Five Traders, One Playbook: How the Small Group Works

The Small Group Experience · Lesson 1

There are five of us. We meet every trading day on Discord, voice and video, and we are each other’s accountability partners. That’s the whole description, and it took me twenty-five years of trading alone to understand why it matters more than any indicator I’ve ever put on a chart.

Who we are

We are, literally, from all over the world. Different time zones, different currencies, different mornings. A firefighter. A police officer. Retired people who came to trading with time and patience. Corporate leaders who came to it with none of either. Nobody in the group trades for a living yet in the way we’d all like to, and nobody pretends to. What we share is the VWAP Wave System, a plan each of us has committed to, and a passion for getting this right.

None of it is a Drysdale product. Chris gave us the system and, for those of us in the Inner Circle, the standard. The group is what we built on top of that foundation, because a mentor can teach you the playbook but he can’t sit with you at 5:30 in the morning while you decide whether to take the trade.

Where the Inner Circle continues

Here’s the part I’d underline if you read nothing else. The Inner Circle teaches you a standard: the pre-market routine, the grading, the journal, the accountability checklist, the weekly review. Then the three months end and you’re alone with a chart at 5:30 in the morning, and the standard is only as strong as your willingness to hold it by yourself. Mine wasn’t strong enough. Twenty-five years of trading alone had proved that.

The small group forces us to keep doing what we learned in the Inner Circle, every day, in front of each other. The checklist gets done because four people are waiting on voice for you to say your bias. The trade gets graded before entry because someone will ask. The journal gets written because it gets read aloud. Nothing in the group is new. All of it is Inner Circle material, applied daily, with witnesses. That has made a huge difference, and I don’t think the mentorship would have stuck without it.

What a day looks like

1. Before the open. We’re on voice while the pre-market checklists get done. Levels marked, bias written, condition named out loud. Five people saying “balanced, flat VWAP, overlapping value” to each other is a surprisingly good way to find out one of you is wrong.
2. Through the session. Cameras on, mostly quiet. Someone calls a setup and grades it before entry, in front of four people who know the grading system and will ask why it’s an A. That question alone has killed more no-setup trades than any rule in my plan.
3. After the close. Journals out. Setup name, setup grade, execution grade. The execution column gets read aloud. The crosses get discussed. The ticks get acknowledged, because a clean day that made nothing is still a clean day.

Picking each other up

Everyone in the group has blown a session. Some of us have blown accounts. The difference now is that nobody does it alone, and nobody gets to spiral. When one of us hits a daily stop, the others know within minutes, and the rule is the same for all five: platform closed, camera can stay on, and you talk about it instead of trading through it. The most valuable hour the group has ever spent was one where nobody traded at all.

The other side of that is the pick-up. A bad week in a group of five is a bad week with four people who have had one, who know your setups and your leaks by name, and who will tell you that the plan didn’t fail, you did, and that tomorrow is a new session. That’s not comfort. It’s better than comfort.

Why five

Big communities are good for learning. They’re bad for accountability, because nobody notices when you go quiet. With five people, going quiet is noticed by breakfast. Everyone knows everyone’s plan, everyone’s schedule, and everyone’s excuses. It’s small enough that you can’t hide and large enough that when one person is having a bad month, four are there to hold the standard.

If you want to build one

You don’t need my group. You need your own. Here’s what I’d do, having done it once:

• Start from a shared system. Five people with five methods can’t grade each other. Five people on the VWAP Wave System can.
• Keep it to a handful. Three to six. Beyond that, it becomes a room.
• Meet daily, voice on, during the session. Weekly check-ins are a book club.
• Grade execution, not money. Read the execution column aloud. Make the no-setup trade visible.
• Agree the stop rule before the first session: what happens when one of you hits the daily limit, and what the others do about it.
• Be from different lives. The firefighter’s view of risk and the executive’s view of process are both worth more than another trader’s opinion.

If you’re in the Drysdale Discord, I’m Groot. If you’re building something like this, I’d like to hear how it goes.