Alex Temiz walked into SMB Capital’s New York office a 25-year-old day trader with more than $10 million in verified profits, a 650k January, and a 33-day green streak worth around $300,000. Four and a half years before that, he was working at Starbucks, making $100 a week, watching most of it disappear on gas. The Q&A with SMB’s prop desk covered how he closed that gap, and what most traders still get wrong about shorting, sizing, and sitting at the screen long enough for an edge to show up.
This is the long version, with the parts the first write-up skipped over.
From Starbucks to the Screen
Alex got into trading in 2015. The catalyst was personal, not professional. His girlfriend dumped him, he wanted to get rich, and the Wall Street movies he had watched made the suits look like people he could match. “I don’t think I’m a dumb kid,” he said. “I think I could do it for myself as well.” So he dived in.
The first year was the standard tuition. He bought breakouts at the highs, sold the lows, found the same online gurus most beginners find, and lost money. He was clearing about $100 a week at Starbucks, putting $60 toward gas, the rest toward his girlfriend. When that relationship ended, the cash started accumulating. When the cash still wasn’t enough, he sold the wheels off his car for $2,000 and funded another account.
The hunger is the part most traders romanticize and almost none replicate. He wasn’t trading because it sounded cool. He was trading because the alternative was Starbucks.
The First Short That Flipped the Switch
Long-only wasn’t working, but Alex hadn’t yet considered the other side. Someone mentioned you could make money when stocks go down. His response was honest: “Shit, I’m good at that. Every time I buy a stock, it goes down anyway. Let me just do the opposite.”
The first short trade was 2,000 shares of VGGL. The stock dropped fifty cents instantly. He made $1,000 in seconds.
That was the moment he thought he had found the holy grail. He hadn’t. What he had found was a direction that matched his pattern recognition. The strategy still didn’t exist. He spent the next stretch refining it, asking the questions he should have been asking from day one. Why did the stock drop? Was it technical? Was it fundamental? Was it both?
And then, the harder lesson. He had no risk management.
Risk Management, the Real Definition
Alex’s definition of risk management is not a textbook one. It comes from a tweet he posted after a bad short call cost him about $1,900 publicly on Twitter. He went back and did the math. He had made roughly $300,000 over the previous 30 days. He had lost $1,900 talking trades on a public feed. “That’s the definition of risk management,” he said. “I’m not losing all the money I made. I’m making a plan and I’m sticking to it.”
That’s the bar. Not “don’t lose money.” Lose so little that a full month of public losses is a rounding error against the wins. Getting there means stop-loss orders sit on every trade, and limit orders define the entries. If the plan is “short a daily resistance at $5,” then $5 is the entry zone and the stop sits above the next resistance.
The pre-plan version of Alex did the opposite. He added to losers, refused to stop out, and waited until the pain got loud enough to force the exit. Plenty of traders are still living in that version.
Tape Reading Until Your Eyes Bleed
The tape tells the story. That is the line Alex keeps coming back to.
“I’ve sat there for hours and hours just watching the tape till my eyes literally bleed,” he said. He described a day on AXON when he had no intention of trading, just watching: “It was like a movie. I cracked open a beer and sat there watching the tape just mindlessly to see what I could find.”
Most traders skip this part. They want a checklist or a setup name. The actual edge sits in recognizing what a 50,000-share hidden seller looks like when he’s only showing 100 shares on the ask, filling, filling, filling, refusing to budge. That kind of pattern recognition only loads into your head if you stare at level 2 for thousands of hours. There’s no shortcut.When he was earlier in the game, Alex recorded his screen during the wildest moves, then played the tape back in slow motion to see what was actually happening on the breakouts and breakdowns. If you want a starting point, reading the tape is the rabbit hole that pays the most.
Sympathy Plays and the Head of the Snake
The SMB room asked about DRYS. In November 2016, DryShips ($DRYS) ran from single digits to roughly $100 in days, then collapsed. Everyone on small-cap Twitter was watching DRYS itself. Alex was watching the cousins.
ESEA, TOPS, DCIX, SINO. Other shippers, other low floats, all running because DRYS was running.
He couldn’t get a borrow on DRYS, so he couldn’t short the headline name. He shorted the rest. “Once you cut off the head of the snake, all the other ones felt like that. So that’s kind of where I started to realize there is a lot of money to be made on the stocks that people aren’t really watching as well.”
That’s the entire thesis of a sympathy play.
When the parabolic on the headline name breaks, the sympathy names lose the reason they were running in the first place. SINO closed near $8, gapped to $14 the day DRYS unhalted, then traded back into the $7s on the same session. The volume that was holding the move up evaporates the second the catalyst dies.
It was one of the best days of his career. He held about as much short as he could.
What He Did Wrong on the Best Day of His Career
This part didn’t make the first write-up. It should have.
Alex made roughly $100,000 the day DRYS collapsed, and he still calls it a drawdown story. Not because he was down on the trade, but because he covered too early.
“I was so emotional about making so much money that I focused on the money instead of the trade,” he said. SNO went from $14 to $7 that day, and he took the $100K and went to celebrate. The next day SNO dropped more. The day after that it washed out and rebounded. The chart was telling him to hold. His P&L was telling him to bank it. He listened to the P&L.
