315 · Jamaal Ghauri - From Early Crypto to 0DTE Options: Fast Money, Fast Reality

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Markets, speculation and risk. This is the Chat with Traders podcast. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Chat with Traders. This is Tessa, your co-host, and we're in episode 315, which happens to be the first episode of 2026. Happy New Year. I wish all of you a great year ahead. new charts, new data, better discipline, and a lot of opportunities. And I think today's conversation is a great way to kick things off. Today, my co-host Ian chats with Jamal Gauri.

based just outside Philadelphia. Jamal first got exposed to markets at just 14 years old, watching his dad trade early crypto, and a few years later was placing his own trades while working at Chipotle as a teenager. Now in his mid-20s, Jamal's path through crypto, stocks, and then options reflects his full learning curve, early confidence, oversized bets, and a painful reset.

At one point, Jamal ran a small account up aggressively during the post-COVID crash and meme stock era and then gave nearly all of it back in a single sequence of trades. What makes his approach interesting is how he moved away from simply predicting direction toward ranking setups, sizing risk accordingly, and trading volatility and structure rather than just price.

In this conversation, we talk about the evolution of his process, the risk mistakes that nearly ended it, and how he now approaches options through the lens. of volatility and structure, including the strategies he's using inside his own private multi-strategy hedge fund launched last year. Ladies and gentlemen, we're so pleased to present Jamal

Gauri from Pennsylvania. Jamal, how are you doing today? Doing fantastic. How about yourself? Great. Fantastic. It's a pleasure welcoming you to chat with traders. Yeah, absolute pleasure to be here. I've seen the episodes in the past, so we're ready to have a good time. Yeah. Where are you now? So I'm in Pennsylvania, about 20, 30 minutes outside of Philly, actually.

Okay. Whereabouts did you grow up? So I grew up in the city of Philadelphia and then moved out in my teenage years and then been in the area of Bucks County, a little bit of a small town, been there ever since. Fantastic. So tell us about your early years and when was the first time you got attracted to financial markets? Yeah, sure. So it really started when I was young, probably about 14 years old.

when my father got in very early to crypto when Bitcoin was first running up. And I was in middle school or a freshman in high school, very young. I was 14 years old. And he was just showing me what he did. And I would sit there, watch him do it. And from that point really is where my interest peaked. And I figured, you know, this is way more fun than school and homework. I want to be doing this.

Wow. So what year was that when your father was introducing you to crypto? Oh, man, I believe it was maybe 2014 or 2015. Wow. So he was really an early mover in crypto. That was back when it was very obscure. Absolutely, yeah. He was one of the early adopters. I remember him going on about it for forever.

And I didn't really take them seriously. I'm like, oh, it's just an online coin. No one's going to want this. Right. And so did you... did you have any attraction to putting any of your money into any of these coins or or or did you just follow him just see what he did yeah so i i just followed him and then you know i saved up birthday money as a young child and then eventually

I think I saved up like $100 just from, you know, gifts from aunts and uncles. And I just put it in his account with him and he let me buy some of the altcoins. There's obviously Bitcoin and then there was Ethereum. Litecoin was a popular one back then. And that was really my first experience into the world of investing. Wow. And so were you tempted to trade it frequently, like day trading it? Or were you more of a kind of a buy and hold because you thought there was some future potential?

So in reality, I didn't know much of what I was doing. You know, just young me, I was looking at the charts. I thought I knew what I was doing, definitely. But it would really just depend on how busy I was with school, what I had going on. i remember just coming home every single day and if i if i had time i would go go into the account would buy i would sell i would do all of these random actions that probably were more negative than positive

But in my mind, I was increasing the gain. Oh, wow. So your early experiences were positive in trading. Yeah, yeah. So it was very hard to lose money in that stage with crypto. Everything was just going straight up all the time. Realistically, if I just held and didn't make any transactions at all, it would have been a lot better.

But in my mind, I just saw the numbers go up. So I'm like, oh, hey, I must be a genius. Yeah. So tell us about your first loss or drawdown in crypto and how did it feel?

So the first drawdown that would have been in probably the crash of I believe it was 2016 near the end of that four year cycle. And that was the first time I really understood that. these things go up, they can also come down just as fast. And to me, it wasn't a huge hit just because we were able to get in so early, but it was very...

very jolting just to see the value of the account drop, you know, 50% in just a matter of weeks. Yeah. Wow. And so are you kind of shadowing your father and all his trades? Are you pretty much doing? Close to identical trades or were you more off on your own? I was mostly off on my own. I did shadow him for the first, I'd say, month. But realistically, he was smarter than me. He just bought the quality ones and held on to them forever.

