Phil G. turned $5,000 into $55M+ of profits shorting stocks that went vertical. Three long interviews distilled into one playbook, built as an interactive terminal in four parts: the trader, the system, the setup, and a reference.
Who he is, what the twenty years looked like, and the six habits he credits for still being here.
Cumulative profit reconstructed from the figures he states on stage. Hover the curve for the year's numbers; click an event to zoom to it. The shape between anchor points is illustrative.
The setup never changed: something small or mid cap, overbought, pumped on a PR, betting it comes back. What changed is how long he can afford to hold it. Brokers went from free locates and zero borrow cost to a business built on charging short sellers, and the strategy had to move with them.
Scottrade: great locates, no borrow fees, short interest "wasn't invented." Find a 3–10 day (up to six-week) runner, short it, ride it down for one to four weeks. Cleaner tape: no algos, no chat-room pumps he can remember.
hold: weeksSomething gaps 50–100% overnight on a PR; read the release, decide if it's overbought, short the day. Added to the arsenal alongside the swings.
hold: hours to daysBrokers make their money on shorts now: pay for the locate whether you use it or not, pay short interest overnight (100% one day, 600–800% two days later; he has seen >1,000%), maintenance jumping from 100% to 400–500%. Swing shorts "dropped dramatically." Same money means more size intraday; options carry no locate and no fee.
hold: intradayTrades the open no matter where he is. If there's no A+ setup 60–90 minutes in, he's gone: yard work, swimming, coaching. Options watched from the phone.
hold: 60–90 minutesMarkets alternate between easy and hard; the hard stretches define the trader. Asked for his single greatest strength he picks resilience: "the refusal to accept being mediocre." Click a node.
The process around the trades: reviewing data, reading the regime, moving money out, cutting losses, and the rules that hold it together.
Three profitable six-figure years, then a wall. At the end of year three he opened his tax return: ~1,000 trades, about two dozen he remembered vividly ($45k–$100k winners), and a string of $25k–$40k losers he couldn't place at all. They were boredom trades. Toggle to apply what he did in year four: +10% size on A+, everything else cut.
A mental review every day: what went well, what didn't, how did I feel. A deeper data pass monthly, quarterly, annually. Yearly is "the absolute bottom."
His own finding: very profitable in the first hour, flat through the midday lull, profitable again in the last hour or two.
Spend hours on the 10–15 winners and 5–10 losers; the thousands in the middle are noise.
Sleep, stress, expectations the night before. It all shows up in the P&L.
Nail one Thursday? Re-study it Monday. The next may come in days.
His phrase for it. "All in" always meant all in on the trading account, never on net worth, and the account itself is defended with small, fast losses and a pyramid that only grows when the trade is already green.
| Name | What happened | Loss | After |
|---|---|---|---|
| DRYS DryShips · 2018–19 | Short with an average under $20. Next day it ran to $30–40; he refused to cover ("I'd have to re-locate the shares"). A day or two later it printed ~$115 pre-market and was halted. "That's stubbornness. That lack of discipline." | ≈ −$1M | Made it all back. A hard cut-loss rule went in that day. |
| GME GameStop · 2021 | Short into the squeeze. "There are no fundamentals, but you've got to trade the chart." | ≈ −$2M | Made most of it back on the backside. |
| HKD AMTD Digital · 2022 | $30–40 to ~$2,500. Halts that reopened 30–50% higher and re-halted; no way out. Traders he knew ended careers on it. | $0 | Never traded, borrowed or priced it. "The risk/reward is so out of whack it doesn't even interest me." |
An A+ chart is half the context. The other half: what the whole market is doing and what month it is. Hover a month for his read; the gauge shows how hard to press.
He has wired out at month-end every month for 20 years; trading accounts are now under 10% of net worth. Move the sliders to see why a bad month "doesn't register", and what the same edge does to the trader who keeps it all in the account.
Everyone has to. He was all-in on every trade with $5k. After the $1M→$500k lesson he wired $400k to the bank and traded $100k: "if I don't see a trade today, I'm not going to take it."
Retirement accounts and outside accounts funded to the point where he could stop trading if he ever wanted to. Decided early, not after a blow-up.
Anything above $100k at month-end went to the bank for a year or two; then the line moved to $200k. "Until it's in my bank account it's not really my money."
"I don't need the money anymore. I can sleep well enough." Trading cut back, still addicted to the markets. A $500M trade tomorrow? "Of course I would."
What do you want in your life? What is your plan for 10, 20, 30, 40 years? Logging into passive accounts and watching them grow is the fun part.