“Focus on the chart, not the money. If the chart is saying these stocks are going to go lower, focus on that rather than your P&L.”
There’s a generation of small-cap traders that has heard “let your winners run” a thousand times and has never internalized why. Alex’s answer is that you internalize it by losing the back nine of a great trade, then realizing you left more on the table than the entire week’s P&L.
How He Reads a Setup: The AXON Walkthrough
When the SMB desk asked him to walk through a live name, he picked AXON. The pattern is worth memorizing because most of his bread-and-butter shorts look like a version of it.
Shares outstanding around 100 million, float around 30 million. Stock was up 100% on the day. Float traded 30 million shares in the first 30 minutes. Borrow available almost everywhere. A midday downgrade trapped a wave of late shorts. The last 30 minutes of the session, the stock went straight up “on air,” meaning thin volume and no real selling pressure.
That setup is a stack of signals. Easy borrow means everyone who wanted to short has been shorting. The midday downgrade puts late shorts in immediate pain. A close on light volume into the high of the day means there’s no real demand left, just trapped shorts covering. The next morning gap is the exit door for those shorts and the entry for traders like Alex.
Pattern recognition, in his words, is what happens after you’ve watched the same sequence run a hundred times. The first ten times you see it, it’s a coincidence. By the fiftieth, it’s a setup.
VWAP as the Anchor for the Plan
Alex calls Volume-Weighted Average Price his number one indicator. Here is the exact AXON game plan he laid out for the SMB room.
Plan was to be short 50,000 shares on day two. He doesn’t slam 50K at the open. He starts with 10,000 around the 5.50 area, partly to “feel” how the tape is trading, because you don’t notice the little tells until you have skin in the game.
After the starter, two things can happen. The stock pushes to 5.75 and stops him out. Or the stock pulls back to 5.25, bounces to 5.40, then rolls over on a lower high. The lower high is where he adds the second 10,000. Now he is short 20,000.
Then VWAP. If price consolidates under VWAP and starts breaking down through VWAP on day two after the stock has already exhausted itself, he loads the final 30,000. Full size of 50,000 short, average around the second tranche, stop at the day’s high.
From there, he takes profit in pieces. He’ll cover half at the first major support, then make a call: cover the rest on a chart level, or hold a runner overnight if the chart and the fundamentals both say lower. “There’s nothing worse than an unrealized gain turning into a realized loss,” he said. The partials buy him patience on the remaining position.
That’s the level of granularity that separates a setup from a trade. Most traders have the setup. They don’t have the staircase.
The Morning Routine That Builds the Plan
Alex is up at 5 a.m. every day. He says he might have a sleeping problem. Either way, by 7 a.m. he’s at the screens watching every tick of pre-market.
His pre-market checklist on any gapper:
- Catalyst check. Has this company released similar news before? If yes, what did the stock do that time? If the chart shows a fade after every previous spike, that’s a tell.
- Float check. Pull up a screener like FINVIZ for float data. Low float, high float, or institutionally owned? Each one trades differently.
- Filings. Open BamSEC for SEC filings and search for active ATMs and recent S-3s. An ATM is a registered shelf that lets a company drip shares directly into the market, which the SEC’s framework around at-the-market offerings lays out in detail. If a company has an active ATM and the stock is gapping up on news, there is a real chance the news exists to push retail buying into the ATM dump.
- Cash situation. Are they desperate for money or sitting on a fat balance sheet? A company that needs cash and has the registration to sell it is going to sell it.
- Daily chart resistance. Where did the stock get rejected last time? That’s where the next plan starts.
A finished plan reads like this: $5 is a daily resistance, the company has an active ATM and needs cash, my short is based off $5 with a stop above $5.25. If the morning gap takes price into that zone, the trade triggers. If it doesn’t, no trade.
Then journaling the trade at the end of the session. Screenshot of the chart with entries and exits, review on the weekend, ask the only question that matters: did you follow the plan?
Scaling Size: You Have to Earn the Right
The first VGGL trade was 2,000 shares. Years later, 2,000 shares is what he ends up holding when a 10,000-share order partially fills.
That difference didn’t come from confidence alone. It came from running the same setups small for long enough that the conviction built up, then sizing up incrementally as the data came in. Alex is blunt about the cost of going too fast: “If you’re losing $1,000 on every tick the stock is moving, there are going to be heightened emotions. Some people literally can’t handle it. Some people freeze when the stock goes against them.”
He points to his friend Eric Wood as the cautionary tale. Eric has been trading 10 to 20 years, starter position 50,000 shares, often short 300,000 to 500,000 shares. Eric made $3 million when DRYS collapsed because he held 500,000 shares for a month. He is also, by Alex’s description, bald, stressed, drinking, smoking through it. “Like, that’s not the life I want, man. I’m 23 years old. Like, why am I going to lose my hair?”