I had a lot of fun just going, experimenting, buying, selling, doing all of those useless actions. But it's how I learned a lot. So glad it happened. Was there any particular type of strategy? you were just following the technicals on the chart or did you have a method uh to what you were doing at all or just just experimenting Just experimenting at that stage. So I was still around 14, 15 years old. If I saw something going up super fast, that would be my cue to buy in. Wow, great.

how long did you uh stay with the crypto and and did you ever consider um given your initial positive experiences venturing out into stocks or commodities or any other asset

Yeah, yeah, of course. So from then, I stayed with crypto for a little bit and then I got into stocks next. And then from stocks, I had a portfolio. And again, my dad is the one that introduced me to stocks. At first, I was solely focused on crypto. I didn't really, I knew stocks were a thing. I didn't just pay much attention to it. And he had an account about $3,000 in a Robinhood account at this time. This was maybe two years later.

And he just said, hey, you know, if you want to invest this, do your research, be careful with it. But I would love for you to take it over. And I did exactly that. So that's kind of my transition from crypto to stocks.

And you transitioned from crypto to stocks because you were just kind of curious about trying a new market or did you feel disappointed at all with crypto by the end? A little bit of both. So I definitely did want to try that new market. But absolutely, that happened with crypto. After that drawdown, I kind of took a break for a couple of months. You know, first big loss for every trader. I feel like it's a little bit disheartening.

um so i just didn't trade you know i was focused on school focused on work other things and yeah got back into stocks um a little bit after that the year was probably 2019 at that point right before covid And that was, you know, so a good time has lapsed between the crypto and stock transition. So tell us a little bit about your early stock experiences, your methodology. If you had any, what did you look at? What did you invest or trade?

Yeah, so when I first got into stocks, I remember I was about 17 years old. I was working at Chipotle at that time, making $8 an hour. And I had a portfolio that my father had given me of $3,000.

And I really just invested in classical investing advice, a diversified portfolio. I had gold, blue chip stocks, things of that nature. And I loved it because... i would make eight dollars an hour at my job but then i would pull up my portfolio during my break and i would see oh well i'm up a hundred dollars over here this is way better

um yeah so were you um did you look at then more of a kind of a buy and hold approach or did you dive deep into different ways of trading yeah so at that period uh i i really went

very focused into the buy and hold approach. I subscribed to so many fundamental analysis newsletters. I was reading Warren Buffett books, everything I could do. just to figure out how to even read a balance sheet and do all these things that really mattered in the long run. But eventually, I did get tired of going on social media and seeing people have...

100 percent gains in a day and i'm like well how is that possible and then eventually i inevitably switched to the dark side and started trading options oh wow uh you you jumped from a more of a long-term buy and hold to trading options is that because of what you saw in those videos the seductive videos yeah yeah exactly so you know there's me is 17 years old and i'm seeing on instagram just

all of these people with with lamborghinis and yachts and boats and all of these uh the trading gurus the classic ones you'll see online who you know in hindsight a lot of them are probably not knowing what they're talking about. But to me, that was like, wow, I want exactly that. And I ended up buying a course from this one individual who did solely options trading. And that's really what got me into it.

And what, so is this still 2019 just before COVID? Yeah, so this is 2019 right before the crash. So, you know, around that time, whatever the date would be. So tell us about some of these early option trades. What kind of strategies did you get into? Yeah. So, I mean, learning options itself is obviously a very...

a very hard thing to do. So I remember staying up like all night for a week straight, just learning at learning the Greeks, learning the option structures, just everything. The first time I pulled up even an options chain. i had no idea what i was looking at right so um just i spent the first week learning and then eventually my strategy was very similar to crypto i guess you could now classify it as breakout trading

or momentum trading, whatever you want to call it, where I would just go on these usually penny stocks that were up 50% in a day. And my thesis behind the trades were, well, it's up 50% right now. What keeps it from going up another 50%? And again, in hindsight, maybe not the best thing to do, but that was definitely my early learning curve. Well, you mentioned penny stocks. Are there really many penny stocks that also have options on them? Or were they separate endeavors that you got into?

No. So the penny stocks that I trade, I did options on them. A lot of them don't have options on them. And, you know, back then I didn't even know that. It's probably not the brightest idea just because of the implied volatility that you're paying against. Obviously the huge spread on those. So you're automatically at a loss from the start. I remember entering trades and being down like 40% right on the entry. And I'm like, you know, why, why does, why does this happen?

