First published March 9, 2026

This episode is a deep dive into Brian Shannon’s swing‑trading process and how he uses Anchored VWAP as a core tool to understand who is in control of price and where meaningful support and resistance actually lie.

Big ideas from the episode

• • Brian emphasizes that price is the single most reliable truth in markets and that indicators (including Anchored VWAP and moving averages) are areas of interest, not guarantees; you still get paid only on price movement, not on levels or indicators themselves.
• • Anchored VWAP is framed as a way to objectively define “who is trapped” and “who is in control” from key events (earnings gaps, major highs/lows, breakouts), often aligning with but independently confirming levels like the 50‑ or 200‑day moving average.
• • He strongly favors swing trading over pure day trading, arguing that process, pre‑defined rules, and emotional control are easier to maintain when trades last days to weeks instead of minutes to hours.

Brian’s trading approach

• • He trades primarily long and short swing trades with typical holding periods of roughly three to six days, occasionally extending to several weeks if a trend persists, using multiple timeframes from weekly down to intraday (65‑, 15‑, 5‑, and 1–2‑minute charts) for precise entries.
• • Position management is highly rules‑driven: he sizes in aggressively at well‑defined inflection points with tight risk, scales out a first third relatively quickly when the market extends (for example near intraday pivot extremes), and then trails stops under successively higher lows while the trend and key moving averages remain favorable.
• • He treats frequent small losses as the cost of doing business and focuses on the “edge calculation” (win rate times average win minus loss rate times average loss), stressing that even very good traders are wrong a large percentage of the time.

Psychology, discipline, and why most day traders fail

• • Brian believes far more traders fail at day trading than at swing trading because intraday trading amplifies emotional errors, impulsive reactions to news, and over‑trading without a structured plan.
• • His main defense is a detailed rule set (entry, stop, scaling, and exit criteria) and a second layer of “meta‑discipline” where he quickly recognizes when he entered a trade for the wrong reasons and exits immediately rather than “giving it a chance.”
• • He coaches students to slow down by asking three questions before entry: where has price come from, where is meaningful supply likely to appear next, and is the prospective reward actually worth the risk to a realistic stop level.

Use of tools: Anchored VWAP, moving averages, and scanning style

• • Brian calls himself the “adoptive father” of Anchored VWAP, crediting the original work to Dr. Paul Levine, and explains how he helped popularize it on modern platforms and in his book.
• • He uses Anchored VWAP as a complementary tool rather than a replacement: true confluence occurs when levels derived from different methods (Anchored VWAP, moving averages, prior support/resistance) line up, unlike stacking multiple oscillators that all say the same thing.
• • His universe is roughly 1,100 liquid stocks; he does bottom‑up work on weekends to build a focused watchlist (about 150 names) based purely on price structure and emerging setups rather than starting from sectors, factor themes, or intermarket relationships.

Views on relative strength, intermarket, and fundamentals

• • For his time frame, he largely dismisses classic relative‑strength and intermarket work, arguing that they matter far more for longer‑term investors than for short‑term swing traders whose trades are driven by near‑term flows and pattern dynamics.
• • He notes that sectors can often start trending before the obvious macro or commodity driver (for example, energy stocks firming while crude still looks weak), which is one reason he prefers to “listen to the chart” rather than over‑intellectualize the setup.
• • Similarly, he views fundamentals as often lagging: weak earnings with rising prices can reflect the market discounting future improvement, so he prioritizes price action and risk management over narrative when making decisions.