6 Lessons From Competing in USIC 2024
Reflecting on a year of growth (guest post by Clement Ang)
Clement Ang is a part-time trader based in Hong Kong, who returned 79.3% in USIC 2024:
I always enjoy guest posts on The Trading Resource Hub, particularly when they cover new ground, reflecting experience I lack. Since lessons from competing in USIC certainly qualify, I’m handing over the keys to Clement this week.
Note: I only edited. All views expressed are Clement’s.
Clement’s background
Trading has been my passion since my university days.
My very first encounter with the markets came when my Mum left me some money in late 2019 and asked me to buy HSBC Holdings (SEHK:5) on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Watching the price go up piqued my interest, thinking this was easy money (as all beginners would).
Of course, the 2020 Covid crash hit, which kick-started my way down the trading rabbit hole.
Five years and a whole market cycle later, I decided to participate in USIC 2024.
To me, the competition was about:
Accountability
Refining my trading process under pressure
Benchmarking my skills against those of others
Additionally, I started a public journal on 𝕏 to document my journey, keeping me true to my goals and transparent with my progress.
While 2024 was a relatively easy market to trade, it still came with its challenges.
In my opinion, these allowed me to emerge a much better trader on the other side. 2024 was a year of immense growth, as the competition spurred me to continue refining my trading style/strategy, and helped me connect with like-minded individuals who understand and share the same struggles on this lonely journey.
For these reasons, I’m competing again in USIC 2025! But first:
Time to reflect on my learnings and growth from competing in USIC 2024 as a discretionary speculator in US equities.
In this stack, I’m sharing six key takeaways:
Routine is non-negotiable
The market is always right
Concentration over diversification
The importance of progressive exposure
Risk management is your top priority
Treat trading as a performance sport
1. Routine is non-negotiable
Routine doesn’t guarantee success, but without it, failure is almost certain.
A routine helps:
Prepare for different market scenarios
Achieve the right mindset
Stick to your plan
Personally, I always go into each trading day with my market diary, detailing my take on the market, as well as the main tickers I look to focus on that session.
A commonality I found in successful traders was that they always come into the trading session prepared.
Most people are under the impression that trading is all about calling audibles and sitting at a desk, trading in and out of positions all day — but it’s not. The most successful traders I know approach the trading day with everything pre-meditated.
Many don’t realise that the bulk of the work (at least, for swing traders) is done after market hours:
Flipping through hundreds of charts every day to cull down to a manageable watchlist.
Doing post-trade analysis to ensure they stay aligned with the market.
As with most professions, being prepared is half the battle.
This ensures that you can stay calm and approach things through an objective lens. At the end of the day, you only make emotional decisions if you’ve set yourself up for surprises.
Being prepared by thoroughly thinking through how to act under different scenarios sets you up for success during the trading day.
2. The market is always right
It’s crucial to align your trades with market movements rather than fight them. (At least, for trend-following strategies.)
This includes quick exits from losing positions and allowing profitable trades to grow. Understanding that markets move based on collective actions of many, not the will of one, fosters a strategy where you ‘join’ rather than ‘fight’ the market.
The equity markets are ultimately a mechanism of supply and demand.
When a share price is being bid up, it simply means that demand is outstripping supply, and buyers are willing to pay up more to own shares of a company.
Conversely, when a share price is being offered lower, it simply means that supply is outstripping demand.
As a retail participant, the edge lies in figuring out what institutions are doing and positioning yourself to join their bandwagon. Therefore, it’s vitally important to listen to the market and what participants are doing with their money, as opposed to listening to other people’s opinions.
As Brian Shannon likes to say:
“Only Price Pays.”
3. Concentration over diversification
Contrary to common advice, I advocate for concentration rather than diversification.
Looking at my trading stats for 2024, the bulk of my returns originated from seven winners: $AGQ, $APP, $DJT, $IBIT, $INOD, $RDDT and $UPST, which I’ve discussed in more detail on 𝕏:
Having a concentrated portfolio of a few positions also ensures you can pay close attention to each stock in your portfolio.
At the same time, this allows you to really put yourself in a position to outperform the general market index, since you can put a larger percentage of your portfolio into each position.
As billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller remarks:
“I like putting all my eggs in one basket and then watching the basket very carefully.”
4. The importance of progressive exposure
Closely related to the point of concentration, it’s also important to ‘earn the right’ to trade larger positions.
Trend-following strategies won’t work in every market environment. In fact, it doesn’t work in most market environments. Therefore, it’s extremely important to:
Understand under which market conditions your strategy works.
Only increase exposure on the heels of success.
If you buy a stock coming from a 100% cash position, it only makes sense to increase exposure when that first buy is showing a profit.
With the unrealised profit (or realised profit if your strategy involves taking partials at risk multiples), you can then finance another trade if the next stock is setting up according to your rules of engagement.
