for them. 

I hope my first month experience as Challenge student can help you the ones who just signed up, to make you feel that you are not alone. We all went through this. There will be days are so depressing or there are days that you are optimistic, it is all normal. It is part of the process. When I signed up, I don't even know what bull or bear are. We all in this together. I am a single mom, got out of 14 years of abusive marriage and I am very hopeful and happy for my future. I am having this as my plan B along with my plan A as pediatric dentist because I LOVE both of them. Thank you for Tim and his top students, and of course, all of you amazing traders. 

My plan for May, I want to start strictly with small trading, using just $2000 to start, and follow rules better. I am going to trade ONLY with the pattern works for me. The rest of the trading will be paper trading until I am more comfortable finding which pattern works for me. I feel like April is not an ideal set up for me as it was pretty mess up. I will update my second month of being a student. Good luck to you all. You can do it. Cheers!