The Blueprint Stock Trading Course: Part 1 of 12

Trading feels overwhelming when it is just a pile of patterns, indicators, and opinions.

My Blueprint Stock Trading Course is built to solve that by teaching you what I know about swing trading, then drilling it with deliberate practice until it becomes a skill.

This first part of the course walks through the overall structure, the trader’s journey, the price cycle, and three core swing setups you will see again and again: trigger bars, shakeout demand tails, and gap down reversals.

Here is the full training if you want to watch it alongside this guide:

Below is a structured breakdown of what the video teaches, written so you can revisit the ideas, study charts, and start building your own process.

The Course In One Sentence: ‘How I Would Teach My Daughter To Trade?’

The whole Blueprint course is built around a simple question:

If I was to teach my daughter to trade, how would I do it from A to Z?

That leads to a very specific structure. Instead of random tips, the course is organized around the four components of every trade:

Identify How do you find a high‑quality setup in the first place?
Control How do you size the position and place the stop so the risk is asymmetric, where you are risking little to make a lot?
Mitigate How do you reduce risk after entry, or “free roll” the trade so you are playing with house money as soon as it makes sense?
Optimize How do you sell in a planned way to maximize both the monetary gain and the efficiency of that gain in time?

The Blueprint course moves through these from A to Z.

Each week covers one topic in depth. If a concept needs longer, it gets more time. If some part feels thin by the end, it gets revisited.

How The Live Coaching Works

Every Blueprint session follows the same rhythm:

First half, structured teaching Concepts like trigger bars, shakeout demand tails, gap down reversals, opening range breakouts, buy stop limit orders, position sizing, and portfolio construction.
Second half, deliberate practice Bar‑by‑bar chart work on that exact topic. You are not just watching setups, you are asked to find them, annotate them, and think through decisions.

If you want to do this live with me and my trading community, then you can join my trading membership.

The Trader’s Journey: Systems Over Goals

Trading is not a straight line. You collect ideas from books, YouTube, other traders, and you slowly build something that fits you.

Two quotes frame this journey in the course.

First, Bruce Lee:

“Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is essentially your own.”

You will learn my systems for identify, control, mitigate, optimize.
Over time you will tweak pieces, add your own filters, and remove things that do not suit your personality. That is encouraged.

Second, James Clear from Atomic Habits:

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

Want to be consistent? You will not get there by “wanting it more”. You get there by building systems and routines that make good decisions far more likely.

By the end of the course you should be able to answer, in writing, without hesitation:

How do you identify a high‑quality setup? Which patterns, which phases of the price cycle, which filters?
How do you control risk on every trade? How do you decide stop distance and position size relative to the stock’s 20‑day Average Daily Range (ADR)?
How do you mitigate risk after entry? What are your specific tactics for reducing exposure once price moves in your favor?
What are your selling rules and guidelines? How do you manage winners so you are not giving back huge chunks of profit or exiting far too early?

All of that lives inside your “system”.

Random Trading vs Systems‑Based Trading

Here is a simple comparison taken straight from how the course talks about process.

Aspect	Random Trading	Systems‑Based Trading
Entry decisions	Impulse, social media, news, gut feel	Predefined setups in specific phases of the price cycle
Risk	Changes trade to trade, often unclear	Fixed rules for stop placement and position size
Management	Emotional, reaction to P&L	Planned mitigation and trailing rules
Selling	Hope, fear, “it feels toppy”	Written guidelines tied to moving averages and price action
Review & learning	Rare, mostly story‑based	Trade log, stats, chart review, feedback

Successful trading is framed very simply in the course:

Successful trading is a process. A process is made of systems and routines. Systems and routines are skill sets. Skill sets are trainable through deliberate practice.

Building Your Trader Identity

The course is not just “here are some setups”. A big part of it is who you are becoming while you trade.

Again, James Clear provides the frame:

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”

Applied to trading:

Every entry is a vote for the type of trader you are.
Every stop you respect or ignore is a vote.
Every way you manage a winner or a loser is a vote.

You are constantly voting for one of two identities:

The trader who follows a clear plan for identify, control, mitigate, optimize.
Or the trader who trades on feeling, FOMO, and random decisions.

No single trade changes everything. But as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your identity.

To become a trader, you must start thinking like one.

That means:

No randomness in entries. You know why every trade is on.
No randomness in risk. You know the stop, the size, and the maximum loss before entry.
No randomness in exits. You know what has to happen for you to scale out or get flat.

The Blueprint course keeps pulling you back to that identity level. Not “did you win this one”, but “was that a vote for the trader you want to be?”

Knowledge vs Skill: Why Watching Is Not Enough

Another Bruce Lee quote sits at the heart of this course:

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

That is exactly how the Blueprint treats trading.

Knowledge vs Skill

You can separate the two clearly.

Knowledge You gain this from YouTube videos, books, seminars, courses, watching other traders. The Blueprint course increases your knowledge in four areas: identify, control, mitigate, optimize.
Skill You gain this only by doing the work yourself. No one can give it to you. Skill grows through focused, repeated, feedback‑driven practice.

The course makes this point with two simple analogies:

You could watch 40 hours of the Masters and Tiger Woods. Your knowledge of golf tactics might go up, but your handicap will not drop just from watching.
You could read 100 books on swimming. Until you get in the pool and practice, your swimming ability will not change.

Trading is the same. You cannot learn to trade by only consuming content.

What Deliberate Practice Looks Like In Trading

The second half of every live session is built around deliberate practice. That includes:

Becoming the player, not just the watcher You do not just see a setup after the fact, you are asked to find it bar by bar as if the right edge of the chart is live.
Creating feedback loops
- Study historical setups and annotate charts.
- Log trades and decisions, not just P&L.
- Review trades with myself and other traders on live calls.
Practicing specific skills For example, one session might focus only on identifying Phase 1 to Phase 2 transitions. Another might focus only on spotting shakeout demand tails at key moving averages.

To help with this, there is a shared deliberate practice and return simulation sheet you can copy and use to track trades and simulate how different approaches would have performed.

The Blueprint gives you knowledge. You build the skill.

The Chart Setup Used in the Course

You will see the same chart layout used again and again so that you can train your pattern recognition.

Key elements on my charts:

Price on candlesticks
Moving averages
- 10‑day EMA (black)
- 21‑day EMA (blue)
- 50‑day simple moving average (purple)
- 100‑day simple moving average (grey, optional reference)
- 200‑day simple moving average (red)
30‑bar average volume A black line running through the volume pane, used to judge relative volume very quickly.
Relative strength (RS) line vs the index With blue dots marking new 52‑week highs in relative strength.

You can get my free RS Line indicator for TradingView and use it on your own charts. If you are setting up TradingView for the first time, there is also a TradingView referral link.

The idea is simple. Use the same visual language every time so you can spot the footprints of institutions without fighting your charting tools.

The Price Cycle: The Foundation Of Every Trade

Before any setup, the course starts with where you are in the price cycle. This underpins everything else.

I use a four‑phase model:

Phase 1: Accumulation Sideways bases where large operators quietly build positions.
Phase 2: Uptrend Strong, orderly advances with higher highs and higher lows.
Phase 3: Distribution top The character changes. Volume and price start to show selling.
Phase 4: Downtrend Lower lows, lower highs, and aggressive selling.

You are not trying to be good in every phase. You are focusing the process on a very specific zone:

Get involved as a stock moves from Phase 1 to Phase 2.
Ride Phase 2 uptrends using clear rules.
Exit before or as Phase 3 starts, and avoid Phase 4 completely.

How To Study The Price Cycle

A big part of the course is you doing this yourself.

I suggest:

Pull up very long‑term charts of major indexes, like the Dow Jones or the Nasdaq, on monthly or yearly charts.
Pull up leaders from different decades and sectors, such as Nvidia, Tesla, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Crocs, Zoom, Peloton, NIO, Coca‑Cola, and group ETFs like semiconductors, oil and gas, uranium, or solar.

Then ask yourself:

What are the common traits when a stock is:
- Basing in an uptrend
- In a strong uptrend
- Topping
- In a downtrend
Before a stock breaks out of a continuation base, what tends to happen?
Around the lows of bases, what tends to happen?
Before major downtrends, what do you see in price and volume?

Over time you start to build mental representations. For example:

In Phase 2 You often see price respect certain moving averages, like the 10‑week or 21‑day, with strong up bars on high volume. That is what I call bullish synchronicity, where wide green candles line up with big volume spikes.
In Phase 3 and 4 You start to see repeated wide red bars on high volume, slicing through moving averages. I call that bearish synchronicity. On weekly charts of stocks like Coca‑Cola or Crocs, you can see entire downtrends made of these heavy red weeks.

You begin to link this to institutional behavior.

In Phase 1 and 2, they are accumulating and supporting price.
In Phase 3 and 4, they are distributing and no longer supporting price.

Rotation And Following The Money

The price cycle does not move in sync for every group.

You might see:

Growth stocks in Phase 3 tops while
Oil and gas or commodity stocks are transitioning from Phase 1 to Phase 2.

Money does not disappear. It flows.

Part of your job is to scan:

The indexes
The leading groups
The best stocks within those groups

Then ask: where in the price cycle are they, and where is the money flowing?

Key Questions To Ask On Every Chart

When you pull up a chart, train yourself to ask:

What do I see? Trend, base, volatility, volume, relative strength.
When would I want to own this stock? Usually where Phase 1 is turning into Phase 2, or in clean continuation bases within Phase 2.
How would I control risk here? Where is a logical stop relative to the structure and the 20‑day ADR?
How would I mitigate risk if it moves in my favor? Where could I move the stop, or trim, without being random?
How would I exit to optimize profits? Which moving average or price behavior would tell me the trend is over?

You are not just staring at candles. You are having a conversation with the chart.

Large Operators, Liquidity & Cause And Effect

The course leans heavily on Wyckoff’s idea of a “composite operator”, a kind of stand‑in for the big funds, mutual funds, pension funds, and sovereign wealth funds.

They have two main needs:

Liquidity They cannot buy or sell huge size in one day without moving the market.
Perceived value They need to feel they are getting a good deal on entry or exit.

Because of this:

Accumulation and distribution take time. They build or unload positions over weeks, months, sometimes years.
Price builds big bases before large advances, and big tops before large declines.

This ties into Richard Wyckoff’s law of cause and effect:

Big causes (multi‑week or multi‑year bases or tops) often lead to big effects (large moves up or down).

Warren Buffett’s line captures how these operators behave:

“Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.”

Around Phase 3 tops, others are greedy, and the big players turn fearful and start distributing.
Around deep Phase 4 lows, others are fearful, and the big players turn greedy and start accumulating again.

Your setups sit on top of this deeper structure.

Swing Trading Setup 1: Trigger Bars

The first core setup in the Blueprint course is the trigger bar.

What Is A Trigger Bar?

A trigger bar is:

A tight daily candlestick, often an inside bar, in the context of:
- A strong uptrend, or
- A clean continuation base (flag, pennant, wedge, VCP, cup‑with‑handle, Darvas box).
It sits near one or more key moving averages, most often:
- 21‑day EMA
- 50‑day SMA (sometimes also the 10‑day EMA, especially in very fast leaders)
It often has:
- One of the tightest ranges in weeks
- Lower volume than the 30‑bar average, sometimes the lowest volume in the whole base

In many good cases, the range of the bar from high to low is about half to two‑thirds of the stock’s 20‑day ADR percentage. That makes the initial risk small relative to how much the stock can move on an average day.

Trigger bars are rarely at the obvious breakout point of the base. You usually find them just before that, at higher lows within the pattern.

Why Trigger Bars Matter

When you see:

A liquid, leading stock
In a clear Phase 2 uptrend or a Phase 1 base starting to turn up
Building a continuation pattern
Then printing a very tight bar on low volume right on a key moving average

it often means:

Supply has dried up.
Strong hands have taken control.
The stock is ready to move if fresh demand comes in.

On a lower time frame, like the 1‑hour chart, you will often see:

The 10, 21, and 50‑period moving averages converging tightly.
The first 1‑hour bar showing strong buying.
Then several hours of tight consolidation near the top of the day’s range, on declining volume.

All of that adds up to a simple idea: there is not much stock for sale at that level.

Using Trigger Bars In Practice

The course uses a few standard tactics around trigger bars:

Entry Buy stop limit just above the high of the trigger bar, or an opening range breakout through that high.
Stop Under the low of the trigger bar, often also under a key moving average.
Risk filter Compare the stop distance to the stock’s 20‑day ADR. Ideally, risk is less than the ADR, often about half to two‑thirds of it.

Trigger bars appear on:

Historic Dow charts from the early 1900s,
Leaders from the 1950s to today like Bethlehem Steel, E. L. Bruce, HP, Netflix, Oracle, AMD,

and everywhere in between. The pattern is timeless because supply and demand are timeless.

Swing Trading Setup 2: Shakeout Demand Tails

The second setup is the shakeout demand tail.

These are the long lower wicks you see on hammers, dragonfly dojis, and similar candlesticks.

What Is A Shakeout Demand Tail?

Technically, shakeout demand tails are variations of:

Hammer candlesticks
Dragonfly dojis
Tweezer‑style lines with long lower shadows

Thomas Bulkowski tested millions of candlestick patterns and found that these types often have reversal rates above 50 percent, sometimes into the mid 60s, in both bull and bear markets.

In Blueprint language, they are candles where:

Price pushes down strongly intraday
Undercuts prior lows in the base or a moving average
Then reverses and closes back up in the upper part of the range

The key again is where they form.

Very often around the 21‑day EMA in leading stocks
Sometimes around the 50‑day SMA
Often undercutting:
- The lows of the prior 1 to 3 weeks
- Or the low of a recent earnings gap

Psychology Of A Shakeout

Shakeout demand tails show a very specific story:

Weak hands, often retail traders or recent breakout buyers, get stopped out.
There is a burst of supply as those stops trigger and fearful holders sell.
Larger operators step in at those lower prices and buy that supply, pushing price back up.

When volume on the shakeout tail is not huge, and is even below the 30‑bar average, it tells you:

There was not that much true selling.
A lot of the move was stop‑driven rather than institutions dumping stock.

Combine that with:

A strong longer term uptrend,
Relative strength near 52‑week highs, and
A base forming in Phase 1 or Phase 2,

and a shakeout tail becomes a powerful sign of accumulation.

Intraday View: Stop Hunts In Action

The Disney example from the course shows this clearly.

On the daily chart:

You see a gap up on earnings and a base forming.
Then a large shakeout demand tail that undercuts:
- The 21‑day EMA
- The low of the earnings gap
- Several weeks of prior lows

On the 1‑hour chart of that same day:

The first 1‑hour bar is a huge red candle on high volume. It looks terrible.
That bar is exactly where a huge number of traders had their stops placed just under the earnings gap low.
Once those stops are filled, the selling pressure dries up.
Price then grinds back up, and the daily candle finishes as a shakeout demand tail.

By the close, the story is no longer “this looks awful”. It is “institutions just shook out a lot of weak holders and reclaimed the level”.

That is the basian mindset the course pushes. You keep updating your view as fresh data prints.

Shakeouts Around V‑Shaped Breakouts

The Uber example shows another side:

A V‑shaped breakout through a base high on low volume is often retail‑driven.
Later, the stock pulls back to a deeper level, sometimes near the 21 or 50‑day.
A shakeout tail then undercuts the obvious stop level, knocking out late breakout buyers.
Institutions support price lower down, not at the emotional breakout point.

That is why the Blueprint approach is very wary of chasing obvious V‑shaped breakouts. The better entries tend to come on the controlled shakeouts that follow.

Risk On Shakeout Tails

Because shakeout tails are wider bars than trigger bars:

Initial stops can be larger in percentage terms.
The course suggests keeping stops:
- Preferably under the stock’s 20‑day ADR percentage,
- And within about 1.5 times the ADR if the stock is a very strong leader.

So if a stock has a 20‑day ADR of 6 percent, a 4 to 5 percent stop can still be reasonable if the rest of the context is excellent.

Swing Trading Setup 3: Gap Down Reversal Bars

The third core setup is the gap down reversal, sometimes called a gap down reversal bar or GDR.

What Is a Gap Down Reversal Bar?

On the daily chart a gap down reversal looks like this:

The stock closes at one level.
The next day it gaps down and opens significantly lower.
During the session, buyers step in and push price back up, so:
- The candle closes near the high of the day.
- Often it engulfs the prior day’s body, or more.

On Japanese candlestick lists, these show up as patterns like:

Bullish engulfing
Piercing pattern
Bullish belt hold
Meeting lines
Bullish thrusting

Bulkowski’s testing shows some of these, such as the bullish belt hold, with bull market reversal rates near or above 70 percent.

Again, the pattern matters most in the right context:

In strong uptrends or mature bases
Near key moving averages, especially the 21‑day and 50‑day
Often undercutting:
- Recent base lows
- Recent support levels that attracted stops

Psychology Of A Gap Down Reversal

On the surface, these days start ugly.

Pre‑market and on the open, the gap looks bad.
It often slices straight through the 10 and 21‑day EMAs.
Many traders bail out on the open or set tight stops that are hit right away.

But when the bar finishes as a gap down reversal, you know:

There was immediate and strong demand at the lower prices.
Buyers were aggressive enough to overpower all that early selling in the same day.
Bigger players were likely waiting there to add.

If volume on the GDR is not huge, and the prior pullback was also on light volume, it suggests:

The selling into the gap was not institutional distribution.
It was mostly shorter term traders getting shaken out.

Fakeouts And Second Chances

The AMD example from the early 1990s shows a classic pattern:

Strong uptrend, then a base.
First breakout through the base high is V‑shaped and on modest volume.
Many breakout traders buy that move and place stops just under the obvious level.
Price then gaps down through those stops, prints a gap down reversal bar, and reverses.
Later, a second breakout from a tighter base provides the cleaner entry.

Nicholas Darvas changed his rules years ago for this reason. He decided not to buy first breakouts. He waited for the second breakout after the “shakeout and reset” phase.

Gap down reversals are often that reset.

Risk On GDRs

Like shakeout tails, GDRs are usually wider candles, so you need to watch risk closely.

The course suggests comparing the stop distance to the 20‑day ADR.
Better GDRs tend to have:
- Stops less than or around the ADR,
- And ideally no more than 1.5 times the ADR.

That usually keeps risk below the 4 to 5 percent mark on leaders. If you need a much wider stop than that, it is often a sign the trade is not in a sweet spot.

Bringing It Together: From Setups To A Full Process

The three setups are not used in isolation. They plug back into the four‑part process:

Identify
- Use the price cycle to focus on Phase 1 to Phase 2 transitions and continuation bases in Phase 2.
- Within those zones, look for trigger bars, shakeout demand tails, and gap down reversals near key moving averages.
Control
- Measure stop distance against the 20‑day ADR.
- Keep risk small on each trade.
- Size positions so a stopped‑out trade does not damage your account.
Mitigate
- Once a trade moves in your favor, look for chances to:
  - Move the stop to breakeven or better, or
  - Take partial profits and free roll the rest.
Optimize
- Use the character of the stock and key moving averages like the 10, 21, and 50‑day / 10‑week to guide exits.
- Watch for Phase 3 distribution behavior, such as:
  - Repeated wide red bars on high volume
  - Breaks of key moving averages that do not recover
  - Relative strength rolling over and hitting new lows

The course also leans on the 80/20 rule:

Roughly 80 percent of your profits are likely to come from 20 percent of your trades.
Many trades will be small wins, scratch trades, or small losses.
Your job is to not mess up the big ones through poor selling, over‑trading, or abandoning your rules.

I’m honest about the pain of learning this. Giving back a 50 or 100 percent gain because you would not sell, or because you never had rules, hurts. That pain is often what finally pushes traders to write down and follow clear selling rules.

Some traders even separate accounts by purpose, for example:

One active swing trading account.
One longer term account managed on weekly charts.
One “never touch” account for family and long‑term holdings.

You can take the same idea and add what is essentially your own.

Your Next Steps

If you want to put this into practice, here is a simple path:

Spend one focused hour a day pulling up charts and asking:
- Which phase of the price cycle is this?
- Do I see trigger bars, shakeout demand tails, or gap down reversals in the right spots?
Keep Bruce Lee’s line in mind: Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is essentially your own.
Start building your own written answers to:
- How you identify setups
- How you control and mitigate risk
- How you sell

If you want structure, live feedback, and a community working through the same material, you can join my trading membership, which includes:

The full multi‑part Blueprint Trading Course including notes.
Twice‑weekly live coaching with bar‑by‑bar practice.
Daily stock plans, analysis and market reports.
An active community of traders sharing ideas and risk management.

You can also:

Try the MarketSurge discounted trial if you want to run CAN SLIM‑style screens.
Set up your charts in TradingView using the RS Line indicator and templates.

Conclusion

The first part of the Blueprint Stock Trading Course is not about hot picks. It is about giving you a repeatable way to think about markets, trades, and your own behavior.

You learned:

How every trade can be broken into identify, control, mitigate, optimize.
Why systems and identity matter more than goals and wishes.
How the price cycle and institutional behavior sit behind every chart.
How to spot and use three practical swing setups: trigger bars, shakeout demand tails, and gap down reversal bars.

All of that is only potential until you start doing deliberate practice, logging trades, and voting for the trader you want to become.

Thanks for reading. If you go study a few charts right now and try to spot which phase they are in, then you have already taken the next step.