Jack Kellogg has verified more than $11 million in trading profits, and he’s 25 years old. That number gets the attention, but it skips the part that actually matters.
Before the OTC breakouts and the eight-figure account, Jack was parking cars. He saved about $10,000 valeting for four years, watched a few free YouTube videos, and then lost money for almost two years straight.
When he came on the After Hours Podcast with Alex, James, and Harry, he walked through the whole thing: the setups that grew the account, the trades that nearly broke him, and the lesson that surprised him most once the money was in the bank.
From Valet to the Screen
The start was an accident. Jack was at the gym in January 2017 when a friend mentioned he was doing some penny stock day trading, learning from Tim Sykes. Jack went home, watched a few Tim Sykes videos, then “really just scoured the internet, chat with traders, everything, watched all the YouTube content that was for free.”
He had $10,000 saved from valeting (four years of parking other people’s cars, the occasional McLaren), and he put it to work.
It did not go well. By his own description he was “a consistent loser for like 20 months.” The turn came when he met a friend, Dom, who taught him OTCs. They started trading them in 2018, and September of that year was his first good month.
After losing roughly $15,000 learning, he turned a $10,000 profit. From there it was steady, ten to fifteen grand a month for about a year, until COVID hit and the whole thing went vertical.
The Setups That Grew the Account
Jack is clear about what built him. There are three setups he keeps coming back to.
The first is the OTC breakout, the one that started it all. His example is SHMP back in 2019, the ticker he says “really, really grew me.” He bought the double-top breakout over five cents, sold it the next day around eight or nine, bought again at ten and sold at eighteen, then thirty and out near fifty or sixty, “just really trading it the entire way up.” That stair-step, rebuying every breakout and selling into the spike, is the core OTC move.
The second is the gapper, which he learned from a trader named Connor. The idea is simple: buy into the closing price and sell into the next day’s gap up. It works on OTCs and NASDAQs alike, and if you’re still fuzzy on what’s actually happening when a stock opens above its prior close, it’s worth understanding why stocks gap up and down before you try to trade the move overnight.
The third is the panic dip buy. His example is SHMP again, the day it topped at $1.00 and panicked down to $0.50 within fifteen minutes. Getting in at $0.51, $0.52, $0.53 and selling into $0.70 or $0.75 is exactly the kind of risk/reward he hunts for, and it only works because a hard stop-loss order at fifty cents caps the downside if the bounce never comes. “It’s a great risk-reward trade.”
What ties all three together is volume. When Alex asked what he prioritizes, Jack’s order was blunt: volume first, chart structure second, dilution third, and catalyst dead last. “The amount of PRs that I’ve read since I started my career is probably zero. Never read one.” His favorite chart is the one that does no volume, flatlines, spikes once, then trades relative high volume for a month or two before breaking over the price. That is the kind of base that, with enough gas in the market, can turn into “a COVID-type runner.”
How He Scales Without Blowing Up
Once he found consistency, Jack got big fairly fast. The mechanism wasn’t a percentage formula. It was feel, and a specific moment he waits for.
“A lot of it is just waiting for like that net zero moment,” he said, “where it’s how much liquidity is going to be in this next one-minute candle, and how much liquidity can I take safely.” He starts small to get a feel, and if the trade goes his way, he adds the winner and moves his stop down to break even. That’s the trade he’s actually looking for: a starter, confirmation, then size, with the stop tucked at a level where “if it gets above it, then you don’t want to be part of the trade anymore.”
He’s also disciplined about where the money sits. After his first $100,000, he split it across three separate brokerage accounts so that “if something ever crazy were to happen, you just lose what you had in that account.” With roughly 6,000 trades behind him now, he knows fast: “I usually know if I’m right or wrong in my gut within the first like 5, 10, 15 minutes.” If it feels off, he exits as close to break even as he can.
The float matters too. He’ll only put real size into liquid names with thick floats, because that’s where the stop is clean. The low-float stuff he keeps small (“they’re only good for like 2, 5, 10, 15, 20k max”) because beyond that your own slippage works against you.
The Bed Bath & Beyond Trade
The setup that put all of this on display was Bed Bath & Beyond. Jack and Alex both made serious money on it, and Jack’s breakdown is a clinic in trading the same ticker from both sides.
He calls it a “big Larry setup.”
The stock “ran from $1.50 up to $6 with four perfect days with increasing volume” (more volume each day, more range expansion to the upside) until it finally came in hard. That’s exactly the moment he waits for.
On the big red day from $5 to $3.50, he got short in the pre-market after it failed to squeeze red to green, added at the open risking the $5 level with a $4.74 to $4.75 entry, then covered into the mid-threes and re-shorted the midday bounce back to $4.50. Trading the short side of a bankruptcy stock the way Jack did it is all about that structure: massive volume, a failed squeeze, and a clean level to risk against.
He’d worked the long side first. Earlier in the year he bought it around $1.70, “just seeing that it was down so much” and remembering something Roland Wolff talks about, that beaten-down bankruptcy stocks often get a big bounce once the bad news is out. He’d watched Party City’s PRTYQ run from twenty cents to sixty on the same idea. He swung BBBY overnight after earnings and sold around $2.50 to $2.75, leaving “a ton of money on the table” as it ran to six, then caught the end of the squeeze on the long side around $5 to $5.50.
The collapse afterward is the part Alex still can’t get over. After the toxic offering hit in the after-hours, the stock “just got absolutely smoked the next day and just faded every single day since,” losing roughly 10% a day on obscene volume. “The fact that they kind of trapped so many longs on this stock is something that I don’t think I’ve seen for a very long time.”
Reading the OTC Tape
One thing Jack does that most NASDAQ traders never learn is read the OTC tape, and he says it’s a genuinely different skill. “With OTCs, it’s different market making. It’s not electric. The market makers have to manually put in your order, so you can see the turns a lot more clear.”
He walked through a $45,000 trade from that week to show it. The stock was down from $7 to $0.10 with almost no bounces, which to him meant the institutions were long gone and it was “really just left with like OTC idiots” who’d buy it back up thinking it’s going to a dollar. It held 10 to 12 cents for a couple of days, so he started small into the close, added as it broke over $12, and trailed his stop up as each push confirmed. The tells were on the tape: at the $18.75 top, “you saw a market maker add onto the offer, and another market maker add onto the offer, and then you see the bid kind of start to chip off, that’s like the start of a turn.” When the bid stays firm on a dip, it’s about to turn back up.
The Year Breakouts Stopped Working
2022 was a different animal, and Jack didn’t fight it. His only big-size months came from the oil run in March on names like IMPP and HUSA (his best month of the year by far), and the rest was just trying not to blow up on the China liquidation pumps, where it was “either like a huge win or a huge loss.”
The reason he stopped trading breakouts entirely is worth sitting with. “We’re in a bear market. Any breakout that attempts is going to stuff.” His example was Tesla setting up a clean breakout over 300 on a CPI day, breaking out, then rolling straight from 300 to 100. In that environment the edge flips: “On a breakdown, that’s where you want to buy because it’s gonna get saved… in the bear market, you want to short the breakouts.” Knowing how to adapt to a bear market instead of forcing a strategy that only works in a bull is most of what kept him in the game that year.
His confidence came back when CLSM ran from ten cents to a dollar in December. As he put it, “that’s the stock that got my Tingley senses started up again.” Knowing January and February are usually the hottest months for penny stocks, he was willing to give the long side a chance again.
Where He Parks the Money
Alex pushed him on the question most traders avoid: what do you actually do with it once you’ve made it? Jack’s answer is the opposite of the all-in-the-account ego play.
Today, more than half his net worth sits in a savings account earning four percent (“that’s how I sleep at night”). He trades with only about twenty percent of his money, spread across three brokerages. He’s got 10 to 15 percent in two-, five-, and ten-year bonds paying him every quarter, a small slice in stocks he believes in like Google, a couple of Datejusts and a GMT bought at retail and up about 27 percent on Chrono24, and he’s started flipping distressed real estate with a friend’s company.
Alex’s point landed hard: if you’d been trading a million-dollar account in 2021 and kept it all in the market, “that shit is probably 50k right now.” Pulling half out into savings, bonds, and hard assets is what saves you from catastrophe. Jack lived the lesson the hard way. His most profitable stretch ever, December 2020 through February 2021, made him about $5 million, and he says 2021 was “probably one of the worst years of my life. I had all this money. I didn’t know what to do with it. I thought there would be a golden rainbow at the end.”
The Part Nobody Warns You About
The most honest stretch of the whole conversation had nothing to do with charts. Jack was open about the burnout that came with all of it.
From 2019 through 2021 he “put so much pressure on myself to do well” that it turned into habitual burnout: zero energy, lost friends, a girlfriend and parents who were fed up with the bad energy he carried home. “I was so obsessed with trading and so stressed out all the time that I put that bad energy onto them.” He didn’t laugh at all for three years. Protecting your mental capital turned out to be just as much a part of the job as protecting his trading account, and it’s the thing he’d warn a younger trader about first.
What changed it was deliberate. He does meditation with a coach now, a yoga flow, a walk every day, fishing once a week.
