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Trading Psychology

The Mindset Shift That Made Me Millions

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Written by Timothy Sykes
Updated 2/23/2026 10 min read

Trillions of dollars move through the stock market every single day.

Picture it: clouds of cash sifting through the air.

Flying from households and businesses, into and out of the market. All day long. Every day.

With all that money changing hands, there should be a way to snag some…

To hold out a net and fill it with greenbacks as the wind carries it by…

Well, there is.

Especially in 2026.

The number of catalysts rocking the market right now is mind-numbing. I picked three of the biggest headlines…

  • Early in February, the market erased nearly $1 trillion in AI market caps.
  • The Supreme Court just threw Trump’s tariffs out the window.
  • There’s a new Fed chair on deck amid sticky inflation and a weakening labor market.

Volatility is back.

And when stocks are volatile, my trading patterns work even better.

That might seem counterintuitive. But the patterns are based on human emotion.

When emotions are high (like they are right now), you’ll see stocks follow this exact framework.

I’ve already used these patterns to pull $7.9 million from the market. And they’re the same patterns my 50+ millionaire students use to trade.*

It’s not rocket science, it just takes a few small shifts in your mindset…

Mindset Shift #1: Understand the Upside. Really Understand It.

I grew up in a neighborhood where $50,000 was more money than most people had lying around.

So when I started making $10,000 – $30,000 trading, I thought I’d already won.

I didn’t know the true upside…

I didn’t know you could make seven figures or eight figures with the same patterns I had already mastered

I was capping my own potential.

There wasn’t anybody in my life to show me what was possible. So I never bet big enough. I never sized up when I should have. And I left tens of millions of dollars on the table because my neighborhood taught me what “rich” looked like, and it wasn’t rich at all.

My first $100,000 trade changed everything.

I was a college freshman. And the gain rewired my brain.

It showed me what was possible with these strategies.

Everyone thought penny stock volatility was meaningless garbage before I traded them for a profit.

Now look at my students: Jack Kellogg started as a valet and has made over $24 million in trading profits. Tim Grittani doubled my profits in half the time.

My students understand the upside after seeing my success. And they refuse to cap their own potential.

It’s the Roger Bannister effect.

Before Bannister ran the sub-4-minute mile in 1954, everyone said it was humanly impossible. The moment he did it, other runners started doing it too.

Not because they got faster overnight… because they finally believed it was real.

A million dollars is possible.

I know that sounds crazy if you’re starting with a few hundred bucks. But you can get there over time.

Put in the work and refuse to limit yourself.

Shift #2: Ignore the Crowd. They’re Usually Wrong.

Tim Sykes checking his top penny stocks list in Italy
© Millionaire Media, LLC

When I told people I was getting into penny stocks, short selling, and day trading, everyone had the same reaction.

They told me:

  • “Penny stocks are for suckers.”
  • “Short selling is dangerous.”
  • “Day trading is gambling.”

I heard it from everyone.

Wall Street types, family friends, people who’d never actually tried any of it.

The wisdom of crowds told me I was making a catastrophic mistake…

But then I made my first million buying penny stock pumps.

When your own results contradict what everyone else is saying, you start to realize something: maybe everyone else is wrong.

It’s not arrogance if there’s evidence.

Now I know there’s no such thing as the “wisdom of crowds” when it comes to trading.

The crowd buys at the top. The crowd holds when they should sell. And the crowd loses money. I’ve watched it happen thousands of times.

Ironically, the crowd’s poor choices actually create the patterns that I use to trade.

Try penny stocks, try day trading.

More Breaking News

Test these so-called “evil” strategies for yourself. See what the crowd has been wrong about.

Shift #3: You Don’t Need an Office, a Degree, or a City.

© Millionaire Media, LLC

I used to think I had to live in New York.

I took endless meetings. I wore the right clothes and sat in the right rooms with the right people.

And none of it mattered. Not one bit.

The meetings, the offices, the fancy connections: zero impact on my trading results. Zero.

