Your First 90 Days: A Practice Plan With Drills

Knowing the steps and having the skill are different things, and the gap between them is repetition.

The beginner path is the what. This is the how much, for how long, and how to know whether it is working. Twelve weeks of specific drills, with a decision point at the end.

Nothing here requires money beyond one small position in week nine.

Weeks 1 and 2: the three prohibitions

Goal: you can screen an asset yourself rather than looking up our verdict.

Read: riba, gharar, maysir, then the methodology. The fiqh module of our course is free and covers this ground with the reasoning laid out.

Drill 1. Explain riba to a family member out loud, without notes, in two minutes. If you cannot, you have read it rather than learned it.

Drill 2. Pick five assets we have not written articles about and screen them yourself using the three layers and the property test. Write your verdict and one sentence of reasoning for each. Then compare to our published verdicts.

Where you disagree with us, write down why. That is the most valuable output of the entire fortnight, and if your reasoning is sound you have learned the thing that matters, which is independence from anyone's list including ours.

Do not open a chart this fortnight. It will feel like the productive thing and it is not.

Weeks 3 and 4: chart literacy

Goal: you can look at a daily chart and describe what happened without using a pattern name.

Read: candlesticks, then market structure.

Drill 3. Fifty consecutive daily candles on Bitcoin, one written sentence each describing what buyers and sellers did. Tedious, and it is the exercise that builds fluency faster than anything else.

Drill 4. Mark structure on ten daily charts of screened assets, with the current price hidden. State the trend. Then reveal.

Drill 5. Take one moment on three timeframes, weekly, daily and four-hour, and write whether they agree. Do this five times. When they disagree, write the sentence explaining why.

Measure: whether your structure markings are consistent when you return to the same chart a week later. If they are not, you are marking to fit an opinion.

Weeks 5 to 8: zones, which is most of the skill

Goal: you can distinguish a zone worth trading from a box on a chart.

Read: support and resistance versus supply and demand, then the spot-only adaptation.

Drill 6. Mark thirty demand zones across daily charts of screened assets. For each one log four fields: fresh or tested, with or against the higher-timeframe structure, where the asset sat in its range at the time, and what happened on first return.

Thirty is the number where the pattern becomes visible without anyone telling you. Fresh zones aligned with structure behave differently from the rest, and discovering that in your own log is worth more than being told.

Drill 7. Backtest by scrolling. Cover the right side of the chart, advance one candle at a time, and record what you would have done. No money, no pressure, and it compresses months of experience into weeks. This is what the course does live with students on BTC and SOL, and it is the single highest-value exercise in the whole plan.

Drill 8. Mark five supply zones and write, for each, what you would sell and how much. Exits get almost no attention in trading education and they are half of your job, because you cannot short.

Measure: your hit rate on Drill 6. It will be lower than you expect. That is the correct finding and it is why sizing matters more than zone quality.

Weeks 9 to 12: execution

Goal: you have followed a written plan with real money, at a size that cannot hurt you.

Read: order types and sizing, then the risk rules.

Drill 9. Write the one-page plan first. Maximum percentage per asset. What you own and why in one sentence, without referring to price. The level or the fact that would make you sell. And the rule that you never fund a position with money you owe.

Drill 10. One position. Limit order at a zone you marked. Size you would be unbothered to lose entirely. Scale in across the zone in three portions rather than one.

Drill 11. Withdraw it to your own custody, verify the recovery by wiping and restoring the device, and solve the inheritance problem. Do this while the amount is small.

Drill 12. Start the two ledgers. Zakat on one side, purification on the other, same annual date, never mixed. Our portfolio tracker keeps the transaction ledger these obligations need.

The journal, which is the only thing that compounds

Four fields per trade, and the fourth is the one that matters.

What I did. Asset, price, size, date.

Why, in one sentence. No price references. If you cannot write it, do not take the trade.

What I planned to do if wrong. Written before entry.

Whether I followed the plan. Yes or no.

That last field is the whole point. A trade that lost money while following the plan is a success in month one. A trade that made money by abandoning the plan is a failure, and it is more dangerous than a loss because it rewards the behaviour that will eventually ruin you.

The Mastermind tier includes monthly journal review for exactly this reason, because the field people misjudge is their own compliance with their own rules.

What not to measure

Profit and loss. In ninety days it is noise. A beginner who made money in their first quarter learned nothing except that this is easy, which is the most expensive lesson available.

Number of trades. More is not better and inactivity is a legitimate state. Ranges are the default condition of markets, not trends.

Whether you were right. Being right about direction and wrong about size is a losing combination. Being wrong about direction with correct sizing is a survivable Tuesday.

Measure plan compliance, journal completeness, and whether your zone log is producing a pattern you can articulate.

Month four: the honest decision point

At the end of ninety days, answer one question. Did you enjoy the work, or only the outcome?

The work is marking zones nobody will see, logging trades that did not happen, and sitting out ranges. If that was tolerable, continue and start increasing size slowly.

If it was tedious and you were only ever interested in the number going up, that is genuinely useful information and the correct response is not to push harder. Build a portfolio, accumulate on a schedule, check it monthly, and get your time back. Most people arrive here and it is not a failure. It is the outcome I would predict for the majority of readers, and it is a completely legitimate way to participate.

Anyone who tells you ninety days makes you a trader is selling something. Ninety days tells you whether to spend the next three years finding out.

The fiqh module and the community are free, along with a large library of free walkthroughs including sessions in English and Dari. Start there, and start with week one rather than week five.