Our founder, Alex Temiz, has made over $16 million in verified trading profits, and the question people ask him more than any other is simple: “How do I get bigger on my setups and make more money?” Everybody wants the bigger number. Nobody wants to talk about what has to happen before you earn it.
So we’re going to lay the whole thing out. Not the hype version. These are the same steps that took our co-founder, Alex Temiz, from making $100 a day to making hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single day. Because sizing up is not about being brave. It’s about knowing when the odds are so far in your favor that betting heavy is the obvious move, and knowing when to sit on your hands the rest of the time.
First, the hard truth about getting bigger
Alex did not start out putting size on million-dollar setups. He started 11 and a half years ago knowing nothing, buying breakouts because that was what the internet taught back then, and watching them go straight down. Basically the Reverse Midas touch. Ouch.
Short selling is what finally turned it around, and even then it took until year three to make his first $100 day. A hundred dollars a day, in year three. That is the part nobody posts.
What turned that into six-figure days is the system we’re about to walk through. And it starts in a place most people don’t expect.
The mistake that creates the drawdowns
Here’s the trap almost everyone falls into, and Alex fell into it too. He thought the only way to make big money was to size up on everything. Same exact share size on every single setup, good or bad, A-grade or garbage.
You know what that gets you?
Huge drawdowns and total inconsistency. Up +$1,000 one day, down -$2,000 the next. Up +$5,000, then down -$3,000. Up +$7,000, then down -$4,000.
And after all that swinging, you look up at the end of the week and you’re only up maybe +$1,000-$2,000. Or worse, you’re red because those price swings mentally and physically exhausted you. All that stress, all that emotion, for a number you could have hit calmly.
So Alex did something that sounds backwards. He started to size down.
We know how that sounds. You came here to learn how to size up and the first instruction is to size down. Stay with us, because this is the part that makes everything else work.
Step 0: size down to take the emotion out
When you size down, you take the emotion out of the trade. Think about yourself as a trader. If you’re trading with a $10 position, you could leave the house, walk around the block, go get lunch, and not care. The money doesn’t move you. Now put real size on before you’re ready, and you’re glued to the screen, heart pounding, sweat profusely, making decisions out of fear instead of out of your plan.
By the end of the day, you feel, physically, like you just ran a marathon in your pajamas and mentally like you just played Jeopardy for 36 hours nonstop. Doesn’t that sound relaxing? No, it doesn’t.
You need to get back to that place where the numbers don’t bother you. Where you aren’t getting emotional on the trades. That’s the foundation. Before you do anything else, you go back, you size down, and you get your emotions under control.
Sizing down does something else too. It lets you grow your account with small, boring consistency. And that consistency is what eventually earns you the right to size up, because you can’t size up until you’ve got a cushion saved.
For Alex, the moment he felt ready to size up again was when he had a full year’s worth of savings in the bank. That way, whether he was swinging up or down, it didn’t really matter to his life. He needed that comfort to give himself permission to push. Back then, he had been sizing up on anything and everything, it wasn’t producing consistent profits, and he was scared. He didn’t want to give back the gains again. Having money set aside was what let him push further without trading out of fear.
Whatever amount of capital it takes for you to capital is entirely up to you. A year’s worth of savings is just what it took for Alex.
The principle is what matters: you size up from a position of safety, not from a position of need. If you’re trading out of need for the money with money you need, your emotions will not stay in check and the market will beat you and take your entire account a little at a time or all at once.
Step 1: track your statistics so you know your best setup
#1 in the actual size-up system is tracking your statistics. Everyone talks about tracking. Almost nobody explains what it means or why it matters.
Here’s why it matters. If you don’t know which setups make you the most money, how are you supposed to know which setups to size up on? You can’t. You’d be guessing, and guessing with size is how accounts die.
When you track your day trades, patterns show up.
Say you find you make the most money on:
- day-one stocks to the long side
- in pre-market
- under a 1-million-share float
- priced under $5
Now, you’ve got a fingerprint. Every time you see those same criteria line up again, that’s your signal this is an A-grade setup for you and you can take more size.
For Alex, the data said a few clear things. He makes the most money when:
- The time of day is between 9:30 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. ET.