I wasted years thinking geography and credentials and handshakes were prerequisites for success. They’re not.

All you need is a laptop and an internet connection.

I trade from Bali. I trade from Europe. I’ve even traded from Machu Picchu… it was one of my childhood dreams to visit Machu Picchu.

I’ve brought my laptop into nightclubs with music blasting all around me just to test myself in hard conditions. And you know what I’ve learned? Trading from uncomfortable, distracting environments forces me to be selective.

When I can’t babysit a screen all day, I can only take the best setups. And when I only take the best setups, my chance for gains drastically improves.

You can build real wealth and real freedom at the same time. Don’t let anyone tell you that you need a cubicle or a corner office to do this.

Shift #4: The Strategy Is Teachable. And Teaching Makes You Better.

artificial intelligence stocks what to expect
© Millionaire Media, LLC

When I started teaching in 2008, I wasn’t sure it would work.

I’d been trading for about a decade. I had wins. I had losses. But I had a nagging doubt: maybe I was just lucky. After all, everyone on the internet said I was.

One of my first millionaire students, Michael Goode, was a skeptic who initially set out to prove my process was a fake.

These days, 15+ years of teaching proves: it’s not luck, and it’s not fake.

It’s discipline. And that can be taught to anyone willing to learn.

All of my millionaire students started where you are right now: unsure, doubtful, grinding through the early losses.

They pushed past the doubt. They pushed past the haters. They put in the work.

And some of them give back to the community by teaching new traders. Because teaching makes you a better trader.

I share every trade transparently.

I can’t afford to look like an idiot by taking a bad setup. So I’m forced to avoid them.

I’ve still made boneheaded mistakes.

I lost thousands of dollars between tricep pulldowns at the gym while trying to hit a profit milestone when I was only $70 short. I traded like a complete degenerate.

Watch my video below with the full breakdown:

The losses are lessons. The embarrassing trades are lessons. Everything I share, good and bad, is part of the education.

That’s the deal.

Shift #5: This Is Not an Exact Science. Stay Adaptable.

Early in my career, I traded as if my strategy was the only way. “This is the pattern. This is the setup. Do exactly this.” I was wrong.

  • I made my first million going long on penny stock pumps.
  • Then I flipped and made millions short-selling those same pumps.
  • Then shares got too hard to borrow and I had to adapt again.

Now, heading into 2026, I’m primarily going long because short selling has gotten too risky for most people. The squeezes are wilder than ever.

But I still respect shorting, and when conditions change, I’ll adapt again.

That’s my main point: the market changes. Patterns evolve. Hot sectors cool off. You have to adapt or die.

After 15+ years of teaching students from every corner of the world, different time zones, different account sizes, different personalities, and different risk tolerances, I’ve realized there’s no single path to success.

My seven-step framework gives you the foundation. But the specific patterns you master, the strategies you favor, the setups that click for you, those are yours to discover.

The goal isn’t to trade exactly like me.

The goal is to become self-sufficient. Financially free. Adaptable enough to profit in any market condition.

My Mistakes Are Your Easy Lessons

Tim Sykes tosses his book An American Hedge Fund in the Alps
© Millionaire Media, LLC

These five mindset shifts didn’t come easy for me.

They came from painful experiences. Sometimes expensive ones.

You don’t have to learn these lessons the hard way. That’s the whole reason I teach.

  • Understand the upside.
  • Ignore the crowd.
  • Ditch the office mentality.
  • Trust that the process is teachable and try teaching it.
  • Stay adaptable.

Study the process.

Take your gains , cut your losses, and never stop learning.

That’s how millionaires are made.

