Trading at 14: His First Steps in the Stock Market
Amir had always liked saving money and would put aside the money his parents gave him. But when he started wanting more expensive things, like a phone or a computer, he began looking for ways to grow his savings.
Amir first learned about investing from YouTube.
At 14, he opened a brokerage account using his father’s ID and invested his first $75 in stocks.
“I started with investing. I bought about $75 worth of stocks. I held them for exactly two months and then sold.”
At first, it was purely investing. Amir checked his account every day and watched the balance move by less than $1. But gradually, his interest shifted from simply owning stocks to trading their price movements.
One of his first experiences came when Amir sold a stock, saw its price drop, and decided to buy it back cheaper. That’s how he came to the idea that money could be made not only from an asset’s long-term growth, but also from its price fluctuations.
By 15, Amir was already trading at school. The market opened while he was in class, which was especially inconvenient during geography lessons because there was no internet in the classroom.
“Sometimes I skipped them.”
According to Amir, on a good day he could make around $25–$40 during a single class. His classmates didn’t even know what he was doing.
So his first $75 investment quickly turned into an interest in active trading. Crypto came next, where the moves were much faster – and so was the risk.
From $40 to $3,600 in One Day and Almost Back to Zero
At 16, Amir decided to try memecoins. He had almost no experience with them: he opened an analytics platform, picked a random coin, and invested part of his $50.
The first attempt failed – his $50 dropped to around $40. But the next trade changed everything.
“I put that $40 into another meme. An hour later, I see $100. Two hours later, $300. Five hours later, I’m already at $1,000. I cashed out at $1,100 and thought: holy shit, that was $40.”
Amir didn’t stop there. He put the $1,100 into another memecoin and grew it to $3,600 in a single day. For a 16-year-old student, that was a huge amount of money. He had $3,600 sitting in his wallet and had to go back to school the next morning.
But the fast result made him feel like he could make even more. Instead of withdrawing the money, Amir kept taking risks.
The next trade took his $3,600 down to around $2,200 in just 10 minutes.
Amir locked in what was left, but then put it into another memecoin. A few hours later, only around $100 remained.
“Back then, I didn’t even know a meme could rug all the way to zero. Why didn’t I withdraw? I just wanted $10,000.”
A few successful trades had turned $40 into $3,600 – and then almost all of those gains disappeared.
From Memecoins to Systematic Trading
After losing almost all of his memecoin profits, Amir stepped away from the market for nearly two months.
Then he returned to trading regular cryptocurrencies, but this time he started looking for a more systematic approach.
Instead of randomly picking coins and chasing quick multiples, Amir began experimenting with different strategies and risk management.
Gradually, those experiments developed into the approach he still uses today.
A Simple Strategy: Liquidity Sweeps and Trend Breakouts
After experimenting with different approaches, Amir settled on a simple model – trading breakouts in the direction of the trend. In his view, there’s no point in overcomplicating a strategy with too many conditions: the simpler, the better.
Amir doesn’t have a fixed time for looking for trades. Throughout the day, he periodically checks the market and only opens the chart for a closer look when something interesting starts developing.
“If I see something starting to take shape, then I open my monitor and look more closely. If everything matches my rules, I enter at market. If not, I set an alert and wait.”
At the same time, Amir believes it’s important to have days when you stay completely away from the market.
“I don’t have specific days when I definitely trade, but there should be days when you definitely don’t trade – when you don’t even open the charts.”
One of his main setups looks like this: price approaches the lower boundary, sweeps liquidity, and then starts forming a local uptrend with higher highs and higher lows.
If price then breaks the level, Amir considers an entry.
“When there’s a liquidity sweep and something resembling a local uptrend starts forming, that’s when you can start expecting a real breakout.”
Amir uses liquidity heatmaps as additional confirmation.
He first analyzes the chart itself and only then checks whether his idea aligns with where liquidity is positioned.
Another filter is the asset’s relative strength. If the entire market is falling while one coin is holding up noticeably better, Amir pays special attention to it and considers buying it when the market reverses.
His asset list is small: ETH, SOL, and sometimes HYPE. Amir doesn’t trade BTC, but he watches the broader market movement to understand the context for other coins.
Why He Sets Take Profit Below the Previous High
Amir has a separate rule for exiting trades. He places his Take Profit slightly below the previous high, rather than directly at the high or above it.
He came to this decision after several trades where price missed his target by literally a few dollars.
“I tried many times to put it higher, right at the peak, but in my experience price would miss the take by literally $1–2. I decided to put it lower – and it started working for me.”
Amir doesn’t necessarily need to wait for a full breakout of the previous high. His goal is to capture the move into that zone, so it’s enough for price to reach the upper boundary.
“I don’t enter right at the breakout. The main thing for me is that price touches the previous high – I don’t even need to wait for the breakout itself.”
So Amir deliberately gives up part of the potential move in exchange for a closer target.
8 Failed Challenges to Find a Working Model
Amir entered prop trading with the same aggressive approach he had already shown while trading memecoins.
Before receiving his first payout, he went through 8 Challenges, experimenting with different strategies, account sizes, and risk levels.
Amir says the main problem wasn’t the lack of a strategy – it was his desire to get results as quickly as possible.
“I tested different strategies, and they were very aggressive. Three of those Challenges were gone almost immediately because the stop was basically the entire Challenge.”
Four of the failed Challenges were genuine experiments. In the other cases, aggressive trading played a major role.
On larger accounts, Amir tried trading more cautiously and keeping risk around 0.5–1% per trade, but that style didn’t suit him.
“It didn’t really work for me, honestly. I don’t know why. A more aggressive trading style suited me better.”
Amir hasn’t completely abandoned aggressive trading.
But in prop trading, drawdown rules put boundaries around it: they prevent him from increasing risk indefinitely and force him to keep it within certain limits.
Amir admits that without those restrictions, he would trade even more aggressively.
First $997 Payout from a $10K Account
Amir currently has 3 active Hash Hedge Challenges:
- $10K
- $50K
- $100K
He received his first $997 payout from the $10K account – more than 10x the cost of the Challenge.
Amir opened the trade that helped him pass the Challenge in an unusual setting – while undergoing a medical examination at a hospital.
He expected the move, with a risk-to-reward ratio of around 1:2, to take several hours or even the entire day. So he wasn’t watching the chart constantly and checked the position roughly once an hour.
“I thought it would take the whole day – the 1:2 move was pretty significant. I wasn’t really watching the trade; I checked the chart about once an hour. Literally an hour later, my Take Profit had already been hit.”
The setup was familiar: price swept liquidity, started moving higher, and held above the level.
For Amir, holding above the level was an important confirmation that the trade idea remained valid.
“If it hadn’t held here and had moved lower, the trade would’ve been invalidated.”
But Amir doesn’t consider even this profitable trade perfect. He normally risks around 1% per position, but because he had high confidence in this particular setup, he increased his risk to 2–2.5%. After the trade, he admitted that this was a mistake.
“If I’d hit a Stop Loss risking 2–2.5%, it would’ve taken me longer to recover. Risk should stay the same – if you trade with a 1% stop, then you trade with a 1% stop. Not 2%, not 3%, not 4%.”
This time, the increased risk happened to coincide with a profitable trade, but Amir doesn’t see the outcome as justification for the decision.
His conclusion is the opposite: confidence in a particular setup shouldn’t be a reason to increase your predetermined risk.
Prop Challenges as a Way to Trade with More Capital
Amir sees prop Challenges as a way to trade with more capital without having to deposit a comparable amount of his own money on an exchange.
At the same time, he doesn’t believe that every Challenge you buy has to end with a Funded Account.
“You shouldn’t set yourself the goal of being 100% sure you’ll pass a prop Challenge. In the market, we can’t guarantee anything except the stop – that’s the only thing you control. If you’re ready for the stop, you’ve already accepted it.”
Amir prefers not to spend his payouts immediately. Instead, he uses them to increase the trading capital available to him, including through new Hash Hedge Challenges.
Why Risk Shouldn’t “Float”
Despite his history of 8 failed Challenges, Amir now tries to keep the risk on every position fixed.
His standard benchmark is 1% per trade. He may have two positions open at the same time, meaning his total account risk can sometimes reach 2%.
On his personal account, where there are no prop-firm restrictions, Amir admits he would trade more aggressively.
“More aggressively, meaning maybe 4-5% risk per trade. Not 10%, not 20% – that’s already too much.”
That’s why he sees prop-account limits not only as rules he has to follow, but also as an additional layer of discipline.
On a regular exchange, nothing stops a trader from immediately increasing risk after a loss and trying to win the money back. In prop trading, drawdown limits restrict that kind of decision-making.
“If you trade on an exchange, there are no such restrictions – you can risk 20–30% per trade if you want. But we’re all human, and there’s always the human factor, the gambling impulse. In prop, you hit one stop, then another – that’s it, trading is over for the day.”
According to Amir, stopping becomes especially difficult after several losing trades in a row. The urge appears to prove the market wrong and quickly recover the loss. It’s in those moments that external limits help him avoid increasing risk even further.
At the same time, Amir doesn’t recommend that beginners copy his approach.
He considers 1% risk per position with several positions open simultaneously too aggressive for someone without sufficient experience.
Key Takeaways
1. A simple strategy can be enough
Amir doesn’t use a long checklist of entry conditions. His approach is built around liquidity sweeps, local market structure, and moves toward a breakout.
2. You don’t have to capture every last dollar of a move
After several situations where price missed his Take Profit by just $1–2, Amir started placing his target slightly below the previous high.
3. Confidence in a trade shouldn’t change your risk
On the trade that helped him pass the Challenge, Amir increased his usual risk from 1% to 2–2.5%. Despite the profitable outcome, he considers that decision a mistake.
4. Fast profits can easily tempt you into taking more risk
His memecoin experience demonstrated this clearly: $40 became $3,600, but the desire to make even more ended with him losing almost the entire amount.
5. A series of failed Challenges helped Amir rethink his approach
After 8 failures and experiments with different strategies, account sizes, and risk levels, he settled on a simpler trading model and fixed risk per trade.
6. Amir uses prop limits as external discipline
According to him, the restrictions help him stop after losses instead of giving in to the urge to immediately recover them by increasing risk.
7. One payout guarantees nothing
After making $997 in 7 days, Amir went on to lose that Funded Account and pass a new Challenge.
His view is that in the market, you can never guarantee the outcome of your next trade or your next Challenge.
