An Unbiased Review Of Roland Wolf's Free Masterclass
An unsponsored post, and sharing my notes from the masterclass
Overview
Tuesday, November 21, 2023 at 4:30PM Arizona time.
I checked X and saw Roland Wolf was offering a free masterclass in the Phoenix area the next day.
He had only 2 spots left, and I immediately responded and hit his DM’s.
I had watched his YouTube videos before and also saw him on a podcast. I knew he was one of the more popular long biased traders in small-caps.
Being long biased myself, I couldn’t pass this up.
It’s great to watch YouTube videos, but it’s even better to be there in person. There’s less distractions, and it’s easier to focus when the person is standing right in front of you.
First Contact
Roland immediately responded minutes after my comment.
My heart was pounding from excitement.
I was going to meet and learn directly from one of the biggest and baddest long traders in the small cap game. Incredible!
As time went on though, my DM’s stayed silent.
Some doubts started creeping into my head:
Did he really have another spot?
Did it get filled right before I messaged him?
Or maybe he’s really busy and just needs some time to get back to me
As the night dragged on, I began to grow more pessimistic there was a spot. But I knew that Roland has a lot on his plate: he runs a trading community, was traveling, and was putting the masterclass on as a last-minute, spur of the moment decision.
He was probably swamped.
Falling back on my experience in the corporate world, shortly before bed, I sent the “polite reminder” DM:
This was my last shot. If he didn’t respond, then he likely filled all the available seats.
I went to bed preparing myself for the worst. It would suck, but he’s a popular trader and teacher, plus he would be streaming the masterclass live on YouTube, so I could still catch it anyway.
The Next Day
Wednesday, November 22, 2023 at 5:45AM Arizona time.
I check X.
What the hell…
At 1:11AM Arizona time, Roland had messaged me back:
My gut instinct was right. This guy was just swamped with work, travel, and family obligations.
It was on.
The Masterclass
Upon arriving at the WeWork, the room was packed. There were around 20 of us packed in a tight room, and we needed to borrow chairs from outside the conference room.
For the next 4 hours, I would have my existing perspective of the small cap market demolished and rebuilt from the ground up.
There were a lot of different things that he touched on in the masterclass. The overall content can be divided into three categories:
His process
How the small cap market works
Breaking down AGIL as an example
I’ll go over each category, pulling directly from my notes. If you’re interested in the original masterclass, you can watch it in its entirety on YouTube.
Process
Roland is always gauging the strength of the market by looking at the last runner. The last few days, SGD/SGBX were running hard.
He uses these runners as blueprints for the next runners. Since SGD started its run from below 1.00, he’ll scan and try to identify the next runner as also coming from below 1.00.
He’ll look for as many matching variables as possible. He’ll try to find similar float, similar industry, anything that could potentially give him an edge in a sympathy play.
Normally, his premarket scanner only has 2 criteria:
$50,000 dollar volume
5% change
He admitted this returns a wide number of stocks, but it helps with being aware of the bigger picture. This week specifically, he added a new criteria: stocks under 0.50, due to SGD.
He mentions he uses Dilution Tracker, which is one of the few tools he uses besides his scanner and his trading software. He mentions he uses it to look up filings, but didn’t get much deeper than that.
Roland uses the daily chart to identify levels from previous high volume days. Why? Because there are probably bagholders from those days that could act as selling pressure.
From there, he went into mapping out levels from the premarket. He recommends using the 15-minute timeframe to confirm your levels.
How do you confirm your levels are accurate? Keep it simple: wherever price bounces off of. If it bounces from above and goes higher, it’s support. If it bounces from below and goes lower, it’s resistance.
The process part was the thinnest section of the masterclass, but I can see why. It’s free, and it’s being streamed live on YouTube.
How The Small Cap Market Works
This was the most eye opening part for me.
When I first started trading, I was especially focused on patterns and setups. I’m a hands on kind of guy, and I loved getting into the charts and finding what worked. This is great, because I’m willing to get my hands dirty and do the hard work.
But I ended up missing the bigger picture and how all the puzzle pieces fit together.
This is what Roland calls the “macro” perspective: understanding how the banks, the companies, and other large players pump and dump the stock. This is personally where I found the most value.
How Small Caps Are Rigged
According to Roland, in small caps, there’s usually a large market participant who has a lot of shares, on the order of millions, acquired for cheap. Who is this large player? It can change, and isn’t important.
The important thing is someone has millions of share from much lower and wants to make money on it. How would you make money on a stock with a small float that can be easily manipulated?
You send out a news release that gets retail excited. “They’re curing cancer!” “New business partnership with ACME Company!” “Revolutionary AI product!”
