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2025 was another really solid year for me, and what’s funny is how little time and effort it actually took. Most days I’m only “trading” for about 1 to 2 hours, and a good chunk of that is me drinking my morning coffee, chatting with people online or scrolling social media.
So I wanted to share the one setup I relied on the most in 2025 to hopefully help anyone that didn't have a profitable year. This particular setup played a big role in the consistency I had all year. I call it the Highest Volume Day strategy, or "HVD" for short.
This isn’t one of those strategies where you need lightning fast decisions, hot keys, Level 2, a bunch of indicators, or a bunch of different 1 - 3 minute scalps to piece together a day. It’s the opposite. It’s a slower paced breakout strategy where you actually have time to build a plan, calculate risk ahead of time, and let the trade develop. As you can see from my second screenshot, my average hold time this year was about an hour, and that lines up perfectly with how this setup works. It’s built to capture the bigger move in one trade, not nickel and dime your way through the day.
The core of HVD is simple. Before the market opens, I’m looking for small cap stocks that are showing abnormal interest, and the way I define that is by comparing the current days premarket volume to the stock’s past daily volume. I want to see premarket volume that’s already competing with, or exceeding, the biggest volume days the stock has printed before. If a stock normally does a few hundred thousand shares on a big day but it’s already doing a few million shares premarket, that’s a real signal. That’s the kind of attention that can lead to a clean breakout and a serious intraday run.
Once I have that candidate, I’m looking for one strong initial upwards move in premarket, followed by one major consolidation. From there, the plan basically writes itself. I mark the premarket high as my main resistance level and I wait. The trade is simply the breakout over the premarket high during regular market hours. If it breaks and goes, great. If it can’t break, or it breaks and fails, I’m not forcing it.
Now here’s the part that matters. As you can see from the second screenshot, my win rate this year was only 51%, and I’m saying that on purpose because too many people think you need some crazy high win rate to be profitable. You don’t. What kept my P&L trending upwards was risk management and patience, especially the patience to hold the winners long enough for them to actually pay for the losses and then some. The big wins are what move the needle, and that’s what HVD is designed to capture.
When this setup works, it can produce the type of intraday runs that make a 1:2 risk:reward feel small. Sometimes these small caps will run triple digit, and even quadruple digit percentages in a single day. That’s why it’s not hard to structure trades on this setup where a 1:2 or better is realistic, because the stock actually has room to go.
That’s the HVD strategy in a nutshell. Simple, slow paced, and built for consistency. One clean setup, one clear trigger, planned risk, and the patience to let the trade do what it’s going to do. That approach is what kept my P&L on a steady up curve all year.