So a lot of flaws with that strategy. So, I mean, you were down so much right out of the gate. Did you just place market orders and get bad fills or was the bid-ask spread just obscenely wide? A little bit of both. Yeah. So I did market orders because I didn't really even know how to properly structure a limit order. I've tried in the past and I wouldn't get filled and it just was a turnoff for me. So I only stood.

only only took to market orders exclusively so obviously the bid-ask spread and then just not timing the market very well buying the highs and then there's a pullback just a combination of everything everything that could possibly go wrong was going wrong at that time upon reflecting back at that time did you feel that you had um like some impatience uh the urge to rush to get into the trade and thus that therefore it's like

That's why you placed a market order? Yeah, that was definitely a big part of it. I just saw the stock was going up and instead of waiting for a pullback or a confirmed breakout, whatever technical signal. I might base my trade off of now. I didn't want to miss it. I was very greedy and still at this stage really didn't have a real strategy. So really just throwing blind darts at this point.

And so the option course that you signed up for, the instructor was teaching people how to play options on penny stocks specifically? So he actually wouldn't teach a specific strategy. It was more just how to buy options, what the Greeks mean, all of these sorts of things.

It was a whole like one of those trading communities and they did do trade call outs and things of that nature. And later down the line, I did start adopting a strategy very similar to theirs, just learning from their call outs. So I did end up flipping to more of a swing trading strategy, a contrarian based strategy where I would use indicators like Bollinger Bands, RSI.

uh divergences specifically and i would look for bullish divergences to line up with the bollinger bands look for some type of reversal play on the daily chart

And that was really when I first developed my own strategy with its own set of rules. And that's what took my trading from complete guesswork to actually first beginning to build a system. So this was a... a process that you kind of develop yourself right exactly i got the base knowledge of options from the course and then just by putting together so many youtube tutorials the the call outs in that trading community and then other stuff i would see online

I just got together a list of my favorite indicators that I've seen from everywhere and mushed it all into one very roughly done strategy. Do you remember any early trades that you did buying calls on these high-flying penny stocks? Can you recall any ticker symbols or stories that you might be able to share? and uh your experiences the penny socks aren't aren't too memorable uh didn't have much success with them but also no huge failures so nothing sticks out to me

One of the first real divergence plays that I took that I remember just because it was such a fantastic win was on Paramount, which back then was, I believe, Viacombe. The ticker was... V-I-A-C and it had a huge runoff and it was just super extended. You could tell that, you know, it was almost the exact opposite of my previous strategy where I would have went long at that point just because of how much it had went up.

It was every day. It was another green day. And eventually it fit my strategy rules. We had a divergence. We had it tapping on the upper Bollinger band. And I figured, you know, this is very extended. And that is where I bought puts. And it was just dumb luck that that very next day they had an announcement that they were filing for bankruptcy or some other type of very negative news. I don't know what it was.

But the stock just absolutely collapsed. I think they had over a 50% drawdown in just three days. And those puts ended up going something crazy, like 6,000%. And that was one of my first trades using that strategy. So it was very, very, very memorable. Wow. So 6,000% return. I mean, you must have been buying what out of the money puts very short dated. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Weekly puts, very short expiration and out of the money. Correct. So that's.

For you to go out on a limb and because that is obviously a risky options play. How to what degree were your successes up to that point that gave you the confidence to.

to go out of the money and be short dated because that goes against what a lot of option gurus say is oh no you want to buy options that are you know very high delta long term options because you can lose your shirt on them so Right, yeah. So my strategy, and again, it was still very new at this point for me switching to it. So it was more of what I like to call the lottery ticket strategy, where I would take 10 types of those plays, nine of them.

probably wouldn't do so good. I would either let them go to zero or get stopped out. But those one in 10 would just absolutely take off and pay for, you know, the previous nine losses. i would count myself as barely profitable at that stage nothing significant at all not beating the market uh but you know still still part of that very large learning curve it did take me longer than most to finally become profitable

You mentioned earlier about your foray into penny stocks. It sounded like you didn't gain much, you didn't lose much, but yet you're... dabbling in a very volatile asset with options that many people can get their account wiped out. Did you have any do you feel was it just dumb luck or did you have a method like a risk management?

protocol uh so for a solid year it was just dumb luck including that trade you know obviously i couldn't have predicted that news was going to come out uh and then after that and the next noticeable one i believe i did catch the the GameStop move coming downwards. So missed it on the way up, but caught it on the way down. And I took my portfolio from 3,000 all the way up to 80,000 in about six months. And this is still me.

a 17 year old child working at Chipotle. So I quit my job at that point. I was on top of the world. I remember every day I would be looking at cars, what car I'm going to buy, looking at $10,000 watches online. And then finally, after one very terrible trade of me almost full porting my account on XPEV, an EV stock from China, I blew my entire account. And went back under $3,000. I believe it got stopped out around $500 is where I sold. So that was how I blew my account after all that.

