Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:57 Why Journaling Matters
06:17 Using AI as an R&D Department
07:34 Why Chop Shows Up First in the Morning
09:18 Claude 101: Desktop vs. Terminal
13:34 Trader Ty's Trade Dashboard
17:14 Position Sizing & the 25/20/55 Exit Plan
22:40 Backtesting Exits: 10 More R
24:35 Turtle Traders & Trading as Math
28:17 Stair-Steppers vs. Vertical Movers
30:36 Live Demo: A Dashboard From a CSV
36:01 Nick's Journal: Feelings, Despair & Chop
47:21 Market Check: Fed Week & the 710 Pivot
50:18 Trailing Stops, ATR & Turning Off P&L
Market Hours #193 went out live on Thursday, July 23, as a two-person show: Nick hosted, and Ben and GP were off. His guest was Trader Ty, a trader working toward going full time, who walked through the trading dashboard and journal he built by talking to Claude, with no coding experience. Most of the hour was about process — tracking every trade, letting the math override emotion, and journaling — with a quick check on the market heading into Fed week. Despite the $AAPL and $GOOGL in the YouTube title, there was almost no single-stock analysis; the Apple trade Ty entered was a demo.
Nick's setups, levels and trades
Nick said he treats AI the way he treats social media, as his "R&D department." His mind runs faster than he can write, so he dumps his thoughts into Grok or ChatGPT, has it organize them, then pushes back and pits the two against each other before deciding what resonates. When he asks whether an answer is really a 10 out of 10, it often admits it's a 7.4. His view: AI is a magnifier — "the power is really in the prompter."
His handwritten journaling showed him that he chops away most of his gains when he gets involved too early in the morning, especially once the market turns choppy. He said that's also a tell about the environment: in a trending bull market you get weak opens and strong closes, so that behavior gets rewarded, but in chop "we're not going to forgive you here." These days his journal is more about how he feels, morning and after the close, because he's found his moments of despair often line up with major turning points. He admitted he's been lazy about documenting actual trades, and called that a missing piece. Because he trail-stops, he'll never catch the top and is "by default" in a drawdown. The loss he most wants to shrink is the first redeployment of capital after trail stops fire while the trend is still intact, not the small feeler positions that get chopped afterward.
On stops, he starts with ATR in his trend account rather than arguing over which pivot to use. Before 2019, moving from day trading to swing and position trading, he used two times the weekly ATR, which can mean 50- to 100-point stops on the expensive $100–300+ stocks he likes. So he takes small starters and builds into positions, since he's better at adding on strength than weakness. Switching his P&L display from dollars to percent, with smaller size and wider stops, helped him sit on his hands instead of buying and selling over and over. He also brought up Michael Covel's book on the Turtle Traders, whose system entered and added on 20- and 55-day highs, as the model of thinking in odds and probabilities. He compared names that go vertical with names that stair-step, and said he prefers stair-steppers because he likes to put feelers out and get rewarded before pushing in.
On the market, he said it felt like "we're hanging by a thread" going into next week's Fed meeting on Wednesday and the remaining Mag earnings. He liked that the day's action was holding the pivot low. A bold bullish scenario would be a gap down the next day followed by a "face rip" all day, using the 709–710 area on the futures as a double-bottom pivot and layering from there, with the 50-day mid-range at 720 and then a push back toward the highs to see if it can break out. Trader Ty added that the SPY was holding up well technically.
Trader Ty's process
Trader Ty said he decided about nine months earlier that if he wanted out of his 9-to-5, he had to treat trading as a business and track every trade. That pushed him from brokerage P&L glances to a detailed spreadsheet tracking time of day and how long he held his runners. About a month and a half before the show, a coworker introduced him to Claude, and he used it to build what he calls his trading dashboard. He uses the $20-a-month plan, which lets Claude read files on his computer, and runs Claude Code through the terminal, which he described as "ChatGPT on steroids" that you still just talk to in plain English.
His exit plan is what he calls 25-20-55: sell 25% at 1R, sell 20% at 2R, and trail the rest with an exponential moving average, moving the stop up to a half-R stop once the trade hits 1R. The dashboard shows a card for each open trade with its entry, remaining shares, current stop and profit locked in. When he enters a new trade, it calculates the size — with $500 of risk and $1 a share of risk, that's 500 shares — and lays out every sell point. It also stores his daily and weekly charts for each trade, keeps a timeline, and tracks results, equity curve, average win and loss, and max drawdown. The data lives in the browser, so he exports it daily.
The most useful part, he said, was backtesting his own exits. Using his own trade data, Claude showed that the same trades with nothing sold at 1R, 25% at 2R and 75% on the trailing stop would have made about 10R more. The only thing holding him back is psychological — he likes locking in profit at 1R — and seeing the math gives him the confidence to act "mathematically and not emotionally." He uses a baseball analogy: a strikeout is a 1R loss, singles are about 1R and extra-base hits are 2–4R, so a strategy can lose more than half the time and still come out well ahead. He sees trading as close to 50% math, and you can be wrong more often than you're right.
His cautions: he ran the dashboard alongside his spreadsheet for weeks to check it, and it does make errors, though it fixes them quickly once you point them out. Give it paragraphs rather than one-line prompts, or just talk to it by voice. Live on the show, he had it build a fresh dashboard from a CSV of 20 sample trades in about a minute and a half, then added an equity curve and stats tab with one more prompt. He also uses it as a sounding board — Is he holding runners long enough? Is he risking enough for his account size? — while treating its answers as one logical opinion, not the final word. He pointed out that setting a stop too wide can be a defense mechanism against losing, even when the setup is invalidated halfway down.
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