Cheers

*Past performance does not indicate future results



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Author card Timothy Sykes picture

Timothy Sykes

Tim Sykes is a penny stock trader and teacher who became a self-made millionaire by the age of 22 by trading $12,415 of bar mitzvah money. After becoming disenchanted with the hedge fund world, he established the Tim Sykes Trading Challenge to teach aspiring traders how to follow his trading strategies. He’s been featured in a variety of media outlets including CNN, Larry King, Steve Harvey, Forbes, Men’s Journal, and more. He’s also an active philanthropist and environmental activist, a co-founder of Karmagawa, and has donated millions of dollars to charity.
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* Results are not typical and will vary from person to person. Making money trading stocks takes time, dedication, and hard work. There are inherent risks involved with investing in the stock market, including the loss of your investment. Past performance in the market is not indicative of future results. Any investment is at your own risk. See Terms of Service here

The available research on day trading suggests that most active traders lose money. Fees and overtrading are major contributors to these losses.

A 2000 study called “Trading is Hazardous to Your Wealth: The Common Stock Investment Performance of Individual Investors” evaluated 66,465 U.S. households that held stocks from 1991 to 1996. The households that traded most averaged an 11.4% annual return during a period where the overall market gained 17.9%. These lower returns were attributed to overconfidence.

A 2014 paper (revised 2019) titled “Learning Fast or Slow?” analyzed the complete transaction history of the Taiwan Stock Exchange between 1992 and 2006. It looked at the ongoing performance of day traders in this sample, and found that 97% of day traders can expect to lose money from trading, and more than 90% of all day trading volume can be traced to investors who predictably lose money. Additionally, it tied the behavior of gamblers and drivers who get more speeding tickets to overtrading, and cited studies showing that legalized gambling has an inverse effect on trading volume.

A 2019 research study (revised 2020) called “Day Trading for a Living?” observed 19,646 Brazilian futures contract traders who started day trading from 2013 to 2015, and recorded two years of their trading activity. The study authors found that 97% of traders with more than 300 days actively trading lost money, and only 1.1% earned more than the Brazilian minimum wage ($16 USD per day). They hypothesized that the greater returns shown in previous studies did not differentiate between frequent day traders and those who traded rarely, and that more frequent trading activity decreases the chance of profitability.

These studies show the wide variance of the available data on day trading profitability. One thing that seems clear from the research is that most day traders lose money .

Millionaire Media 66 W Flagler St. Ste. 900 Miami, FL 33130 United States (888) 878-3621 This is for information purposes only as Millionaire Media LLC nor Timothy Sykes is registered as a securities broker-dealer or an investment adviser. No information herein is intended as securities brokerage, investment, tax, accounting or legal advice, as an offer or solicitation of an offer to sell or buy, or as an endorsement, recommendation or sponsorship of any company, security or fund. Millionaire Media LLC and Timothy Sykes cannot and does not assess, verify or guarantee the adequacy, accuracy or completeness of any information, the suitability or profitability of any particular investment, or the potential value of any investment or informational source. The reader bears responsibility for his/her own investment research and decisions, should seek the advice of a qualified securities professional before making any investment, and investigate and fully understand any and all risks before investing. Millionaire Media LLC and Timothy Sykes in no way warrants the solvency, financial condition, or investment advisability of any of the securities mentioned in communications or websites. In addition, Millionaire Media LLC and Timothy Sykes accepts no liability whatsoever for any direct or consequential loss arising from any use of this information. This information is not intended to be used as the sole basis of any investment decision, nor should it be construed as advice designed to meet the investment needs of any particular investor. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future returns.

Citations for Disclaimer

Barber, Brad M. and Odean, Terrance, Trading is Hazardous to Your Wealth: The Common Stock Investment Performance of Individual Investors. Available at SSRN: “Day Trading for a Living?”

Barber, Brad M. and Lee, Yi-Tsung and Liu, Yu-Jane and Odean, Terrance and Zhang, Ke, Learning Fast or Slow? (May 28, 2019). Forthcoming: Review of Asset Pricing Studies, Available at SSRN: “https://ssrn.com/abstract=2535636”

Chague, Fernando and De-Losso, Rodrigo and Giovannetti, Bruno, Day Trading for a Living? (June 11, 2020). Available at SSRN: “https://ssrn.com/abstract=3423101”