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So your performance was kind of what you say, more or less flatline, but you still had the confidence to go in on these risky bets and you didn't get burned. So you didn't get, you didn't have any early account blowups or trauma. uh in the early years is that accurate yeah that's that's absolutely accurate and i i do believe that's why i ended up blowing my entire portfolio because

The strategy overall, I did have a high win rate. If I just knew how to manage risk, I probably would have been fine. But, you know, I did get cocky. And once I doubled my account and got it to roughly, you know, nine, ten thousand dollars.

i just figured like oh i have it all figured out i'm just going to full port my account on every trade and that that was how i even got to eighty thousand dollars in such a short amount of time and obviously when you're full putting your account you're always one trade away from demise And I took it one trade too far. So how did the crash of 2020, the COVID crash, how did you fare during that? And what kind of positions were you in?

didn't really trade throughout that entire thing because i was uh really just a little bit too nervous to be doing the option plays at that time so and it was a fairly quick crash obviously it happened very fast But really, once it bottomed out and then a week or so went by and it started rebounding, that's when I gained the confidence to really start taking trades again.

you know in hindsight if i was trading in the middle of all that i probably would have blown my account much faster learned the lesson earlier and not have to had dealt with all of that pain later but you know just completely missed out on that and learned it later down the line So I imagine given how long that you've been following the options market during the crash of 2020, you couldn't help but notice the implied volatilities.

the prices of the options going sky high. Did you ever want to change your strategy from just going straight long calls or? uh where you find just sticking with that even when the implied volatility was so high and the the options were so expensive Right. So, yeah, actually, I do remember staring at I traded on Robinhood back then. And every time you open the ticker on Robinhood, it'll show you the options and it'll show you the gains and losses you would have had if you were in it.

and i remember every single day opening robin hood and puts her up like 500 almost every single day so uh from that point forward i actually preferred trading puts just because um you know now i know the science behind how they appreciate it faster due to volatility compared to calls. But back then, I wasn't aware about all the other idiosyncrasies, like they decay faster to theta compared to calls as well because there's the crash risk.

But all of these things I only saw reflected in the gains and losses. I didn't know the intricacies, but I did actually prefer to trade puts. And that's actually what followed.

why I did prefer on stocks like Viacombe and then GameStop to trade them to the downside instead of try to catch the move up. So you said that you were hesitant about... uh being in the market when the market was was crashing and that you waited later right for the market to stabilize well then the market started going back up and and since you liked being inputs

Kind of what were your trades as a market began to stabilize and go back up? How were you able to work with the puts in that situation? So essentially just finding those. Really just sticking to my strategy at that point, that's when I had a good grasp to it. So really just waiting for those indications to line up. I wanted a huge, huge rally, ideally on very high volatility.

I wanted it to be hitting my upper Bollinger bands. I wanted a bearish RSI divergence. All of these indicators that I just put together into one roughly built trading system. And as soon as it would signal. I didn't really take into account the overall direction of the market. I didn't look at relative strength compared to the indexes. I just figured my signals fired. I probably should be in this. And it worked fairly well.

But obviously, as I went on through the years, I realized that there could be a lot of optimization in all this. So you're taking very short-term bets on particular stocks, individual stocks that are way overextended according to your technicals, and for a very short-term drop or describe? uh the time frames and everything right yeah so i would be looking at it on the daily chart that's where i would want my divergence to be that's where i would want the upper bollinger band to hit

And then ideally, I would only hold for about two to three days and just sell my puts at the nearest support level. Whether or not it broke after that, you know, I was typically out by then. But the wins were... pretty sizable anywhere from 100 to 200 percent just because of how risky i was going with the expirations So your count of $3,000, describe the timeframe that you rode the $3,000 count up to the peak of $80,000. How many months or years was that?

So it was about five to six months. It happened very fast again, just because I had no concept of risk management. And yeah, I would just same thing. Look at these daily charts, wait for all of those signals to fire. full port my account or at least put a very big chunk of it. Sometimes I would be in multiple trades at one, say three or four, and those three or four constitute the entire 100% of the account.

But always very, very large bets in terms of percentage of my portfolio. So over a six-month period, you ran your account up $3,000 to $80,000. And by placing big bets, very short-term bets, buying puts on these high flyers that are overextended did you have any um strategy to get out of a losing position or were you fortunate enough to happen to pick the right ones and

your big winners would, uh, outweigh your hopefully small losers. Right. Yeah. So, uh, I would, I would call it unfortunate that I didn't have the system and, you know, it just had a high win rate. Because if I did have a system where I did learn the hard way on how these losses should have worked, again, I probably wouldn't have blown the full account down the line. But realistically, I would just let 90% of them go to zero.