The other piece worth saying out loud: once you size up, you don’t go back. Going back to making $100 doesn’t feel exciting anymore. It feels like losing. That’s the trap. People dive into stupid size before their strategy is doing the work for them, and then they can’t downshift if the wheels come off. The mental side of leveling up is the part most people underestimate before they’re holding size, and overestimate after.
The rule is simple. Earn the right. Find a strategy that works. Run it small until small profits are boring. Then, and only then, size up.
Green on the Day Isn’t the Point
A lot of traders measure the day by the P&L color. Alex measures it by the plan.
“It’s not about being green on the day. It’s about making sure I followed my plan. There have been plenty of times I’ve been green and not followed my plan, and those are the days that piss me off the most. I don’t want to be making $5,000 because I was stubborn or greedy or egotistical. I want to be making that money because I followed my plan and did exactly what I was supposed to do.”
The inversion matters. If you lose money following the plan, that’s a winner, because the plan pays nine times out of ten. If you make money breaking the plan, you’ve reinforced a habit that will eventually take a much bigger number out of you. Greed and adrenaline write checks the next bad trade has to cash.
A related symptom: freezing on entries. He posted about this on Twitter. Mental freezing before every trade is a subconscious signal that you don’t actually trust your process. You haven’t done the reps. You haven’t seen the setup work enough times. The fix isn’t a pep talk, it’s more data. Watch the same setup run, build a small position to test it, then build a bigger one when the prior position paid.
Trade Around People Who Trade Like You
This is one of the bigger gaps in the original interview write-up. Alex doesn’t trade alone.
He trades inside a small room with around 15 to 20 people he has known for years. The seed of that room was a single relationship. He met Bao, known online as Modern Rock, at a conference in Vegas. They had a similar style, similar setups, similar reads. Any time Alex was about to size into something, he’d ping Bao first. “If he didn’t agree on it, I would not use size on it. If me and him both agree, those are usually the ones that are the home runs.”
Bao went on to become Alex’s longtime trading partner and co-founder at MIC. The point is not name-dropping. The point is that one peer who trades exactly the way you do is worth more than a wall of unrelated opinions. You’re not trying to crowdsource conviction. You’re trying to get a second pair of eyes from someone with the same lens.
Alex still adds to the room. When he found a long-side trader on Twitter making money on the same stocks he was shorting, he invited that trader in. He wasn’t trying to convert him. He wanted to learn the long side from someone who actually traded it.
Surround yourself with traders who are better than you. Watch why they entered, why they covered, what they were looking at on the tape. That’s where the small nuances rub off.
How He Handles Big Losses
A big loss is the trade most people get wrong, and the one that ends careers.
Alex’s instinct is the same as everyone else’s. You can’t squeeze me. I’ll come back tomorrow and take my money. He’s clear that this is the wrong instinct. The market is always right. “She’s always right.” Jesse Livermore, the trader most often cited as the original pattern of this lesson, is widely quoted as saying “markets are never wrong, opinions often are.” Whether or not Livermore wrote that exact line, the discipline behind it is older than any of us.
What Alex actually does after a big loss is take a day. Sometimes two. Go hang out with friends. Get away from the screens for a beat, and don’t come back to the desk emotional. The market will be there tomorrow.
He’s specific about the kinds of emotional states that should keep you off the desk. If your girlfriend cheated on you, you shouldn’t trade. If you’re in a fight with someone at home, you shouldn’t trade. The anger will leak into the size on your next trade, and the market doesn’t care that you’re going through it. “You have to be emotionally sharp. You have to be a rock when you’re down.”
A clear head is non-negotiable. If you don’t have one, you don’t have an edge.
Where to Start If You’re New
The questions Alex gets most from new traders are about books and videos. His answer is almost the same every time.
YouTube is free. There are thousands of videos on tape reading alone. The skill that helped him most when he was new was recording his own screen during the wildest moves, then playing it back in slow motion to see what the tape was doing at the exact second a stock broke out or broke down. That’s a habit you can build this weekend.
Spend a Saturday night reading a 10-K. The first one will feel impossible. Google every term you don’t recognize. Build the vocabulary. He likes fundamentals because they tell him things other traders don’t bother to learn: cash on hand, last raise, deadline on an S-3, dilution patterns. Information is the asymmetry. The more you know, the harder it is for the company on the other side of the trade to surprise you.
The other piece is screen time. Pre-market through the close. If you’re not at the desk from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. catching the nuances most people miss, you’re at a disadvantage to the people who are.
Also worth a note: the regulatory landscape for U.S. day traders is changing. FINRA’s longstanding pattern day trader designation, which FINRA’s own day trading guidance lays out, is being reworked. The rules that shaped how a generation of traders thought about account size and trade frequency aren’t permanent. The skill set is.
Information Is the Asymmetry
The TL;DR Alex would give a younger version of himself:
- make the plan
- follow the plan
- journal the trade
- size up only when the data says you’ve earned it, and
- find one or two traders who run the same setups to bounce reads off of.
Everything else is noise.
The first VGGL trade was $1,000. The shipper crash day was over $100,000. The difference between those numbers wasn’t talent. It was four and a half years of reps, fundamentals, tape, and a process he started to actually trust.
