About
I’m Ronnie, an 18-year-old trader and the founder of Rise with Ronnie. I teach SMC and ICT liquidity-based trading, built on rules, risk management and discipline. Everything I teach is something I learned by losing first.
Early Life
During the lockdown I wanted to earn but was too young to be hired anywhere. So I picked up an old Samsung phone and taught myself video editing. My first clients paid me around five hundred rupees for two days of work. That was the first time I understood that skill can become income.
Discovery
I was in 9th grade when a YouTube video about BlackRock showed me how money actually moves in the markets. After that I couldn’t stop. I started watching everything I could find about trading. Then I found a video of someone making a profit in a single trade, and I thought, if he can do this, why can’t I learn it? I didn’t have a mentor or a course. So I bought books. The Disciplined Trader. New Trader, Rich Trader. Trading in the Zone. I read them again and again, long before I had any capital. Those books taught me one thing early: trading is not about predicting the market, it is about controlling yourself. I just didn’t know yet how hard that would be.
The First Trade
After my 10th boards, we got a three-month holiday. I spent it editing videos for clients, and I took advance payments from them to build my starting capital. My mother added a little from her own savings, because she believed in me. That was all I had. My first trade made five hundred rupees, which used to take me two days of editing. Then the second one worked too. I thought I had it figured out. Looking back, that was the most dangerous moment of my journey, because early wins make the market feel easy. It isn’t. I was about to learn that the hard way.
The Losses
My first trade made me five hundred rupees. That was what used to take me two days of video editing, and I made it in one trade. The same week, I made nineteen hundred rupees in a single day. For me, that was huge. I became extremely confident. Too confident. Then the losing streak began. FOMO. Revenge trading. Entering too early, entering too late, entering with no setup at all. Within a month, I lost eight thousand rupees out of my ten thousand, 80% of my starting capital. I took leaves from school on expiry days to sit in front of the charts, and it still wasn’t working. I knew the technical side well, but I had never worked on my psychology. Sitting alone in my room, I asked myself the only question that mattered: what am I doing wrong?
The Rule Book
After the losses, I sat down quietly during the holidays and asked myself what was really going wrong. The market was not the problem. The strategy was not the problem. I was. So I wrote a rule book, and a penalty for breaking it. Maximum two to three trades a day. No entry without confirmation. Stop loss decided before entry. If a rule is broken, trading stops for the day. But I will be honest with you: I wrote the rules, and I did not follow them. Not yet. Writing a rule is easy. Living by it is the real test.
Eleventh Grade: The Turning Point
In 11th grade, I took a break from trading and finally asked myself the honest question. The market didn’t know who I was, so the market wasn’t the problem. My strategy had a three-year backtest, so the strategy wasn’t the problem either. The problem was me. I was entering before the setup formed, out of FOMO. I was entering after it formed, without the confidence to hold. Sometimes I wasn’t even looking for a setup. So I made myself a promise: break one rule, and I write a full trade journal. I hated writing, which made it the perfect punishment. It worked, slowly.
The Sacrifice
I realised I wasn’t giving trading enough time. Too many things were pulling my attention, and my rules kept breaking because of it. So I made the biggest decision of my life. I distanced myself from friends and classmates. When exams came, I deleted social media. I deleted my favourite game. All I kept was trading and video editing. People laughed when I said I wanted to be a trader. I stopped explaining myself and let the results answer.
Position Sizing
Even after the sacrifice, my results were average. Most weeks ended at breakeven, with a small loss or a small profit. The problem wasn’t my stop loss, I always placed it correctly. The problem was my position size. I was putting too much capital on every trade, so I took small profits out of fear. Here is the logic that changed everything. If a hundred rupees falls by one rupee, that’s one percent. If it falls by ten, that’s ten percent. I started risking only one to two percent per trade and waited for two to three percent in reward. The fear disappeared, I could hold my winners, and slowly, week by week, my PnL turned consistently profitable.