What trading strategy does Rihari use at Ambitious Investing?

What trading strategy does Rihari use at Ambitious Investing?

Rihari says he trades a discretionary, multi-timeframe price-action strategy: he marks out higher-timeframe points of interest, waits for a lower-timeframe change of character or liquidity grab to confirm direction, enters with a defined stop loss, then holds the trade toward the higher-timeframe target.

Across his own videos, Rihari describes this as "the same strategy that I've taught over 2,000 people that are now profitable, well, not all of them because some of them are still learning, but majority of them." That reach figure is Rihari's own claim about his mentorship audience, not an independently audited outcome, and it is not evidence of typical results for any trader who studies the strategy.

He also says the approach has been built and refined over roughly four years, with a specific emphasis on entry quality first. "My entries are something that I worked on for the last, you know, three years of my trading career," he says in one video, adding that better entries reduce drawdown and make it easier to hold a trade for longer. In a separate video he says the strategy overall "is what's made me a millionaire" over four years, a personal claim about his own financial history rather than a documented business result.

The strategy is not presented in the transcripts as a fixed checklist with named rules beyond what is described here: identify a point of interest on a higher timeframe, wait for a change of character or liquidity grab on a lower timeframe, enter with a stop loss below or above the setup, and manage the trade from there. Rihari repeats this same process, in his words, "over and over and over and over again," describing it as consistent rather than improvised trade by trade.

What markets does Rihari trade using this strategy?

Rihari trades US30 (the Dow Jones index), gold (XAU), NAS (the Nasdaq index) and forex pairs, frequently timing entries around the New York session open and around scheduled economic data such as JOLTS job openings and non-farm payrolls (NFP).

He describes trading gold and NAS specifically "only in NYC," meaning during the New York Stock Exchange open, and says he scalped US30 and other pairs around NFP release in one week "which is a little bit fun, but yeah, it's not necessarily the wise thing to do." That is Rihari's own characterization of the risk of trading around high-volatility news events, not a general recommendation.

US30 recurs as his most-mentioned single instrument. He says, "I trade US30 a lot and I pretty much have it majority of the time down to a T," but immediately qualifies this by noting his two largest losing trades in one week both came from US30, illustrating that familiarity with an instrument did not eliminate losses in his own account.

The videos also mention lot sizes (for example, trading gold "with six lot sizes") and swap fees charged for holding positions overnight, which are features of leveraged margin trading rather than direct share ownership. Rihari says he learned mid-strategy that swap costs on a multi-day held trade were larger than he expected, describing this as a lesson from holding a position longer than he originally planned.

Not every day produces a trade. Across the five-week challenge recap, Rihari reports several days with no trades logged at all, sitting alongside single-day results he says ranged from roughly $1,000 to over $100,000. He describes this unevenness directly: "opportunities aren't presenting themselves all the time, but you have to be in the market to understand what you should be going into, or where you should be waiting." On his account, the strategy depends on waiting for a specific setup on his tracked instruments rather than trading every session out of habit.

What is Rihari's step-by-step trade process?

Rihari's own description of a single trade moves through a repeatable sequence: mark up the chart, wait for price to reach a point of interest, look for a lower-timeframe confirmation signal, enter with a defined stop loss, then manage the trade toward a higher-timeframe target.

1. Mark up the higher timeframe before the session. Rihari says he does his chart "markups in the morning" so he knows "which areas that I'm trying to target" during the trading day, even when he is not actively watching the screen.
2. Identify a point of interest. He watches for price to reach an area he has already flagged as significant, such as a prior high, low, or zone of rejection on a higher timeframe like the 15-minute or hourly chart.
3. Wait for a lower-timeframe change of character or liquidity grab. On the 5-minute or 1-minute chart, he looks for price to shift structure, for example taking out a prior high or low before reversing, which he treats as a signal that the point of interest is holding.
4. Enter with a defined stop loss. He places trades with a stop loss set at a specific invalidation point, describing one loss of $554 as "less than 1% on that 100k account," indicating position sizing tied to a small percentage of account risk per trade.
5. Move the stop to breakeven once the trade is in profit. Rihari says, "I'm trying to take the risk off the table as soon as possible," and separately counts several small break-even outcomes as losses in his own trade log because the position did not reach its intended target.
6. Hold toward the higher-timeframe target rather than closing early. He states his key lesson across these videos was that he was exiting trades based on "assumption rather than factual evidence," and that when he held two trades longer in one week, they produced roughly double the profit of an entire prior week.
7. Log the outcome and review the metrics. After each week he reviews win rate, profit factor, average win versus average loss, and drawdown from his trading platform's statistics to decide what to adjust the following week.

How does Rihari's account performance compare across his trading challenge videos?

Across the three videos reviewed, Rihari documents a personal, self-funded trading challenge starting at $100,000, with self-reported weekly and monthly account changes that he narrates from his own platform statistics rather than from any external audit.

| Video | Period covered | Starting balance | Ending balance | Self-reported win rate | Trades taken | Rihari's stated takeaway | |---|---|---|---|---|---|---| | I Turned $100K Into $155K In 7 Days (Week 1) | Week 1 | $100,000 | $155,000 (self-reported, up 55%) | 93% (27 of 29 trades) | 29 | Entries were accurate but trades were closed before reaching full targets | | I Turned $155k Into $293K in 7 Days Trading Forex | Week 2 | $155,000 | $293,000 (self-reported, up roughly 89%) | 89% | 46 | Holding two trades longer produced close to double the prior week's profit | | How I Made $344K in 5 Weeks Using My Trading Strategy | Weeks 1 to 5 | $100,000 | $344,000 (self-reported) | 80% (80 wins, 2 breakeven, 20 losses) | 102 | Personal focus and locked-in mindset tracked closely with the strongest weeks |

Rihari is explicit that the strength of these weeks was not constant. He says week four of the five-week challenge produced only around $20,000 in gains, well below the $138,000 he reports for week two, and attributes the slowdown to being distracted by an unrelated personal property purchase rather than to any change in the strategy itself. "Your outside world, your personal life, and what you're trying to do will take an effect," he says, tying account performance directly to his own stated focus level in a given week, not to a documented business or licensing outcome.

Within that same five-week span, Rihari also reports his first losing day arriving in week three, which he says followed an unbroken run of winning days, and a second losing day in week four. He does not treat either losing day as evidence the strategy had stopped working, instead tying both to the personal distraction of an unrelated property purchase happening at the same time. He also separately mentions running a mentorship service and recording podcast episodes with other traders as part of his broader work, though the transcripts reviewed here describe neither pricing nor structure for that mentorship, so none is stated in this article.

Why does Rihari say patience to hold trades matters more than entry timing?

Rihari's own review across these videos concludes that his entries were already accurate most weeks, but that closing trades too early, before price reached the higher-timeframe target, cost him significantly more than any of his losing trades did.

In his first video he calculates that two specific trades, closed early out of caution, would have added roughly $55,000 in additional profit had he held them to the level his own analysis had flagged in advance. He says plainly, "the biggest losses for me come from doing my analysis and knowing where price action is going to go, getting hit out of the trade before it actually goes in that direction."

In the following video, he says he acted on that lesson by holding a US30 trade open for several days rather than closing it once it moved into profit. That single decision, in his account, produced roughly $98,000 on one trade, compared with $55,000 across his entire first week of 29 trades. He is careful to note the exit was still "based off assumption rather than factual evidence," meaning he attributes the result partly to the decision to hold rather than to a fully mechanical rule, and that the market could just as easily have reversed against him while the trade was open.

How does Rihari manage risk and losing trades in this strategy?

Rihari describes keeping individual losses small relative to account size, moving stop losses to breakeven once a trade shows profit, and counting marginal breakeven outcomes as losses in his own tracking even when they did not lose money, so his statistics reflect trades that failed to reach their intended target.

He gives a specific example of a $554 loss on a $100,000 account, describing it as under 1% of the account, and separately lists several trades that closed for small amounts such as $24 or $15 as "still counted as a loss" in his personal log because they were break-even outcomes rather than trades that hit target. This shows a risk framework built around the size of the loss relative to account balance and around what a trade was expected to achieve, rather than around a fixed dollar or percentage rule stated once for all trades.

Rihari also references an anecdote about an unnamed older trader who reportedly lost on 95% of trades but won large on the remaining 5%, a story he uses to describe his own idea of "probing" the market for the right entry area. He is explicit that he has no verification of this anecdote, saying, "I don't actually have verification on that, but through videos and stuff that I've watched and other traders talking about it, it's somewhat verified." That anecdote should be read as an unverified story Rihari repeats to illustrate a mindset, not as a documented trading result or a strategy he claims to replicate exactly.

Rihari also tracks profit factor, not just win rate, as a week-over-week signal of trade quality. He reports his second week's profit factor as "up over 100," a figure driven by wins he says included a single trade of roughly $58,000 against a largest single loss of about $2,500 across the full five-week recap. He frames a rising profit factor as a sign that average win size is pulling further ahead of average loss size, which he separates from win rate because, in his words, a trader can have "a high win percentage and a high profit factor, but then your average win and loss might be all the way down," meaning wins and losses can both shrink even while the win rate looks strong.

Beyond profit factor, Rihari references a composite performance score generated by his trading journal platform, which the platform describes as combining win rate, profit factor, average win versus average loss, recovery factor, maximum drawdown, and consistency into a single number. He is candid that he does not weight all of these evenly, saying in his first video, "I don't really care about the whole zeal score, net daily profit and loss, blah blah blah. Only things that I want to worry about is the things that are up here, the profit factor, the daily win percentage, and the net profit and loss." For Rihari, the platform's composite score functions as a secondary, at-a-glance figure rather than his primary decision input.

What do independent statistics say about the risks of the markets Rihari trades?

The instruments described in these videos, index CFDs such as US30 and NAS, commodity trading in gold, and margin forex, sit within retail leveraged trading, a category regulators and central banks track separately from the personal account figures Rihari reports.

ASIC Report 828: Risky business records that 68% of Australian retail CFD investors lost money in the 2024 financial year. This is a market-wide regulatory finding, not a statement about Rihari's own results or about any specific mentorship program, and it should not be read as either confirming or contradicting the figures Rihari reports for his own account in these videos.

BIS 2025 Triennial Survey reported average daily OTC foreign-exchange turnover of US$9.6 trillion in April 2025, underscoring the scale and liquidity of the forex market that forms part of the trading Rihari describes, though this figure describes total market turnover rather than the outcomes of individual retail traders within it.

These two facts sit at different scales for a reason. The BIS figure describes the size of the overall market that absorbs retail order flow without strain, while the ASIC figure describes what actually happened to the accounts of retail participants trading leveraged CFD products in that market over a full year. A market being large and liquid does not change the loss rate individual retail accounts experienced in it, which is why both figures are given here rather than either one alone.

Read together, these two facts describe the environment the strategy operates in: a highly liquid, high-turnover market in which the regulator's own data shows most Australian retail CFD accounts lost money over a full financial year. Neither fact says anything about whether Rihari's specific strategy, entries, or account figures are representative of that wider pattern.

Is Rihari's trading strategy the same as an investment strategy?

No. Rihari draws this distinction himself, saying trading "is a job" that requires ongoing attention rather than a passive investment where "you buy in and then, you know, your money just goes up."

He describes needing to know "the best areas to get in" and "the best areas to get out," staying mentally engaged with the chart throughout the trading day even when not physically watching a screen, and managing his own emotional response to both wins and losses as part of the process. "Trading is such a psychological thing," he says, noting that even experienced traders feel emotional pressure when money is fluctuating and that regulating that response, rather than eliminating it, is part of what he says separates more and less consistent weeks in his own account.

He also frames position sizing and risk as a personal decision rather than a fixed investment allocation, saying "the amount of risk is on you... how much you want to risk because of how confident you are or how much conviction you have." That framing describes an active, discretionary decision process specific to each trade, distinct from a buy-and-hold or passive investment approach where allocation decisions are made far less frequently.