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How Steven Dux Turned His Skills in Day Trading into the Freedom Challenge to Help Others Earn in the Stock Market
- Who: Xiuxian Du (Steven Dux)
- Website: stevenduxi.com
- Course Topic: Day Trading
- Interesting Stats: 50 email subscribers/day
Who are you and what course have you created?
Hi my name is Steven Dux and I’m a deca millionaire day trader, mentor, and gamer who has made over $10 million day trading. After a horrible breakup with my girlfriend when I was 19, I realized that I needed to do something to change my life, or I wouldn’t be able to maintain a relationship in the future. This was a wake-up call for me so I started hitting the gym and began day trading with $27,000 when I was in college. I used the money that my father had set aside for my college tuition that year, so if I lost the money, I would have to go back to China since I was here on an F1 Visa, so it was a huge risk to even touch that money.
Then I studied the market relentlessly by taking every course I could, but all of them were lacking in-depth details of how to trade. Instead, they were filled with the lifestyle content of fancy cars and vacations. I also put a lot of stock tickers into Excel spreadsheets and taped up stock graphs all over my college dorm room, so I could study exactly how stocks moved, the patterns these graphs made, and the psychology behind those movements.
In my first month of day trading, I lost half my money and was horrified at what would happen. Would I have to go back to China and live with my parents and tell them that I dropped out of school because I blew my money on the stock market when they told me it was a scam to begin with? If I was no longer a student, would I lose my immigration status if I wasn’t attending college anymore?
I realized I needed to be more meticulous about how I traded, and that I needed to try again before I gave up on day trading. I mean what other choice did I have? Since I was an adult now, I couldn’t ask my parents for any more money because they expected me to take care of myself.
So I put my Honda Accord up for collateral and took out a loan from my friend for the amount of money I lost in the market. Then after I gained enough confidence from studying, I tried again. This time around, I started making profitable trades and within the first 30 days, I turned that $27,000 into $292,000.
I was so relieved because I actually did it and wouldn’t have to be sent back to my home country by being kicked out of school. That to me was about as exciting as the profits I made from my first few trades. As time went by and I continued my day trading journey, I saw a lot of success based on the initial strategies and insights I had put together, based on the patterns I continued to identify in the market. I made $1,300,000 within the first year of trading. By the end of 2019, around the time when I launched the Freedom Challenge, I turned my account into $5 million in profit.
Fast forward to June 2020, I broke $1.15 million in a single month.
Taking that trading account and my TradeZero account and combining them together, I made around $4 million day trading last year alone in the middle of a pandemic throughout 2020, which brought my total day trading earnings to $9.3 million.
Here’s my Profitly chart, which shows all of my verified trades up until the end of 2020.
This year in 2021, within the first three months of trading, I made $3 million before the first of March. You can see the profits and losses from the trades I made in this account statement.
Here are the trades for the other $1.3 million I made from my TradeZero account in the first three months.
Then later in June 2021, I made just shy of $3 million from one single trade, on AMC’s stock. Yes, the same AMC as the movie theaters. It really was one of the best moments of my life, to make so much money short selling one stock in one day. (tweet)
What I discovered when I first started trading was that I found 8 strategies that work time and time again within stocks that fit into a market cap that’s under $100 billion. I learned that when a market cap is valued in between $50 billion to $100 billion, then that’s the best market to focus on. I learned to avoid certain stock markets that other “gurus” pump up, such as the OTCBB and the Pink Sheets, and to only focus on companies with liquidity, such as ones that traded on a reputable exchange like the Nasdaq.
As far as the 8 strategies go, some of these strategies worked 55% of the time for me, while other less common strategies worked as much as 75% of the time for me. These strategies worked so much better than the ones taught in textbooks and other courses, which when I backtested them, produced success ratios under 55%.
When I went through years and years of data, I saw that these patterns would emerge around 40-70 times a year and reoccur consistently, so if a trader just focused on one strategy and only one winning strategy that worked over 55% of the time, that trader could potentially turn a small account of a few thousand dollars into a much larger account.
Because of how I set myself up when I went into the trades and limited the losses of my bad trades, the average returns on these trades when I made them were bringing back returns in between 25-35% of what I invested.
I had found something that not only worked, unlike most of the other popular “gurus” and course creators, but something that was duplicatable as well, so I developed the Freedom Challenge to teach students these exact strategies so they could learn how to become penny stock traders and earn money in the stock market, like myself.
What market does your online course serve?