If they were really, really taking off, I would kind of just add to the position over and over. And essentially, you're almost bound to get a bit of a drawdown eventually, especially when you're... looking at such a short time frame maybe the stock is going to continue to go up but you buy puts that open and it just has a very quick flush uh but since you've been dollar cost averaging in that that's all you need you can get out for about break even and then the stock continues higher

So that's what I would always hope to happen. That was kind of my methodology. But again, if we didn't get that, then it would essentially really just go to zero. So it was terrible risk management. Oh, I see. So describe the meme stock. craze what did you do with that uh were you ever tempted to go long i mean quick way to make some money right with some calls you know at that point i was so focused on just a contrarian trading mindset where

I wasn't even considering longs at any point. On GameStop, I did try to short it once and I lost a huge amount of my account. It was like a 20% drawdown in one trade. But then luckily, you know, I was I was patient and I knew that, you know, this this has to end eventually. So I got in one more time and that that was the big one that hit. Got a pretty sizable win on that. It was about, I believe, 200% on a huge red day. But regardless, the implied volatility was just so high that.

I bought the puts so overpriced and it should have been a lot more. And back then I was still kind of confused on why such a big move only yielded 200% when it really should have done. uh something way higher maybe like a thousand percent uh but i ended up getting that win locking it in uh so that kind of offset the prop offset the loss excuse me from from the previous trade and

Still, you're sticking with just straight puts, almost regardless of how high the IV was, because this was working for you and you decided to stick with it. Right. Yeah, exactly. So upon reflection, when you reflected back on those trades, was there ever a time then that you said, hey, maybe I should venture out and try different types of option strategies depending on the IV or what's going on with the stock?

After that trade actually is when I focused on how the IV worked and really took the time to understand it. And that's when I got into really going long on stocks. This was a whole other strategy. i don't want to say abandoned the old one i still traded it here and there when the opportunities showed themselves but my next strategy was a little bit different i wanted compression in stocks that were trending upwards and then i would

buy during that compression period when there's consolidation. And essentially there, I'm buying in low volatility periods and I would wait for a breakout. And I would sell on that breakout, capitalize off of the delta move, of course, in spot price. And then I would also get the added benefits from the increase in the volatility. And those were, were they short-term trades as well? What kind of timeframe?

So those would be anywhere from zero to five days. I would like to trade the hourly and the daily chart on those. Okay. So with your account at 80,000 after six months, describe how it all blew up. It was at $80,000, and that was the peak. As I mentioned, I thought I was on top of the world making my shopping list. And then, as I mentioned, the ticker was XPEV, that company.

You know, it just didn't go so well. I saw that it had a dip and these were actually calls. So these I was going long on and it was a little bit of, you know, I'm unstoppable. I can buy whatever I want and my trade will work. So I got into calls on a dip and, you know, everyone has the same story. You buy the dip and it keeps on dipping. So I averaged down two, three, four, five times until my entire portfolio was in on it.

And I just couldn't bring myself to sell because with my previous strategy, I was so used to, you know, all it takes is one spike and I can get out at break even. But in this case, we didn't really get the spike. It was just absolutely selling off with. no hesitation and i finally cut it at 500 left in my account from the 80 000 and it all went away in one single tree oh my god wow so how long was it uh did it take

to go from 80,000 back down to almost nothing? Pretty quickly, actually, only about a week and a half. What was your mental state at the time? I mean, did you feel like quitting trading altogether? No. So I was definitely a little bit down in the dumps, to put it lightly. But my mindset was, you know, this wasn't my money. This was my father's money. I lost him $3,000.

So I'm going to do whatever I need to do. I'm going to make it back. You know, it might take a little bit, might be hard, but I was very determined on making it back. So what year was this that you? This was about. just just into the start of 2021 now oh okay so wow so this is very short time period um this all occurred during the the run-up so so describe what um what did you do in 2021

Yeah, so 2021, that strategy I just mentioned about the consolidation periods, that's when I started learning that. And again, that experience is kind of why I fell out of love with that. uh divergent strategy just because it didn't work it had a really left a really bad taste in my mouth so switched to the consolidation periods uh liked really just trailing the emas the 10 and the 21.

i would want that i would want the macd crossing i would want volume to be super low during the consolidation and then see a spike on the breakout and that was just very a very very easy strategy to do you have the trend in your favor

It's very easy to spot. There's lots of opportunities all the time. There's always something that's trending. And that, you know, I've seen a lot of success with that really early on. And that's when I fell in love with it. I still trade that strategy to this day, even. But yeah, that, I was able to get the 500 back up to 3,000 in about six months. And how do you find these tightly consolidating stocks? Is there a particular screening tool that you use?

Yeah, so I actually custom built a screener in the Thinkorswim platform. And essentially it would search for squeezes, which are when it uses the Bollinger Bands and Keltner channels. And I would add a few more.

little details as well but those two would essentially put it on the watch list i had a few filters with volume and i didn't want any small cap stocks no penny stocks i liked very liquid stocks with short or not not very wide spreads because i didn't want to get terrible entries and those were essentially just put up on my watch list every day and i would take the best one um every single day

Typically did about one trade a day. If I was already in a trade from the previous day, I wouldn't really look to enter anything. But if there was something that was just perfect, I could possibly be in two or three trades at once. And again, you're holding them for very short timeframes. And if so, were you ever tempted to hold on for the longer term? Those I would hold from about zero to five days.

Some of them, I did see them running even past those five days. I did try holding some of them. I didn't really like it too much because inevitably, you know, some of them. that they would roll over and you end up giving back a large portion of your profit, sometimes even all your profit if you don't trail it properly using the EMAs. So I really just stuck to selling into strength at any key resistance level.

And that obviously gives the best return when you're taking volatility into account as well. So I tended to stick with that on the daily and hourly chart specifically.

Okay, so you have this new strategy now and you're building your account back up, get it back up to $3,000. And then once you got there, you just continued with... with that i mean how did the rest of 2021 uh go for you right yeah so i really just uh kept spamming that strategy day after day i was able to build the account back up

and really just grow it from there. That's really when I first started even becoming profitable is when I had a first strategy that, you know, I understood the risks and everything. And that's also when the most important factor I know. Everyone talks about it and everyone is tired of hearing it. But risk management really is the most important part of trading. And that's when I had a good grasp on how it worked and, you know, the exponential effects of these drawdowns.

And yeah, so from 2021 all the way up until I'd say 2024, early 2024, I specifically only traded that strategy. And that's when I was really profitable right there. So was your risk management just being patient and avoiding the tempting plays, but that did not fit your profile and just waiting it out until the great setups appeared?

So not specifically, no. So I would take most of the setups that came across. I did obviously prefer the higher quality setups, as would any trader. But the way that I did it was not to avoid the... maybe mediocre ones completely, but just allocate a different position size. So I would always rate the setups on a scale from one to 10 on how much I like them. So if I'm looking at a setup, that's maybe a six out of 10, maybe I would risk 1% on it.

And at this point, I was still fairly aggressive. So if I saw something like a 10 out of 10 setup, the most I would risk is 5% of my portfolio on it. And, you know, obviously those quality setups have a much higher win rate. And just using that method of... Really, really being careful about the position sizing, being very, very picky on which stocks to enter and what position size based off all the confluences. That's really what did it for me.

So how did 2021 end for you? So 2021, nothing too crazy. I did about 30% that year. I don't remember if that beat the market. that, you know, the markets have been very bullish over the past five years. But, you know, I was I was very happy with it. It was my first entire year that I was profitable. So I always remember that as kind of the turning point for me. And so you stuck with just simply going long call options for a very short term. And once you fully grasped the whole IV.

Were you ever tempted to short out-of-the-money calls with sky-high IVs on some of these bubble stocks? Surprisingly, no. I just... Don't like the idea. I didn't like it at all. I still don't like it. I have never shorted a call. Just the idea of the risk reward. I've also never shorted a naked put.

I will do credit spreads and things of those nature, but I like the risk to be capped at a certain extent. I like knowing the worst possible scenario. I just hate the idea of having the unlimited downside on a position. So great. So you stuck with this strategy and how did it go in 2022? And what do you still stuck with that breakout strategy? Yeah, so I was sticking with that. In 2022, I did 49%. In 2023, I did much better. I believe it was 103%. So that was one of my better years.

And then, you know, after that, it was typically anywhere from the range of 50 to 100 percent. Very, very, very contingent on the amount of setups I got. And obviously.

uh my trade size that i'm putting on these setups and that's all based off discretionary actions like how how good i think the setup is just based off you know the price action things of that nature uh later down the line i was able to quantify it but back then it was more uh just just intuition at that point and so do you attribute the higher returns in uh 2023

versus the earlier years of due to any kind of refinement or do you just getting better at at picking out the high quality trades the nuances behind it or do you feel it was just kind of the market and luck that you had those higher returns i would love to say that i sat here and got much better at trading that would be fantastic um certainly make me look good but in all reality

That year, just looking back at my trades, I keep a journal of all my trades. I just had an exceptionally high win rate. I didn't really do anything special or change anything. The market was just in favor of the strategy at that time. And I'm sure every trader knows strategies will go through great periods and they'll also go through periods where they underperform.

and you just have to take it for what it is. With that year, I was fortunate to be a little bit lucky. I had the market on my side. That was 2023 when the market recovered off the bear market lows and started. going back up right so that the wind at your back uh helped you um with those that kind of call option strategy

Right. Yeah, it definitely helped a ton, you know, trading with the trend of the overall market matching with the indices. I did take into account strength at that time. That's actually when I first started learning about it. So I was able to use that as an advantage. I'm sure that helped a considerable amount, but definitely can't attribute that to all of the extra success.

So you were successful enough with the stock market. Did you ever feel tempted to go back to crypto or any other markets or you just stuck to your bread and butter? So I just stuck to options from that point forward. I just loved options. The main point was how the volatility works. I just thought it was amazing how you could really just be in a very mediocre trade.

the volatility increases and you're on the right side you pick the right strike prices you can just get outsized returns compared to crypto futures really anything else in the world How did your trading go for what year are we on to now? 2024, 2025? Yeah, so 2024, I had a fantastic year, partly due to luck. So towards the end of the year, around November.

i was up around 80 so still uh still a great year um but then after that i had a fantastic trade on gold actually trading options on the gold index And there was one single trade on that that took me from 80% on that year to 580% by the end of the year. So it went extraordinary well, but again, you know, it was, it was. a large part luck uh but uh you know overall very happy with it regardless so gold tends to uh move rather uh slowly over time uh generally trending um market what

What did you do specifically to get such a big win out of gold? Yeah, so I mean, it was bought in sort of a consolidation period. And then we did have a little bit of a dip back to the exponential moving averages, which is what I like to see. And then during that period, you know, we had the volume kind of confirming that the balance was ending. I had a long-term support line drawed out.

And I risked the entire 5%. It's what I classified as an A-plus setup, a 10 out of 10. And it just bounced super hard. And these were weekly options. So, you know, it just absolutely took off. During this journey, are you sharing any of this with friends or family? And if so, what were their reactions? So not really, you know, I like to keep it a little bit private. I didn't really want my friends knowing what I did. I really started to share it just recently in 2025.

trading for about six to seven years at this point, starting with crypto all the way up until 2025, I actually opened my hedge fund. And when I opened that hedge fund, I actually decided I'm probably going to need investors. I should probably start advertising my returns, telling my friends, my family, my colleagues. And that's when I started publicizing all of it. So what goes into actually starting a hedge fund? Is it a lot of paperwork?

How did you do it? A lot of paperwork, compliance, and too much talking to attorneys. But obviously, I'm sure people are aware it's a very expensive thing to do. That's why I felt it was such a great time to do it after such a great year. But in reality, I knew I wanted to start a hedge fund since I was very early into trading, just getting that first taste of options, really.

So it was a goal for a while. And then once I had that great year, I decided, you know, I have enough capital now. I have enough confidence in my trading. And I'm sure if people see these numbers for the past few years, they would love to invest. So that's really what got me started on it. And then, you know, we worked on it. It took about six months to launch. And we actually got our first launch date of this year in May 8th, to be exact.

excuse the last interruption here this is tessa we hope you're enjoying this episode so far if you love the podcast please give chat with traders the best review you can on whatever platform you're listening from This will help us to keep the episodes coming. Also, if you haven't subscribed to our email list,

please hop on to chatwithtraders.com and click on subscribe so we can keep you posted of information that may be of importance. Thank you. Now back to the chat with our guest. Oh, wow. Well, congratulations on that journey. So with the strategy that you use, have you figured out, is there kind of an upper limit on how much money you can easily deploy?

Yeah, so we actually use a lot of strategies at the hedge fund. We're classified as a multi-strategy hedge fund. Our AUM that we would cap out at is at $150 million. So we foresee us being able to operate perfectly smoothly for at least another three to five years. And then once we get to that point, our strategies would cap out just because of the liquidity issues.

And from there, there are a bunch of solutions, but we're most likely going to have to start really just distributing profits back to investors at that point or closing the fund down. But we probably wouldn't choose that unless we're ready to retire. Oh, yeah. So you mentioned other strategies. What other strategies did you get into and kind of why and how much experience do you have with them?

All the strategies, I'll just list them out very quickly. We do have a version of the original one, the swing trading strategy, where you want to look for a divergence and all of these signals with the Bollinger Bands. An example of that. would be about two weeks ago we had a fantastic swing trade on meta where it gapped down and it just slowly trended down i'm sure you and tons of other people have seen that everyone watches meta

And it ended up shooting up and exactly like we like. It happens very quick with big candles. The volatility goes up. So that's the one strategy we use. Swing trading strategy, we only really get about one trade a month on that one. But we keep it. We love it. It's very easy to monitor. So no point in not using that one.

The second one is the next strategy I learned after that, the breakout one that we just talked about. And then we use two more. And those two are shorter term zero DTE strategies. The first one, what we do.

is our spin on the classic break and retest where we'll mark out the pre-market high and pre-market low. And this is traded on SPY, QQQ, and the blue chip stocks. And we like to do... single leg calls or debit spreads on these zero DTE every single time. We want to break and retest. We have all of these indicators with high volume ATR measures.

