Hello traders!
I hope you enjoyed the brief introduction to Breakout’s free trading course. Below you can access the course in its entirety (with a nice little bonus)
We created this course to help you build a solid foundation for trading and to provide an overview of some of the most important trading principles.
No trading course is complete, as the markets are always evolving. However, the basics never stop being important. This course will teach you good habits that will be relevant for your entire trading career.
It is our hope that whether you’re entirely new to trading or someone experienced looking to refresh your knowledge, this course will help you improve your trading. Each module comes with a full video as well as a Mayne’s Notes addendum.
Mayne’s Notes are additional insights to add even more value to the module and offer some practical guidance on how to implement what you’re learning.
Watching a video is one thing, but taking a real trade and having risk on the line is another beast entirely.
My only advice at this point is to be patient with yourself, strap in for the long haul, and create reasonable expectations. There’s no shortcut to screen time, but this course is designed to accelerate the process, point you in the right direction, and ultimately help you become a trader and get funded at Breakout.
Enjoy!
Mayne’s Notes:
I hope you enjoyed the risk management video.
We covered the importance of good risk management, calculating your position size, risk-to-reward, invalidations, and more.
The topic of risk management is vast, and there’s only so much that I could squeeze into a single, digestible video. But I have one crucially important tip that can make a huge difference in your trading immediately.
Don’t force yourself to use an exceedingly tight stop loss – give your trade idea some room to breathe.
One of the most common mistakes traders make is placing their stop 1 point/tick/pip below the area they’re trading. Usually this is done to maximise the risk-to-reward or put on a bigger position size (as discussed in the video – tighter stop = bigger position).
However, in reality, this doesn’t really increase your risk-to-reward.
Instead, it just kills the likelihood that your trade will be successful.
Go through your charts and see how often levels are respected to the precise tick.
It’s quite rare.
Instead, especially with big levels and sharp moves accompanied by tons of liquidations (i.e. the imbalanced moves you want to be trading), the market will often wick through a level, even if it ultimately ends up respecting it.
So what happens if you place your stop immediately below the level you’re trading?
You get stopped out, and then the market reverses.
You were right, but you didn’t make any money.
The worst of both worlds.
By using an artificially tight stop, you sacrificed the entire trade idea for a tiny bit of extra R:R or marginally more size. Now that’s a bad trade.
As you become more experienced, you can drill down to the lower time frames and gradually use a tighter invalidation based on low time frame structure. However, your starting point for your invalidation should always allow some room for wicks – especially if you’re trading high time frame levels.
Look back at your trading journal: how many times have you been directionally correct but got stopped out before the move materialized? The problem isn’t in your timing, trade selection, or any of that difficult stuff.
It’s often a simple matter of trying to be too precise for no good reason, and worse, doing so at the expense of your trade idea. Leave the ego at the door – having an extremely tight, tick-perfect stop loss is for Instagram traders and hindsight charlatans.
Give your trade ideas some room to wick and breathe. Your results will almost certainly improve.
– Mayne
Mayne’s Notes:
I hope you all enjoyed the price action video.
As someone who went deep down the ICT rabbit hole, I have some very important advice for you. Don’t get too tied up in the precise terminology for everything. Don’t feel the need to annotate every single part of your chart and have an ‘explanation’ for every single move.
Most of the time, the market is noisy.
Your job as a trader is to isolate the signal and execute. It doesn’t really matter whether something is an order block, fair value gap, support level, demand zone, PD array, or exactly which high/low to use for a structure break, and so on. If you major in the minors, you will get analysis paralysis and never be able to execute a trade.
Let’s be real for a moment: you’re drawing lines on charts – it’s not science.
There’s no single ‘right’ way of marking up a chart. People telling you that are usually trying to sell you a trading course and bait you in with some magic secret sauce (hint: it doesn’t exist).
If you look through the charts shared by experienced traders on social media, more often than not their levels will overlap and they keep it simple and clean.
Simple and clean also means actionable.
Start with high time frame charts, find the clearest levels (those that would stand out or have some importance in virtually any trading system), and focus on mastering just one setup.
.Focus on clarity and something that’s identifiable and actionable.
Eventually, you can expand your range of setups, bring in lower time frames, have several areas across different time frames marked out at the same time, and all that fancy stuff.
But complexity is earned, not assumed.
Ignore the jargon, ignore the full-time chartists and annotators, and laser focus on 1 setup on 1 time frame to build a solid foundation.
Keep it simple, stupid.
– Mayne
Mayne’s Notes:
I hope you enjoyed the trade execution video.
To be blunt: most of your time should be spent improving and refining your trade execution and trade management.
Most traders do the opposite.
They’ll spend all of their time making their charts look pretty and deciding exactly which level to draw and how to label it. When the market actually reaches their level – especially if it’s on a fast move – they end up acting like a deer in the headlights and their pretty-looking ‘plan’ collapses into inaction.
Anyone can draw levels.
Trading them is the hard part, and also the part that is responsible for your PnL.
You get paid for executing and managing trades, not for drawing on charts. Asking yourself 4 basic questions can cut through a lot of the noise:
Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.
This is another case where screen time is irreplaceable. Drawing nice charts and watching price ‘react’ to your levels can lure you into a false sense of security, especially if you’re doing some hindsight backtesting exercise.
Nothing other than experience can prepare you for the feeling of actually taking risk and immediately watching your PnL fluctuate. All your psychological demons – greed, impatience, overthinking, and the rest of the laundry list – will immediately bubble to the surface.
Moving to break even, averaging down a losing trade, opening/closing a position at more or less the same entry, sizing up/down for no reason, moving your invalidation/target, and about 100 other mistakes you didn’t think were possible will likely happen to you.
The bad news is that these traps are almost entirely unavoidable at first.
The good news is that if you journal well and know that they’re coming, you’re more likely to fix them quicker.
The market is the best teacher. In short, forget the chart fluff, and focus on the meat and potatoes of trading (execution, management).
– Mayne
Mayne’s Notes:
I hope you enjoyed the trading psychology video.
There’s one very important thing to understand about all the psychological pitfalls you’ll face as a trader.
They never go away.
It’s not like I don’t feel FOMO, greed, euphoria, loss aversion, and all the things discussed in the video. I do, and it still costs me money from time to time.
The difference is that through experience, those urges and impulses become more muted. They become easier to ignore.
Once you get burned enough times, you’ll be extremely reluctant to touch the stove. The “I’ve been here before” déjà vu feeling that stops you from doing stupid stuff has to be earned via experience.
You can accelerate this process in at least two ways.
First, keep a trading journal.
Your journal should have a section where you can honestly reflect on your emotions during the lifespan of the trade. You can directly track how your feelings correlate with your decision-making and your performance. Psychological barriers are most powerful when they are new. Your 50th burst of FOMO won’t feel anywhere near as powerful as the first time you feel real FOMO – the effect is diluted over time. Keeping a journal can serve as an objective reminder that you’ve been here before, it’s nothing new, and the world isn’t going to be reshaped completely by the outcome of a single trade or move.
Second, you need to have an actual edge and a trading system that works.
Sounds obvious, but a lot of traders fall into this trap of grinding trading psychology courses without developing their trading system in the first place. It’s a lot easier to be mentally disciplined when you actually have an edge, know what you’re looking for, and can have a rationally justified belief that what you’re doing is statistically profitable. Trading psychology on its own won’t get you anywhere – it’s a means to an end, and that end is being able to trust your trading system.
In short, you should set reasonable expectations for your trading psychology and be aware that the demon on your shoulder never fully goes away. But you can make him a lot quieter if you know what’s coming, put in the screen time, and have a system that you can trust.
– Mayne
Mayne’s Notes:
I hope you enjoyed the trading styles video.
Now that you have a broad understanding of a few of the different trading styles, you can gradually begin to experiment with them and see what works best for you, your risk appetite, your personality, lifestyle, and so on.
That said, if you’re a newer trader, I generally recommend that you trade a bit more frequently.
As per the previous module, the market is the best teacher. You won’t progress as quickly if you show up to a couple of lessons per month.
The best way to learn about the market (and yourself) is to be in the market.
That doesn’t mean you need to start scalping with maximum risk for 23 hours per day, but you should be actively trading – even if it’s with very small risk. Paper trading, charting, backtesting, and ‘analysing’ the market are not replacements for actual trading.
There’s something qualitatively different about putting on some risk – even if it’s a small amount – and seeing how you behave, what observations you make, patterns that come to light, how the market ‘feels’, and so on.
Think of these small trades as feedback sessions from the market, or a data-gathering exercise.
You’ll learn a lot more with a lot more data and generally progress more quickly.
The process of making mistakes, experiencing emotional ups and downs, refining setups, journaling, and identifying your strengths and weaknesses is accelerated by trading more frequently.
You’ll improve faster.
In short, put the hours in, and even a small amount of risk is much better tuition than staring at charts all day without actually being in the market.
– Mayne
I hope you liked the course and found some value. I hope it helps you crush your next evaluation or reach. payout on your funded account.
Trading is a journey of continuous learning, refinement, and self-improvement. With this course, we’ve laid the foundation to help you build strong trading habits, develop a deeper understanding of the markets, and navigate the psychological and technical challenges that come with trading.
At Breakout, we’re committed to bringing you even more insights, education, and resources to support your growth. Trading is an ever-evolving skill, and we’re here to help you adapt, refine, and ultimately succeed.
Stay tuned for more Mayne’s Notes, new course modules, and additional tools to elevate your trading. Keep learning, keep refining, and most importantly—keep executing.