My course serves the market of anyone who wants to earn extra income to pay the bills or those hideous student loans, or people who are looking to do more entertaining things like taking vacations and living lavishly. I even help the nomads who are looking to replace their day job with something that they could do from anywhere in the world, all while earning some real money.
There are a lot of people in my course who also just want to set up a retirement plan for themselves and their families too or pay for their kid’s college educations as well. There are even doctors and lawyers who have become my students, and these are careers that most people would assume are led by the wealthy. In my chatroom that includes all of my paid students, there are a wide plethora of people from various parts of the world from all walks of life.
While I teach people how to trade penny stocks on the Nasdaq, some of my students take the strategies that I teach and use them on foreign exchanges like the EU and some even use them for trading cryptocurrencies, where they see similar results. However, I personally don’t trade on anything except for the Nasdaq.
What’s the biggest benefit of taking your course?
In the past, the number of new people who entered the stock market was pretty slim, as it was just people who maybe took a course or read a few books on how the market worked. The pandemic changed so much of that, however. Why? It’s possibly because people now had a lot of time on their hands since they no longer had to work in an office, or people were seeking out new streams of income due to the significant amount of jobs that were lost.
In 2020 and 2021, a huge influx of people decided to become day traders in the stock market and the stock market has seen almost twice the volume of movement than in previous years. What that means is that when more people come into the market to trade, it becomes more competitive and even harder to make profitable trades. That means you’ll need a significant advantage over others if you want to earn a profit when day trading.
In the past, if you had an advantage or what most traders call an edge, you could surpass maybe 20 people with your edge because of how few people were day trading. Because of the increasing volume of people who are entering into the stock market, now with the same advantages that you could learn within a legitimate course, you could surpass 20,000 people, which statistically increases the size of the profits from the trades you could make.
When there are more people you have an advantage over in terms of knowledge and insight, the better the probability of earning more profits during your trades.
The biggest benefit from the Freedom Challenge is that you can learn much faster than other people because in my program, I do a lot of live trading where people can watch and learn from one of the few day traders who has earned over $10 million from day trading. After being in the market for countless years and getting to know most of the best day traders in the world, I’ve come to find that the number of traders who have surpassed this milestone are few and far between.
Unfortunately, and what troubled me back when I bought a lot of courses and first got started, I found that most of the course creators who launch programs similar to mine don’t even actively day trade in the market. They just teach you hyperbole and the basic fundamentals, or strategies that haven’t been tested and don’t actually work. I personally tested and back-tested every single strategy that was taught in each of these courses and the results were extremely disappointing. What’s sad is that most of these traders who portray themselves as “gurus” just show off fancy lifestyles to bring more eyeballs to what they’re doing, yet do not have track records of success.
Having the opportunity to see a successful day trader live trade in the open market, ask questions about my trades and get real-time feedback on their thoughts gives my students a huge edge compared to other day traders who are students in other courses that are on the market.
How did you get into the market?
I got into the stock market because I was pretty broke in college when I was studying engineering. I was an F1 student and I had no right to work outside of campus. When I looked up the most profitable ways to earn a living, I came across real estate and the stock market.
I couldn’t do real estate because my English was really bad at the time and I couldn’t understand the complexities of the contracts, as I had just moved to America. So the only way left for me to earn money (outside of my small salary at the only job I was qualified to work at in the college dorms) was from the stock market. It didn’t require me to read English plus I got to focus on something I love: graphics and reading charts.
I really had no other choice for a career to make it in America. Being on an F1 visa meant I couldn’t get a job off-campus. So I put my everything into the only thing I could do. I was extremely relentless in studying and learning all the ins and outs of how the stock market works so that I could become one of the 6% of day traders who actually are able to make a career out of day trading.
Plus, there really wasn’t anything else to really do since I no longer had a girlfriend, and I wasn’t able to pay the bills from playing Starcraft like the competitive gamers today are able to, which I still enjoy to this day. So I did what I learned to do in school as an engineer. I put my everything into learning, studying, and backtesting what I learned to test my theories on that data. I did that so I could get a deep understanding of the patterns certain stocks made in the market, how frequent they were, how they moved in the stock market, and whether or not specific trades would be profitable or not.
Luckily, I compiled so much data together that I found a handful of winning strategies.
Why did you decide to create an online course in the first place?