- The stock price is between $2 and $10 (which coincidentally sits right in the range of the best stocks to day trade)
- The pattern is a first-red-day setup or sell-the-news setup
So before he sizes up, he needs those criteria in place. The numbers told him where his edge actually lived, instead of where he assumed it lived.
If you don’t know your data, you have not earned the right to size up yet. Full stop.
The Bao at Disney World example
This is the example we always come back to, because it makes the whole idea of probability click.
Say we’re making a bet, and you win the bet if Bao gets drunk.
Scenario one: Bao goes to Disney World. There’s maybe a 50% chance he gets drunk. Would you place that bet? Maybe. It’s a coin flip. You’re not backing up the truck on a coin flip.
Now scenario two. Bao’s going to the club. There’s a bottle of Hennessy sitting in front of him, and there are a couple of cute girls in short skirts. Now there’s a 99.9% chance he’s getting drunk. That’s the statistics talking. And when the statistics are that lopsided, that’s when you bet heavy.
Trading is the exact same thing. There are specific moments, based on your own data, when your win rate on a setup is sky high. That moment is when you size up. And if you don’t know what your best setup is, you simply haven’t earned the ability to size up. The data comes first.
Step 2: grade your setups and size exponentially
Now the question becomes: how do you actually put the size on?
You grade your setups. You need to know the difference between a:
- C setup
- B setup
- A setup
This is called exponential bet sizing.
Here’s how it looks in practice for Alex:
- C setup: around 1,000 shares.
- B setup: somewhere in the 5,000 to 10,000 share range.
- A setup: 50,000 shares and above.
If you’re not comfortable with that level of risk, just reduce those shares by a multiple you are comfortable with.
Notice the scale doesn’t climb in a straight line. It jumps. It goes up exponentially. Why? Because the higher the grade of your setup, the higher the probability, and the higher the probability, the heavier you bet.
Go back to Bao at the club. On a setup like that, you want to mortgage the house. Sell the watch. Sell the cars. Sell a kidney. Figuratively speaking, of course. This is purely for education purposes and is not investment advice. In that bet, you put it all on that one, because it has a 99% chance of working. That’s the energy an A setup deserves. A C setup gets a toe in the water. An A setup gets everything you’ve got.
So step two is knowing your best setup from your data, then scaling into the position exponentially as the grade climbs.
Step 3: wait for the confirmation signal
This is the most important step, and it’s the one that ties everything together.
By now you know which stock to size up on, and you know how to size exponentially. The last question is timing. When do you actually put the size on? You don’t just slam it on because the setup looks pretty. You wait for confirmation.
Back to Bao one more time. What confirms he’s actually drunk? He starts slurring his words. He’s passing shots around. He’s flirting with the girls. Those are the tells. That’s the moment you have confirmation, not before.
In trading, confirmation depends on which side you’re on.
As a short-bias trader, Alex is looking for:
- a death candle
- a break below VWAP
- a low-of-day break
When those signals show up on a stock that already fits his criteria, that’s the green light to put the size on.
For a long-bias trader, confirmation looks different. It might be a reclaim of VWAP, a break of high of day, a break of the pre-market high, maybe a halt up on top of it. Once those indicators line up and the stock fits your criteria, that’s when you size up.
If you want to see this play out live, we broke down how Alex scaled into his CMBM trade, where he made around $80,000 in a single day. You can watch exactly how the size went on, step by step.
You don’t size up every day
Here’s the part that protects you from yourself. Putting all three steps together does not mean you size up every single day. The truth is you might get one of these chances once a month, maybe once a quarter.
Don’t fool yourself into thinking you have to trade aggressively every day to make it. That mindset is exactly what creates the up-and-down drawdowns we talked about at the start. Your actual job as a trader is to show up to the market and wait for your opportunity. When it’s there, you size up. When it’s not, you walk away. That’s it.
So let’s bring it back to the three numbers.
- Track your statistics and know which stocks make you the most money.
- Grade your setups and bet exponentially when the right one shows up.
- Wait for the confirmation signal before you put the size on.
Get all three lined up, from a place of safety with a cushion behind you, and that is when you finally size up.
That patience, not constant aggression, is what built over $16 million in verified profits. Show up, wait for your spot, and when the odds look like Bao at the club, that’s when you go all in.