A trader has a first big year, $100k of profit, and buys a $100k car. "Was that really the best way you could spend the $100k you just earned?" Five or ten years later the car is worth $10k and the trader has to make it again next week, and the week after.
"Spend what you need and enjoy it, but keep growing it." The point is the mental one: profits that are constantly spent must be constantly re-made, and a trader who must make money this week trades forced. He hasn't feared a slow stretch in years, because the farms would carry the household forever and a slump is "more time off to go enjoy things."
Asked for one tip from twenty years: minimize losses. Be unstubborn, admit you're wrong, the market is always right. A paper cut hurts; you can take hundreds before you lose the finger. Exit at 10:00, re-enter at 10:01 if it sets back up.
−20 to −30% of the account. Not a 1% loss; those are meaningless.
Revenge mindset walks to the desk with you the next morning.
"It's not A+, but I think it'll work." Rules go out the window.
Snowball. "Just get me back to even." Deeper hole, bigger size.
Some owe the broker. This is how careers end.
"Whether you have $100k or $1M of buying power, before you place a trade think of it as the last dollar to your name. Would you still put it on?" Tick what's true right now.
Every explicit rule from both interviews, in one filterable table. "Everybody's rules are different," so treat these as his, and as the template for writing your own.
| # | Category | Rule | Why (in his words) |
|---|
How the parabolic short is found, entered, managed and exited, then the binder of charts he studies.
A+ setups arrive once or twice a month, sometimes not for two months. The routine exists to be at the desk, with the right three names on the main monitor, when one does. Away from the desk: a workout every day, and the three-day weekends he used to resent are now the reset he looks forward to. Hover the day.
Fundamentals are one tenth of the decision, but the tenth decides how far the balloon can stretch. His COVID-era test: a four-employee biotech with no cash and a history of failing to cure Ebola, bird flu and the ordinary flu announces a COVID vaccine. "The likelihood is literally zero." That is a short candidate.
And still: fundamentally worthless companies run to highs nobody thought possible (GameStop). So the story sets the thesis and the chart runs the trade. "Trade the chart, trade the trend."
SMCI, Friday, February 2024, rebuilt on a 5-minute chart from the prices he gives: opened around $1,025, ran to $1,050, and about 30 minutes in traded back below its open on heavier volume. That was the signal. Fifth-size starter, full size within 30 minutes, scaled out from $900 down, flat by the close near $800.
On a climax day he buys puts alongside the short common for leverage he can't get from the equity. The rest of the year he is mostly an option seller. Same instrument, opposite risk, and he treats them completely differently.
The same pattern shows up on different clocks and in different instruments. What changes is how long he holds, how much he sizes, and what he refuses to carry overnight.
| Variant | Typical run | Grade | Hold | Size | Watch-outs | Example |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| One-day runner | Gaps up 100–500% on a PR (biotech "pivots to AI") | A | Intraday; flat by close if low float | Smaller; fakes and halts | 10–15 min fundamentals check: cash, burn, warrants, financing need | BYND-type |
| Two-day runner | Day two doubles again | A | Intraday to overnight if borrow is cheap | Moderate | Day-two "it can't go higher" is the fundamentals trap | BYND $3 → $6 |
| Multi-day / multi-week runner | 3+ extended candles, gap after gap, then the 4th-day reversal | A++ | Day one for the big print, or weeks when liquid and cheap to borrow | Largest; add to winners | Timing the top; shorting a day early is "very detrimental" | SMCI, MSTR |
| Low-float squeeze | Hyper-parabolic, float concentrated | A | Never overnight | Capped; he no longer touches 1–2M-share floats at all | Manipulation, halts on an uptick, locates, spreads | CAR $100 → $850 |
| Commodity blow-off | Extreme parabolic; repeated false peaks | A | Swing after the break | Small only. New rule after silver: never let one eat weeks of focus at size | Gap risk every day, trades all night; leveraged-fund liquidations | Silver −35% day, gold, oil 2008 |
| IPO run | $70 → $300 in days | A | Multi-day to multi-month swing | Moderate | IPOs "trade a little differently"; no history to study | Circle |
He keeps printed A+ charts, hundreds of them, and re-reads them until a new chart triggers "I saw this two years ago." Wins and the two big losses, with the prices he gives. Select one.
His vocabulary, his reading, and the two things he wants you to leave with.
Terms he uses as shorthand throughout the talk. Hover or tap a term.
"There's almost no book that taught me, do this." The value is one takeaway per chapter.
Two things. Cut losses. And have a backup plan outside the market, because you will retire one day and you'll be glad the money is somewhere it can't be traded away.