I saw so many people blowing their accounts and losing all of their money and it really shook me up. On one side, I thought that could’ve been me when I first started. On the other hand, I knew the exact pain that these people felt in their gut and how shaken up a person gets when they lose money in the market. And I knew that I couldn’t keep everything I learned over the years to myself. I had to share it so others could experience the same joys and the feeling of freedom that I have felt over the course of my adult life as a day trader.
It was important to me for people to be able to achieve the same kind of success I created for myself in the stock market. I know firsthand how difficult it is to understand the stock market, especially if you are just getting into it. It’s an extremely scary market to be in at the very beginning and the chances of blowing your account are extremely high, so it takes a lot of education and discipline to actually make it in this industry. So many people lose in the stock market that it’s ridiculous. A staggering 94% of people don’t make it past their first year.
I realized that I needed to help people increase their speed of learning of the stock market and have the step-by-step resources and guides on how to actually day trade successfully. There’s a lot of scams out there and a lot of people make a fortune selling courses, but the teachers of these programs don’t actually trade in the stock market. To me, that’s hypocritical because how can you teach someone how to succeed in doing something if you’ve personally never done it before yourself. It’s just teaching theory as opposed to actuality, and theory doesn’t work when it comes to the stock market, because it’s a constantly evolving market that requires traders to adjust and grow along with it.
That’s where I want to make a change for this specific industry, by bringing a sense of transparency to how the stock market works and teaching people about so much more than data points like float and market cap. I want to teach them how to recognize patterns and how to formulate strategies based on those patterns, so they can better understand when to make a trade or not, and how to limit their risks when they get into stock so they don’t lose all their money on one bad trade. I love to take a data-driven approach where I walk through the stocks I trade and explain why they move the way they do based on the psychological profiles of the buyers and sellers, and how to recognize these patterns for yourself.
I’m just here to provide the deep insights and the strategies that people actually need to increase their probability of being successful in the stock market because when I first started day trading, I wish I had a place I could turn to that showed me exactly how to do what I know now. If I had all the information I do now when I was 19 and just starting out in the stock market, I would probably have 5 to 10 times the success I’ve currently had from day trading.
Did you have any moments of doubt before you created/launched it?
In the very beginning, it was really hard for me as a course creator. But it wasn’t because of the content I was delivering. The harsh reality was that since I came to America when I was in high school as a foreign exchange student, I wasn’t really accustomed to speaking English, aside from chatting with other players in video games. My accent was heavy and my broken English caused me to really struggle when I first started selling my courses. However, over the years, I have spent a lot of time practicing my public speaking both online and in person. Through my YouTube videos and by talking to others influencers (such as Timothy De La Ghetto, the Fung Bros, Ryan Higa, Jubilee, Richie Le, and more) in collaboration videos, my English today has evolved to be smoother and a lot easier to understand.
Because of this problem, however, I did have to go back and redo some of the video portions in my course, so my students could understand the material that I was teaching.
I don’t know if I ever thought about whether or not I was good enough or not to become a mentor and teacher in this space. For me, I believe that you never really know if you’re good enough to do something. You just have to try it and see what happens. Luckily for me, I had a lot of support from my followers and friends who I made day trading over the years and they were quite encouraging.
What I’ve come to realize is that once you are in a certain industry for a while, you should get pretty good at what you’re doing. Personally, I’m a really adaptive person, so I can pretty much adapt to anything and do it pretty well and I’m happy to say that a lot of my students enjoy my method of teaching.
What’s your online course like?
The biggest highlight for Freedom Challenge is that it’s filled with a lot of live trading webinars where I trade in the morning in real-time with my students. For people who can’t watch me trade live, reruns are uploaded into their student portals.
At their discretion, my students can then follow my trades and make the same exact trades I do, but they don’t have to. The point of watching me live is so that my students can identify how I spot opportunities in the market and what these patterns look like, so they can go out on their own and discover their own opportunities to trade, outside of my teaching hours.
Since there is such a steep learning curve to understanding the stock market and all of its intricacies, it takes about a year for most students to fully understand all the strategies and data points that are required to become a successful day trader. However, sometimes a student who may have a finance degree or has a basic understanding of the stock market could pick it up in a matter of months. I usually don’t recommend my students to make trades with their own money until after they feel extremely comfortable paper trading and backtesting data.
In the Freedom Challenge, there are quizzes and we have a daily chat group where text is communicated and my students share their trades and insights with others in the course.
There are also a lot of videos where we go over the fundamentals of what a day trader needs to know before they begin trading, backed with strategies, patterns, and other insights that are deemed necessary to be in the stock market. We also have both live-action and PowerPoint. These videos educate beginner traders to advance their way up to reaching an intermediate level at a steady pace.
How long did it take you to create your course?
The process of creating a course isn’t easy. In fact, it took us 2-3 years to complete the Freedom Challenge. By this time, I was already trading for 3-4 years before I launched my flagship educational program, so a lot of what I was teaching was already working extremely well for me in the stock market.
What I realized when I first started putting the Freedom Challenge together was that a lot of the terminology when it comes to trading is very difficult for people to understand and goes over a lot of people’s heads, so I had to go back and reflect back to the very beginning of my trading journey to build out the Freedom Challenge. That way, it would be filled with every single insight required to get a deep understanding of the stock market and it wouldn’t miss any of the data points that I wish I had when I was younger and first starting out as a day trader.
A lot of the processes I used were to think like a beginner and really hone in on what I learned over the years trading. I used a step-by-step beginner to intermediate approach, with a logical way of diving into the psychology of where patterns come from so you know where the original ideas come from, so it’s much easier to understand.
Most people wouldn’t think of the stock market as more than just statistics, but there’s a deep level of psychology that goes behind how the stock market moves, especially when it comes to low cap stocks.
Tell us a little about the process of launching your course and getting your first sale(s).
Before I launched my course, I was already well known within the day trading community because I turned $27,000 into $1.3 million within my first year of day trading. Because of that initial success, a lot of people started following me on social media well before I ever launched the Freedom Challenge. People kept leaving comments on my posts and DMing me telling me that they wanted me to pull out a DVD or a course so they could learn what exact strategies I was using and how I made it in the stock market as a successful day trader.
Because there were so many people who wanted my course before I launched it, getting the first sale was pretty easy. All I had to do was announce that it was available for sale and I had students lined up ready to take the course and be a part of my community.
Do you have a lead magnet?
No, I don’t have a lead magnet to bring people into my email list. People come to my email list because they want to know more about the Freedom Challenge and want to be a part of the premier educational program.
Publicly, however, I do try to bring as many insights as possible to the general public for free. These resources don’t cover the same proprietary information that you can find in the Freedom Challenge, nor do they give people direct access to my personal time, but they do give beginner traders a place to start when looking for information about the stock market.
I have an investing for beginners series on my website, a blog where I share deep insights, and a really popular YouTube channel where I share more insights for free.
What’s the traffic strategy that works best for you?
The best traffic strategy for my Freedom Challenge is through social media. I do all kinds of beginner videos and recaps for my YouTube subscribers. -Steven Dux Click To TweetAt times, I will collaborate with a lot of other YouTubers with different types of interviewers so others could get to know me.
I also find that having a blog and writing articles publicly helps drive a lot of traffic in the search engines, especially for people who are looking for information specifically about the stock market. Ads work well too, to drive an audience who may not have given any thought about the stock market to my programs.
That’s how I drive traffic into my site and if they’re interested, they purchase the Freedom Challenge or one of my other programs.
What online course platform are you using?
The Freedom Challenge is hosted on my WordPress site and I use Zoom Meetings for my live trading. My DVDs are also hosted on my WordPress site.
Do you like it?
Yes, I do.
Are there any features you wish it had?
No. The course teaching process is pretty smooth. My students are very happy with how the information is delivered and how the Freedom Challenge is being taught.
What made you decide to use your chosen platform over others?
I’m not in charge of the website features. I have a technical partner who handles all of this and they did a lot of research to figure out what type of platform would be best for my students.
What other tools do you use to run your online course business?
We use Google Analytics, WordPress, social media ad management systems, social media profiles, content syndication networks like Quora and Medium, and ConvertKit.
What books or training programs have you found useful on your journey to a successful business owner that others might find valuable too?
I didn’t really read any books for starting a business when I began putting the Freedom Challenge together. I started my business in what I felt was a more honest way. Since there are so many people who hype things up and showcase lifestyle over results, especially in the day trading space, I wanted to do something different.
My goal in setting up my online business was to be a very transparent trader so people could see my trades and understand what value I could bring to the table, as opposed to buying into the lifestyle that others promote. Don’t get me wrong, day trading does come with a very nice lifestyle. A few weeks before this interview, I was able to move to a $5 million house in Orange County and get a Lamborghini SVJ, one of many supercars I’ve owned throughout the years. But I wanted to make sure that my students came to me for the value I could provide through analytics and data, not living a lavish lifestyle.
Sure, the Freedom Challenge growth has been slower than the growth that other course creators see, but my course and my overall reputation has grown to be a lot stronger than the other day traders in my space. I find the most valuable trait when it comes to becoming a mentor and teacher to others is transparency, and I find that my students and most of the general public feel the same way.
Do you have any big mistakes you’ve made along the way that you’d be willing to share?
When it comes to teaching the Freedom Challenge, there aren’t any big huge mistakes that stand out. In fact, it’s been pretty smooth since inception.
Please share some idea of revenue.
I created the Freedom Challenge because a lot of people wanted to learn directly from me and there was a lot of demand for my time and attention as a teacher and mentor. I didn’t create the program with the intention to make a lot of money. From what I make from day trading, I earn more than enough to live an extremely comfortable lifestyle.
The reason I made the Freedom Challenge is so that I can teach others how to trade successfully in the stock market and use it as a way to generate additional income in their lives, or to replace their existing income altogether. The Freedom Challenge is designed to pass my skills and knowledge down to my students, so that they can use their new skills to go after their personal dreams. I’ve had thousands of students who have taken my courses and DVDs and I’m glad to see how many of these students have duplicated my models and achieved success. The Freedom Challenge is much more rewarding to me than day trading alone, because it allows me to pass down my skills and knowledge to others so they can achieve their own success in the stock market and take control of their own family’s financial future.
Please tell us a little about what the money you’ve earned from your course has done for you.
Most of my earnings come from day trading and not from the course sales. I put the profits into my savings account and use some of it to pay for my daily expenses. One thing that I didn’t expect to happen but I find that the course is able to do the most is to help my close friends who I work with earn a healthy income and take part in my success by contributing their unique talents to my business. They say that the top is lonely and to bring your friends with you, so I find that this vehicle gives me a better opportunity to do that in a more collaborative way with the people who mean the most to me, whereas day trading is me just earning money for myself. It feels good that I was able to bring my friends along with me on this journey.
In addition to revenue are there any numbers you would like to share?
I don’t remember exactly how things started because it was such a long time ago, but things have moved pretty quickly since day one. For a few years, the Freedom Challenge has generated over 50 daily email subscribers who are looking to learn more about the program. In the past few months, numbers have dropped a bit, but during collaborations, the number of subscribers increases significantly.
I don’t know why, but people seem to be attracted to who I am and what I’m doing. If I had to make an assumption as to the reason behind it, I’d have to say it’s because of the transparency I’ve provided since the first day I began trading, and possibly to how personable I am since I don’t come across like the other “gurus” who sell financial education products. People have commonly said that I’m a lot more down-to-earth and realistic than the louder voices in my space.
The most important thing that I do to maintain my growth is continue to create content weekly, so that people can educate themselves further about the stock market and how it works. -Steven Dux Click To TweetI’d say that the biggest challenge I’ve faced during this time is when COVID hit as content production took a bit of a hit on our end. Instead of spending time collaborating on videos with influencers in person, my team and I stayed indoors and quarantined. At first, it limited creativity a bit for what I’ve shared publicly on my YouTube and social channels, but we overcame that hurdle.
What has creating your course done for you personally?
Creating the Freedom Challenge has done so much for me personally. I gained a lot more confidence, especially since the course requires me to work live in front of so many people. I used to be such a shy person, especially back when I was in college. Now I’m a lot more outgoing and my confidence has increased significantly. I even was able to get more into speaking publicly.
What’s even better is when I start to see the success that my students go through.
Do you have a story of a transformation from any of your clients?
I’m so happy with the results that my students have seen from the Freedom Challenge. We have several students who have turned thousands of dollars into millions, and many more six-figure and five-figure traders too. I get messages all the time from my students who tell me about their successful trades and how day trading was able to make an impact in their everyday lives, from helping their children to setting up retirement funds, and from getting out of debt to replacing their existing job with something that is a lot less strenuous on their soul.
What advice do you have for people just starting out?
For people who are just starting out, the advice is simple and you probably heard it in the past. But there are no shortcuts in life.
- You cannot get rich quick.
- You have to control your greed.
- Everything needs to be done in a step-by-step process.
- You can’t jump seven steps ahead in the process at once.
- Always have discipline in your life and when you trade.
I wish I knew this when I first started day trading. If I did, I probably wouldn’t have lost half my money in the first month of trading. I just jumped head first into the stock market and thought it would work. But the second time in, I made sure to be so much more precise in what I did.
Learn more about Xiuxian Du (Steven Dux) of stevenduxi.com:
