What steps helped a student make 28% in three months trading?

What steps helped a student make 28% in three months trading?

Rihari says his student Ali heard about trading in January 2024, joined Rihari's course in March 2024, and by June 2024, about three months later, reported a 28% gain in one night trading the strategy taught in that course. Rihari frames this as the result of six sequential steps, not a quick outcome.

This is Rihari's own account of a single student's experience, shared on his YouTube channel as part of a video titled "Step by step to day trading success." It is not an independently verified trading record, not a published performance statement, and not a claim that other students achieve the same result. Rihari presents it as an example of what following his six-step process can look like, and he says the same process is what he teaches "every single person that comes into my education platform."

Rihari's six steps, in order, are:

1. Choose a mentor who shows consistent results, explains the market in plain language, is transparent about wins and losses, and has demonstrable real trading experience such as public trade breakdowns or live sessions.
2. Study that mentor's full strategy in depth, including entry and exit rules and the market conditions they trade, and ask questions inside the mentorship community rather than staying passive.
3. Backtest the strategy against historical price data using replay software to build win-rate, average-win and average-loss analytics before risking money, then forward test by predicting live charts without placing real trades.
4. Build trading psychology through emotional detachment from losses, journaling the cause of each loss, and disciplined adherence to a trading plan.
5. Open a small live account and begin trading live once analytics and psychology both hold up, expecting gradual improvement and early struggles rather than immediate success.
6. Keep journaling, keep learning and keep refining the strategy rather than giving up when results are slow.

The rest of this article works through each step using Rihari's own explanations, plus two independently sourced statistics on the retail trading and foreign exchange markets for context. Rihari opens the video by calling day trading a topic that "can transform your financial future," while also acknowledging it currently attracts accusations of being "gambling." The video closes by pointing viewers toward a free Discord community offering "exclusive tips, free live analysis" and a downloadable ebook version of the same material; these are promotional elements of the video itself, separate from the six-step framework described below, and are not evaluated in this article.

Why does Rihari say day trading attracts scammers, and why is finding a mentor the first step?

Rihari opens the video by addressing controversy directly, saying day trading currently gets treated as "gambling" and associated with scams because people can start with a small amount of money and want to make money quickly. His answer is that the fastest, safest route in is a transparent, experienced mentor rather than going in alone.

He is careful to note scams are not unique to trading; he says "there's so many different industries" with scammers, but trading's low entry cost and visible upside make it an especially easy target. Against that backdrop, he sets out what a legitimate mentor looks like: someone whose personality and explanations resonate with the student, who has consistent profits, and who can "digest the market and explain it in a very simple manner." A good mentor is transparent about both what they teach and what they say, rather than someone who flaunts results, cars or lifestyle; Rihari says of himself, "I don't even have a car... my whole passion is just being in the market."

He also says a mentor should have real trading experience that shows up in trade breakdowns and live trading sessions, because publicly showing profit and loss "could put them in a hard spot if they get something wrong," which he treats as a mark of honesty. Rihari adds that he built his own course to be deliberately simple, saying many people, including "a lot of New Zealanders like myself," find sophisticated trading terminology overwhelming to the point that they never start. His argument is that an overly complex teaching style, as much as any scam, is a reason people abandon trading before giving it a real chance.

What does learning "everything a mentor knows" involve, including adapting to different market days?

Rihari says step two is entirely on the student: study the mentor's strategies, when they trade, what markets they trade, and exactly how they enter and exit positions, rather than copying only part of the approach. He argues picking pieces of a mentor's method is, in his words, "wasting your money," because "that person already has the winning strategy."

He connects this directly to Ali's story. Rihari says Ali did not just sample ideas from the course; he studied the strategy in enough depth to apply it three months after joining, and Rihari's framing is that mimicking a mentor's full method, not just their general philosophy, is what let Ali reportedly execute the trade that produced the 28% result. Rihari also stresses asking questions inside the mentorship community, saying students who stay quiet because they are unsure or shy get less value from what they are paying for.

Part of what a student needs to absorb from a mentor, in Rihari's telling, is pattern recognition across different market conditions. He compares this to building houses: a builder does not construct every house identically, because a 150 square metre house and a 200 square metre house require different approaches, even though the underlying skill is the same. He says the first market a new trader observes might be a quiet day with no fundamental economic news, moving slowly, while the next day the same market might be driven by a news release and move quickly in a way that feels overwhelming to someone who has only seen calm conditions. A mentor's explanations are what teach a student to recognize which type of day they are looking at and adjust accordingly.

How do backtesting and forward testing fit into practicing a strategy?

Rihari calls practice the third step and breaks it into three parts: backtesting, forward testing, and starting with a small live account. Backtesting means running a mentor's strategy against historical price data using replay software, without risking real money, so a student can see whether the approach performs consistently before ever placing a live trade.

He names two backtesting tools by title: Fix Replay, and the replay feature within TradingView, which he notes is available on paid subscription tiers. Rihari says backtesting can go back years, "all the way back to 2010 if you wanted to," and that its value is in generating analytics: win rate, average win size, and average loss size. He says a student should keep backtesting "until your numbers get to the point where you're like, okay, I can be successful."

Forward testing, in Rihari's description, means marking up live charts and predicting what price will do next according to the strategy, without money on the line, then logging each prediction as a win or loss to build a running win-rate percentage. He gives a worked example: a first prediction that wins counts as 100%, a second that loses brings the running rate to 50%, and a third that wins brings it to roughly 66%. He says if the average size of winning trades is bigger than the average size of losing trades, "you are going to be a successful day trader," calling this "as simple as that."

Only after backtesting and forward testing produce workable analytics does Rihari say a student should open a small live account, specifically to get used to real-market conditions that replay software cannot fully reproduce, such as spread and volatility.

Rihari gives a concrete example of how he wants students to read their own analytics. He says a 60% win rate means that "every 10 trades that you take, six of them you're going to win, four of them you're going to lose," and that this is enough to be a successful day trader provided the average size of a winning trade is larger than the average size of a losing trade. In his framing, a trader does not need to win most of the time in some abstract sense; they need the arithmetic of wins and losses, tracked honestly through backtesting and forward-testing logs, to work out in their favor over a large enough number of trades.

What is the difference between backtesting, forward testing and live trading?

The table below summarizes how Rihari describes each stage of practice, based on the distinctions he draws in the video between historical replay, real-time prediction without money, and trading with real capital.

| Stage | What it uses | Money at risk | What Rihari says it reveals | |---|---|---|---| | Backtesting | Historical price data in replay software (Rihari names Fix Replay and TradingView's replay feature) | None | Win rate, average win and average loss across past market conditions | | Forward testing | Live charts marked up in real time, predictions logged as wins or losses | None | A running win-rate percentage that shows whether the strategy holds up as markets actually move | | Live trading | Real market execution on a funded account | Real money, starting small | Exposure to spread, volatility and emotional pressure that replay and forward testing cannot fully simulate |

Rihari says the purpose of moving through these stages in order is to build confidence in a strategy's numbers before psychology and real capital are added to the equation, rather than testing all three variables, strategy, mindset and money, at once.

Why does Rihari emphasize trading psychology and journaling?

Rihari says day trading "isn't just a game of numbers, it's a game of emotions as well," and that most traders fail from fear of losing money, greed for quick profits, and impatience for results, not from poor strategy. He treats psychology as a distinct skill to be built deliberately, separate from strategy itself.

His core instruction is to detach emotionally from individual losses, since losses are inevitable in his framework as long as the average win is bigger than the average loss. He tells students to treat every loss as a lesson rather than a failure, and to journal the specific reason for it: whether the strategy wasn't followed, volatility spiked, spread widened, or a stop-loss was placed poorly. He argues there are only a finite number of lessons to learn in trading, so journaling turns repeated mistakes into one-time ones.

Rihari ties this to discipline and sticking to a trading plan, framing day trading as something people "do for an actual living," not "a get-rich-quick scheme." He treats a written record of losses as the mechanism that connects psychology to gradual, measurable improvement over time.

He also draws a distinction between judging a trade by its outcome and judging it by whether the setup was followed correctly. Rihari says successful day traders "focus on the setup and not the profits," because a properly executed trade can still lose and a poorly executed one can still win by chance. In his description, journaling exists specifically to keep that distinction honest, since a log of why each trade was won or lost shows whether losses are coming from normal variation within a sound strategy or from repeated deviations from the plan.

How does Rihari describe moving from practice to live trading?

Rihari says the timeline before someone starts trading live varies by student, estimating "three, six, twelve months in" depending on how fast a person learns the earlier steps. He is explicit that early live trading brings struggles and missed setups, calling this expected rather than a sign of failure.

He is explicit on this point: "just because you don't get super successful right from the start does not mean that you are going to be a failure." He frames the path after the first live trades as gradual improvement rather than a sudden jump to consistent profit, comparing it to compounding, where small, repeated gains build over time rather than arriving all at once. His advice for this stage is to stay consistent, focus only on setups the student already knows, and avoid impatience or greed when the market offers other-looking opportunities outside the trained strategy.

Rihari's sixth and final step is simply not to quit. He says many people leave day trading because it does not solve financial problems as quickly as they hoped, and warns against letting trading become "another financial issue" on top of existing ones. His recommended response is to keep journaling, keep learning (from the same mentor or, once their material is exhausted, from another), and to gradually refine the original strategy into a personal one, which he says is exactly what he did before building his own education platform.

What do independent statistics on retail trading and forex market size add to this account?

Two figures from independent regulatory and financial sources sit alongside Rihari's video and are not part of his claims. They describe the market retail traders operate in generally; they do not describe RihariFX, Rihari's course, or Ali's individual result, and should not be read as confirming or contradicting any claim made in the video.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission's Report 828: Risky business found that 68% of Australian retail investors trading contracts for difference lost money in the 2024 financial year. This figure applies broadly across the Australian retail CFD market and is not a statement about any specific course, mentor or strategy. It is relevant context for why Rihari's own framework insists on backtesting, forward testing and small starting positions before committing real capital, since his approach is explicitly built around delaying live risk until analytics support it.

Separately, the Bank for International Settlements' 2025 Triennial Survey reported average daily over-the-counter foreign exchange turnover of US$9.6 trillion in April 2025. This figure describes the scale of the global forex market that day traders like Ali operate within; it says nothing about individual profitability, and a market's overall size has no bearing on whether any individual trader, mentor or course produces reliable results.

Neither statistic should be combined with Rihari's account to produce an implied success rate, return expectation, or safety claim. They are presented here only as independently sourced background on the environment retail day trading happens in.

The core distinction to hold onto across this entire article is between what Rihari says and what is independently verifiable. Ali's 28% result, the six-step framework, and every quoted piece of advice above come from Rihari's own video and represent his account and his teaching philosophy, not audited results, licensed financial advice, or a guaranteed outcome for any other person who follows the same steps. The ASIC and BIS figures confirm that retail trading carries real, common risk of loss and that the market Ali traded in is enormous in scale; they do not confirm, measure or validate anything about Rihari's course, his mentorship, or Ali's individual result. Readers should treat the 28% figure as one person's reported outcome from one course, described secondhand in a marketing video, rather than as evidence of a typical, likely or repeatable result from day trading education generally.