We use the RSI. We use something called the DSS Brezzer indicator, which is one of my favorite ones. But a whole bunch of things go into that. And we really only hold those trades for about 5 to 15 minutes. one is one of our highest performing, our second highest performing one, our first and our flagship strategy of the entire fund. What we do actually is zero DTE butterflies on the SPX.

uh and we won't trade them on spy well we'll look at the chart on spy because you can obviously look at the extended hours you don't get that on spx additionally spx is cash settled so you won't be left hanging with anything And what we do is we look at these gamma heat maps. We take into account Charm, all of these market maker tools. We use something specific called Options Depth, which shows it. And we've also created our own tools.

And essentially what we do is 5 to 10 with butterflies that will pin. And it only has a 52% win rate, but the average win on it is 950%. And as you know, these butterflies. So every single trade will close anywhere within 500 to 2000 percent because they're so narrow and you just get great probabilities on them despite the 52 percent win rate. and that is really the the flagship one that we use and these are on short-term um zero dte spy options spx only for yes yep correct correct

Uh-huh. That seems, well, that's quite a high return for an index that is so widely watched. What do you attribute the super high returns that you can get with that? Wouldn't everyone be doing this because it's so widely viewed? Right. You know, I actually had no idea about how this worked. But when I was starting my hedge fund, I was obviously talking to a lot of lawyers and a lot of other members of people now that I'm very close friends with who had hedge funds.

And I met this one person in particular, and I remember his hedge fund was doing 500% every single year for the past, I think it was like nine years. And it just blew my mind that 580% was my best year by far by absolute luck. And this guy was doing 500% consistently. And I didn't believe it at first. He showed me the audited reports of his fund and everything.

And he really taught me so much about how to use things that most most traders actually haven't heard about. You'd be surprised, like these gamma levels, charm. There is obviously options Greeks. But there's actually second-degree derivatives, there's third-degree derivatives, and there's a single fourth-degree derivative of these as well. And all of these that traders don't know about, that is where we get essentially our entire edge.

And we're able to exploit that advantage to get very outsized returns. Hey, quick note for context. After we wrapped this interview, we followed up with Jamal to clarify a few of the performance figures that you just heard and how some of the strategy details were derived. On the example he referenced of another fund doing roughly 500% annually, he told us he's not able to share the name of that fund and described it at a high level as a breakout-based approach using Fibonacci retracements.

key levels. Now on his own flagship strategy, he clarified that it's been live traded for about three years, and that it is zero DTE butterflies exclusively on the SPX, typically built with five or ten point wide structures. The underlying thesis, as he described it, is centered around where price may pin using what he referred to as second-level derivatives. He also clarified the distribution of outcomes.

He stated that approximately 52% of trades fall into the large winner range he described, while the remaining trades typically result in losses of about 50% to 100% of the premium at risk. And finally, on risk-adjusted metrics, he said that due to his funds structure, certain figures aren't shared publicly. and that any information he's able to disclose is available on his website and has been audited by a third party. Wow, that's impressive. So how many, how much?

assets under management are you currently at so we're currently right under 50. wow fantastic uh so to wrap things up what do you struggle with most as a trader and and now and in the past In the past, it was, you know, as the war stories may have indicated, it was most definitely risk management. Now it's really a different set of struggles where I almost.

flip through strategies too much i want to develop even more strategies and you know ever since we got the most recent two our funds has been doing great um and in my head it's like okay well you know they can always be better So I'm always tweaking things and trying to change it up. And usually the changes don't actually end up being an optimization, but it actually takes the stats down. So my biggest struggle is kind of just...

You can kind of classify it as discipline where I already know that a strategy works, but I just need to trust in the strategy, stop trying to mess around with it, find a hundred other things. to do and just sit there, be patient, and wait for the setups to happen. What advice would you give to traders who keep blowing up their accounts but refuse to quit?

As someone that struggled with the same thing, it would definitely be practice risk management. When I first heard that you're only supposed to risk 2% of your account per trade. I was devastated. I didn't know how anyone was supposed to make money like that. But really just make a set of rules that will help you stick to it and just stick to it from that point. It's all about discipline.

Well, great. Jamal, I'd like to thank you for coming on Shot with Traders. Absolutely. It's been an absolute pleasure and I thank you for having me. And how can our listeners get in touch with you? So, you know, we don't actually have a... public website or what we do for our fund. But specifically, I know a lot of gurus have the trading education channels, which I don't have, but anyone is

please feel free to look me up on LinkedIn and shoot me a DM. And I'm more than happy to reply there. Okay. And what's your handle on LinkedIn? It's just my name, Jamal Gari, and that's J-A-M-A-A-L, and then Gari is G-H-A-U-R-I. Fantastic. Thanks for coming on the show. Of course. My pleasure. You've reached the end of this episode of Chat with Traders, but rest assured there are more episodes loaded with real market insight and zero hype on the way soon.

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