From Small Wins to Big Leaps: The Power of Agenda Trading

Mastering the Art of Spotting Opportunities and Managing Risk for Growth and Success

It was a Monday morning 6 years ago, I got to the desk, eager to trade again and grow richer. I got started and shorted a company, I was proud as I caught the top and locked in a 5 percent win within 30 minutes. Little did I know the company would be 40 percent lower at the end of the day and I had missed a major opportunity to make a leap forward in my account.

This experience repeated over and over again. I was happy at first, blinded by the money and the ease of a quick profitable trade.

What was the result?

I was constantly locking in small winners, taking losers on 40% of my other positions, and getting wiped back to my starting point through outlier losses after months of work. Naturally, fees like commissions and locating fees were to be paid on top.

The truth is that small losses alone will not cut it!

It takes a combination of small losses, fat tail (black swan) risk management as well as maximizing opportunities to not only grind to new highs but make leaps while avoiding the risk of blowing up.

Missing out on predictable profits equals losing money to me.

How can I change my trading to achieve both the knowledge and conviction to take advantage of opportunities and the market rather than being a slave to stagnation?

Agenda trading is the answer.

95% of the action is random. The positive skew comes from finding the instances where a move is orchestrated for a specific reason. In this Blog we will focus on understanding what agenda trading is, how to get proficient in spotting these opportunities, and get closer to the goal of growth. We will focus on using the enemy/action creator to make us stronger.

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"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles."

-Sun Tzu

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Understanding opportunity

We will keep the obvious outlier opportunities aside and focus on a simple and stable truth.

Opportunities arise when the bigger players need liquidity or lack it. You have 2 distinct sides, a buying event, and a selling event. Both have random instances but the point is that some situations have drastic odds tilts. While most days show 50% odds these instances present up to 75%+ odds.

Our job as traders, more than even executing is to find these tilted opportunities. It is repetition and maximizing from there that creates the skew and jumps to bring us from 0 to the much coveted 7 figures +.

These specific days are often what I call ‘Agenda days’.

Spotting and timing opportunity

Now that we know that opportunity comes from Agenda days, how can we time these and what do they look like?

Asking the right questions is central to acquiring this understanding. If the biggest players are creating what I perceive to be an edge, why today/right now, and what do they need?

We need to focus on elements and opportunities that we can research, fact-check, study, and track… The rest is random and hindsight will be leading us to make erroneous decisions.

The easiest way to spot an opportunity is when the agenda creator either needs liquidity to enter/exit a position or they see an opportunity to take advantage of smaller, dumber, and emotional players to make money.

The start of the rainbow

I started this agenda journey by focusing, which is what most know me for, with small caps, because I could answer the question easiest as well as check the boxes for the above.

Smaller caps need capital to function. Most are not profitable and IPOed to get capital in the first place to continue to survive. SEC filings, mostly through the 10Q and 10K (the quarterly and annual filings) allow us to know how much cash a company retains.

The cash flow statements within these, allow us to know how much cash they are using each month. It allows us to pinpoint fairly accurately the moment at which a company will run out of money.

When the money runs out, the easiest way to resolve it is to raise capital through a secondary offering.

The Holy Trinity is achieved when you can find an opportunity that combines:

• An immediate need for capital/cash

• The possibility to raise (Find out what limits companies to raise)

• The creation of liquidity (Find out what creates interest by random people, what creates volume)

Our job as traders is to get as close to the truth (the agenda) as possible, we will not be right 100% of the time, but if we manage to get closer and closer to the logical truth, it allows us to understand why something might be moving and what the likely outcome is. The more you work it the more you will understand nuances, the more data you will have on it and the better you will become as a trader.

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Take advantage of my partnership with my only broker CenterPoint and the deal we worked on for the past months

The importance of Agenda

Understanding the truth and opportunities allows us to better comprehend the odds we have. It allows us to better know when we are wrong and it creates conviction through comparable instances to look back on.

Most of all it allows us to minimize risks of random moves and being caught in the 50/50 odds type of days that constitute 99 percent of the daily action across the stock market.

We get much more data points than ‘I was wrong because it went against me‘. Additionally, the understanding of events allows us to grade an opportunity with far higher accuracy.

The combination of structural data (technical setup) as well as the agenda is what allowed me to pyramid into the best opportunities throughout the years and allows me to reach a 100,000%+ year while scaling up one of my accounts. It is the number one reason I made it to 7 figures in the first place.

Plain trading or quant trading, if you would prefer, can make you rich, but the addition of agenda allows us to make the leaps that erase all slip-ups, fees, and so on.

One maximized agenda-based A+ setup can make your whole year, decade, and life, which you saw me post some of in the past on twitter.

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The golden pot(s?)

We only attacked one specific instance of agenda which targeted one specific asset class and thus player type. I want you to leave today with the understanding that there are countless other agenda playbooks out there to take advantage of.

The quest for agendas is my greatest day-to-day pleasure as it combines networking, introspection, structural data work, reading and overall researching.

The start of each journey is the same and starts with a central question:

When do the biggest players within the space I am currently looking at need liquidity to enter or exit a position OR do the biggest players have a way to play against the smaller, dumber and emotional players to make money?

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I hope I could help you reach a better understanding of what constitutes an integral part of my thinking process and view of the markets. If you enjoyed the reading all I ask for is for you to spread the knowledge and share the blog to help me grow this sub stack.

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