As this progresses, and the market continues to reward you for the risk you’re taking, you’ll naturally begin trading larger in a good market environment. Conversely, you’ll also be trading at your smallest in a poor market environment.
This approach was exemplified by my $RDDT trade — my biggest winner in 2024.
This trade highlighted the importance of easing your way in, progressively building exposure on the heels of traction, then pressing it when market conditions reward you for taking additional risk.
$RDDT was initially a 0.3R risk position (1R representing 1% of my overall account equity), as I eased my way back into the market from a 100% cash position.
That said, the stock offered multiple opportunities to add to my position as the market continued to trend higher. As a result, I was able to build the position from a low-cost basis, adding to it as it set up again while riding the trend.
Building concentrated positions doesn’t necessarily entail higher risk…
…if you can manage the trade such that you’re always improving your worst-case scenario where possible, then use unrealised profits from the initial position pre-earnings gap to finance the adds later.
That’s how you build concentrated positions in a low-risk manner.
In hindsight, if I had to nitpick, I could have afforded to be more aggressive in playing the post-earnings gap up. That said, hindsight trading doesn’t benefit me — but it offers a learning point as I continue to build proficiency.
The concept of progressive exposure was one of my biggest learnings this year.
I didn’t fully understand it until I was practising it in my trading.
But as the saying goes:
“Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.”
Taking things slow in terms of market exposure allows you time to gather that market feedback and rationally decide on your next steps:
Are current positions working?
Are there more setups in your watchlists?
Based on your existing thematic awareness, do those setups have high odds of working? In other words, do they belong to themes in play?
This protects you during whipsaw markets, when things work one day and reverse entirely the next.
5. Risk management is your top priority
Effective risk management separates the professionals who achieve superperformance from the amateurs.
It’s all about building failure into your trading strategy to withstand inevitable losses and risk of ruin.
I distinctly remember having a conversation with Christian Flanders — one of the top USIC performers in 2024 — over dinner, and recounted myself hitting a little bit of a trading roadblock after the killer trade in $AGQ that sent my equity curve up the moon.
Aside from remarking that I was probably suffering a bout of winners’ tilt, Christian recommended slashing my risk per trade in half after every losing trade until I gained traction again.
And look at our respective returns for 2024: +433% (Christian) vs +79% (me).
When looking at his trading performance by month, notice how Christian kept his drawdowns for most months below 5% — super impressive!
Plus, Christian was only profitable for 6 out of 12 months, but that didn’t stop him from returning +433% for the year.
Having a robust risk management system in place allows you to survive the bad trading periods, when your strategy isn’t in vogue, because losses work geometrically against you. A 50% equity drawdown requires a 100% gain, just to get back to even!
Therefore, preserving your mental and financial capital is vitally important so that you come out relatively unscathed to take advantage of the next market opportunity.
When you take care of the downside, the upside will eventually work itself out for you.
So, cut those losses short, let winners run, and you can have a triple-digit year even if you’re not profitable for six months of the year (as illustrated by Christian’s monthly breakdown).
Risk management is a key element I’m working on in 2025.
While I’ve found myself to be good at trading for performance and stepping on the gas during good market conditions, I need to better contain my downside for consistent superperformance.
6. Treat trading as a performance sport
Trading requires preparation akin to that of an athlete.
This means facing the gruelling demands of the financial markets with proper:
Rest
Diet/nutrition
Preparation (physical and mental)
As a part-time swing trader juggling a day job, family and trading, I generally get about 6½ hours of sleep a day, which, frankly speaking, isn’t enough.
Some days, I fall asleep in front of the screen with open positions, just because I had a very long day at work and was exhausted even before the markets opened. I’ve also not had the best diet or frequent (enough) exercise routine to be in the best physical shape I’d like to be.
Purely through observation — no hard numbers to back this up — this has had some impact on my trading last year.
So, coming into 2025, my goals don’t just revolve around trading, but also fitness, diet and sleep. Managing my time and caring for myself is important to ensure I last in this business over the long term.
Conclusion
In sum, these were the six biggest takeaways I had trading ‘under fire’ this year in USIC.
While these lessons are hardly new, participating in last year’s USIC truly reinforced these concepts for me. Understanding the theory is one thing, but actually practising and understanding the nuances are quite another!
I believe my journey towards achieving trading superperformance starts here.
I aim to continue addressing the key issues for my trading:
Being more rigorous in managing my drawdowns through position sizing and progressive exposure.
Getting a minimum of 7–7½ hours of sleep a night. That additional (half an) hour makes a huge difference!
Diet changes:
Switching out coffee with tea. I’m currently two weeks into this change, and have already noticed a huge difference in my focus (much more controlled) and appetite.
Introducing fruit into my breakfast and increasing my intake of vegetables, while reducing my intake of red meat.
Physical exercise: introducing two sessions of cardio a week, on top of my two sessions of weight training a week.
I hope this reflection piece inspires some ideas (if any) for those seeking improvement in your journey.
Let’s make 2025 our best year yet!
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