The Wheel System: My Interview on Chris Drysdale’s Channel

Chris Drysdale interviewed me for his YouTube channel, and it went out across the whole Drysdale Trading Group™ community. That’s a big community, and it was an honor. We talked about what I call the wheel system, why I trade Globex instead of the New York open, the tools on my desk, the hardest stretch of my Inner Circle, and journaling. Here’s the video, and the parts people ask me about most.

The wheel system

Prop firms were new to me before the Inner Circle. I’d traded cash for years and taken some serious hits doing it. Then my eyes opened: I can leverage somebody else’s money.

Most firms let you copy-trade up to 20 accounts. They pay out in tiers, then the account is exhausted and goes away. So I always have something churning: when one account drops off, another comes online to take its place. The goal is a wheel of 20 accounts, each at a different point in the payout schedule, turning all the time. I run it mostly on Apex, Tradeify and Top One. Apex is my go-to.

• Size. The 50K account is the sweet spot. The first payouts on a 50K are small enough that a few hundred dollars a trade, five times, gets you there. People think they need a monster day. They don’t.
• The eval is not the funded account. Firms make evaluations easy to pass on purpose. A funded account has more rules, and if you trade it like the eval that got you there, you’ll blow it. Follow the firm’s rules. They pay when you do. Here’s what one of my payout screens has to look like.
• Copy trading takes a higher risk tolerance. You build it like a muscle. If one mini sends your anxiety through the roof, copy trading isn’t for you yet.
• The first trade of the day goes on an eval. I can usually tell from it whether the market’s talking to me. If it is, I flip to the funded accounts. If I struggle, I stay on the eval until I feel good, and some days that doesn’t happen.
• Smaller wheels now. These days I run two or three accounts per wheel and trade one wheel at a time, as if it were one account. On a choppy day I pull one account out and trade just that spoke. More from a live Q&A.
• Someone has to run the wheel. Twenty accounts, payouts and new evals coming online is real admin. My wife manages it while I trade. Support is stupid important.

Globex, not the New York open

Almost all of my trading lately has been the Globex session: from the 6:00 p.m. ET open (23:00 UTC in US winter), through the Tokyo open, and an hour or two after that. Then I’m done. I’m an evaluator by day and a trader by night.

Everyone told me Globex is slow. It isn’t. And I have an advantage: my charts are on through the day session, so by the time Globex opens I already know what happened. I rarely trade the day session, now and then an afternoon trade before the close. The rest of my routine is on How I Trade.

Five to ten precision trades

I average five to ten trades a day. I’m not taking thirty or forty. I feel like a sniper: I wait for price to hit the level I’m watching, and when it does, I go.

• Core setups only. My journal says fades and Price Discovery Continuations are my best trades. More on the four setups.
• ES and NQ almost exclusively, with oil or gold when something interesting shows up.
• Minis only, one or two. I traded micros successfully, but I kept creeping up to six, eight, ten of them, so I switched to one or two minis and never went back.
• I scalp one bar, and only when TradingView, Bookmap and TickStrike all say the next bar is coming.

My desk

The VWAP Wave System™ sits on a 49-inch monitor in TradingView. Bookmap is on another 49-inch, ES and NQ, always. Higher-timeframe charts on the side, the news feeds, and a vertical monitor with three Tradovate DOMs. Bookmap and TickStrike are my friends. I can’t trade without them anymore.

I’ve used Bookmap for years, and now I read my delta on it: the five-minute and the session delta side by side. On the heatmap I only want to see big orders, so the small ones don’t show at all. Time and again, price gravitates to those big resting orders, six to eight times out of ten.

If you’re new: Bookmap can wait. Learn the core setups in TradingView first. It’s a very technical tool, and without a foundation it will pull you away from the setups.

The hardest part of the Inner Circle

Halfway through my Inner Circle, a war broke out. I’m a veteran, and it brought back memories and threw me for a loop I wasn’t expecting. I told Chris I was going to be his top student and now I felt like I was failing, because I couldn’t get past myself. He talked me through it.

What pulled me out was going back to the drills and to the mental edge conditioning in his program. I’d practiced meditation for years, but I wasn’t doing it consistently. Your brain is a muscle. You don’t get calm under pressure from a couple of breathing exercises before you trade. You get it from practice every day, and it changes your whole life, not just your trading. If you can’t get past your inner beast, no system will work. More in Success Psychology.

You can’t manage what you don’t measure

I’m a data analyst by trade, and I keep TradeZella open all day because it tells me everything about my trading. If you’re not journaling, you don’t know what you’re doing wrong, and you’ll never fix it.

I struggled with journaling at the start of the Inner Circle too. The fix was simple: I don’t take the next trade until the last one is journaled. Once you’re fast, it takes about a minute. I think a lot of people don’t journal because it’s a mirror. More on how I grade every trade.

And the drills. I once asked Chris: if I worked at a prop firm and you were my boss, how many hours would you have me doing this? He gave me more work. I took it to heart and pounded those drills. If you’re struggling, go back to basics and drill.

What’s next

Freedom. Trading already replaced my wife’s income. Mine is next. And I’m still in the community. If you have questions, I’m Groot.