The quarter that actually worked: April–June 2026

This is my first quarter of active trading, reconstructed line by line from the brokerage statement. The headline number is good: +$4,323 realized across 91 trades in 9 tickers. But the headline number is also the least interesting thing in the file, because of where it came from. Read: what 890 trades looked like once I reconstructed the statement →

Two decisions made the quarter

Strip the log down and almost the entire result comes from two things. The first is a Virgin Galactic (SPCE) position I accumulated over three sessions in April — 1,054 shares at an average of about $2.85 — and then did nothing with for six weeks. I sold half at $4.40 on May 29 and the rest at $7.80 on June 1, for a combined +$3,523. Read: the position I did nothing with for six weeks, and what it paid →

The second is a single session: June 10, when I bought 1,410 shares of CID HoldCo (DAIC) at $1.85 and sold 1,400 at $3.20 the same day for +$1,897. Read: the single day two decisions made $2,206 →

Those two decisions produced about +$5,420. The quarter finished at +$4,323. Which means everything else I did — every other trade, in every other name, across the rest of the quarter — netted out to roughly -$1,097.

Four green sessions, eight red ones, and a profitable quarter. That only works when your winners are enormous and rare. It is not a repeatable shape, and I didn't understand that at the time.

The shape of the curve

Look at the chart above and the story is unmistakable. The account climbs to a peak of +$5,635 on June 11 — and then falls for the rest of the month. From that peak to quarter end I gave back about -$1,311 across eight sessions, six of which were losers.

What changed on June 11 wasn't the market. It was me. Before that date I made three trades in eight days and held a position for six weeks. After it, I was placing seventeen prints in one ticker in a single session. June 11 itself is the perfect illustration: 23 separate trades to net $46.

The DAIC lesson, in one ledger

DAIC is the whole quarter in miniature. June 10: +$1,897 in a single session. Then, over the following sixteen days, four consecutive losing trades in the same ticker — -$30, -$93, -$178, -$50 — giving back about $350 chasing the memory of the day it worked.

BATL tells the same story in a shorter arc: +$309 on June 10, then I bought it back higher two days later and lost -$198 across the next week. Two names, one pattern — a big win convinces you the ticker is yours, and you overtrade it until it takes the money back.

Every session, no hiding

What this quarter should have taught me

I finished June up $4,323 and concluded I was a trader. The honest reading of the same data is that I was an investor who got one call spectacularly right, and a day trader who was already losing money by mid-June.

I didn't act on that. Over the following six weeks — documented in the July–August log — I traded far more aggressively, added leveraged products, and gave back about -$2,059. Across the whole run from April to August I'm up roughly +$2,925, but almost all of that came from the first ten weeks — plus a short run of overnight holds in mid-August that added $619 in four orders. The deeper breakdown of what went wrong afterwards is in what 890 trades taught me.

The most expensive thing that happened to me this quarter wasn't a losing trade. It was a $2,746 winning one, arriving early enough to convince me that frequency was the way forward.