The stock shoots up hard in the premarket, and keeps running into the open.
Impatient shorts start their positions, get squeezed and cover higher, longs chase the stock, and it ends up 200-300% higher, where the large player is now able to dump their stocks at a massive profit.
This is the general cycle of a small-cap stock:
Large player has shares from lower
News catalyst sends the stock higher from retail involvement
Once the stock has climbed up to a maximum frenzy, the large player begins dumping their position
The important thing is that the large player will unload their position when liquidity is at its maximum: when stubborn shorts have been squeezed to death and buy to cover, when FOMO longs can’t stand it anymore and finally bomb in.
Note that this is where the maximum BUYING from retail is occurring for both longs and shorts. And who’s selling? The large player.
As Roland says, you want to align yourself with the large player. You don’t want to be buying where they’re selling. You want to be long from lower, and selling alongside them.
Breaking Down AGIL
The next part of this was where it all came together. Roland broke down the key market participants:
Dumb longs
Smart longs
Dumb shorts
Smart shorts
Market makers/Institutions/Algo’s
He focused the most on dumb longs, because these are the people that he’s interested in helping the most.
Roland would return to this point repeatedly: most longs are Billy’s (watch the recorded masterclass for more context) and get screwed buying HOD breakouts. Why does Billy buy HOD breaks?
According to Roland, the most common strategy for longs in small caps is to buy HOD breaks. I think there is some degree of truth to this, but I think there is a stronger explanatory factor: buying at high’s is the natural impulse of retail.
They want to buy the stock only when it’s safe, because they are fearful it goes down on them. And it’s only safe when it becomes an obvious long with big green bars. And what is obvious, is obviously wrong.
Roland says you want to do the exact opposite. You want to align yourself with the big players and sell to Billy at the top.
From here, Roland gave a high level overview of his strategy using the chart above.
Roland’s Approach
Roland’s general strategy incorporates multiple concepts. The macro perspective, the current strength (or lack thereof) in small caps, and average retail trader psychology. Then he buys as close to LOD as humanly possible. Why?
Because this is, by definition, the best possible price. He looks for the stock to open weak, and give him a bottoming pattern, and then he’ll look to enter. His first sells are usually at VWAP, or back to the opening price of the stock.
He may hold a small partial for a bigger move in the event the market is strong and stocks are running 200-300%, but he’s okay with his profit targets. He said he used to suffer from FOMO for having his profit targets so low when the stock would run another 100% higher.
But he’s gotten over that as he has a repeatable process and he’s made peace with missing a big runner every now and then.
This was the basic jist of it. Obviously, he can’t give away his secret sauce in a free masterclass. But you can see just how powerful and non-intuitive his strategy is.
Closing Thoughts
I thoroughly enjoyed the masterclass. Roland delivered a tremendous amount of value for free, and he even overdelivered by continuing to teach for another hour past the scheduled end time.
Personally, I learned a tremendous amount by seeing the game from the macro perspective. Getting into small caps, you have a gut feeling the game is rigged, but I couldn’t put my finger on how it was rigged.
Roland broke it down and explained in detail how everything fit together.
Placing emoji’s on the chart to show where different participants were gave me a breakthrough in how I should be using average retail psychology in my own trading.
Roland’s system has a lot of edge and I suspect it will continue to have edge for two reasons.
The first is because of how human psychology works. There’s something about how greed and FOMO kick in at the top, and how fear kicks in at the bottom. But Roland is doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing.
Unless human psychology fundamentally shifts, Roland will continue to have edge in this area.
The second reason is because he’s identified the big players and their agenda, and he’s reverse-engineered their approach for himself so he can take advantage of them.
The last point I want to make is that by buying close to low of day, he’s reducing risk at a systematic level, and can be viewed as another “layer” of risk management. It’s been incredibly eye-opening getting a high level view of what a 7-figure trader’s system looks like.
Thanks for reading, and feel free to subscribe.
Epilogue
Friday, November 24th, 2023
After attending the masterclass, I took advantage of Roland’s Black Friday special of 40% off his membership.
There’s a lot of education you get access to:
Video lessons
Previous bootcamps
Previous live trading sessions
Trader therapy
Day trading guide
There’s a huge amount of content, although one thing I am concerned about is the gaps in between uploads. For example, in his video lessons there’s a 3 year gap from April 2020, until January 2023. There’s a smaller 7 month gap from April 2023 until November 2023.
There’s also a 4 month gap in his live trading webinar from May 2023 until September 2023.
There’s a few reasons why this could be happening. Maybe personal life got in the way. Or maybe they were streamed live, but not uploaded.
Despite this, I’m still optimistic and excited to dive deeper into his content. Based on my experience of his free masterclass, I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt.