The Traveling Trader

BEST KNOWN FOR

The mental game, free futures courses and live data days

Z’s most-watched video is about psychology, not profits. Titled "How I Beat the Mental Game of Trading [After 5 Years of Failure]," it is closing in on a million views. Around it sit long, free futures lessons. They range from an in-depth 2022 guide, now past 230,000 views, to a course of nearly three hours released in November 2025. On CPI, PPI and Fed days he goes live on YouTube and trades the release on camera.

IN Z'S WORDS

The Traveling Trader's featured video

“How to Trade Futures: The Ultimate In-Depth Guide [2024]” · published Mar 18, 2022 · 231K views

Who is The Traveling Trader?

The Traveling Trader is a channel that has changed with the market and kept its audience. Z, as he is known, began with crypto tutorials in 2017, taught stocks and options through the 2021 boom, and now teaches futures day trading to 399,000 subscribers. His earliest public upload, a December 2017 guide to buying Bitcoin, went out under the old Traveling Crypto handle. The old address, youtube.com/thetravelingcrypto, still leads to the channel. His most-watched upload is a 28-minute talk on mindset, "How I Beat the Mental Game of Trading [After 5 Years of Failure]," now closing in on a million views.

Z has been in the markets, in his words, "since the dot com bust." His 2022 interview on the Trading Nut podcast tells the story. He fell for markets as a teenager and worked at a proprietary trading firm. He found his footing as a trader later, while working as a software developer. It took him three years to become profitable, he says, and more than ten to quit his job and trade full time. The travel was real from the start. In March 2018 he recorded a Bitcoin update in São Paulo straight off a long flight, because he did not want to leave viewers without one. The highlight he shared from Rio de Janeiro that month was a boxing club in the Vidigal favela teaching young kids to defend themselves.

Futures took center stage in his trading lessons from 2022. "How to Trade Futures: The Ultimate In-Depth Guide" walks a beginner through contracts, expiry, tick size, margin and going long or short, and has passed 230,000 views. His 2024 walkthrough of running several prop-firm accounts through one trade copier has passed 170,000. In November 2025 he released "The Simplest Futures Day Trading Course For Beginners [2026]," a free course of nearly three hours. It runs from chart setup through liquidity, fair value gaps, market structure, Fibonacci and risk management. A 2024 Short explaining why he never day trades options has drawn more than 538,000 views on its own.

The business behind the channel is The Traveling Trader Academy, a membership on Whop where Z trades live at the market open every morning. Members get his plan for the day, charts, trade ideas, an education library and a community of more than 1,000 traders. His site lists a 4.9 rating from 456 member reviews and calls the Academy "education, not signals." A lower-cost Investing Floor serves long-term investors. Newcomers can start for free, with a Discord of more than 25,000 members, a 19-minute technical analysis training and a weekly market update. On YouTube the rhythm is a weekly market outlook plus live sessions on data days. He goes on air for the 8:30 am CPI and PPI releases and the 2 pm Fed decisions, and trades them in front of his audience.

Z’s appeal is that he shows the whole job: the mindset, the mechanics and the live decisions on the busiest days of the month. His site sums up the idea in one line: "The work is process, not personality." Almost nine years after that first Bitcoin tutorial, he is still teaching the basics patiently, from wherever the trip has taken him.

How Z trades

See how the wider prop-trading field is positioned in NQ while you study a method like this: MarketFramework's Positioning Edge shows live long/short splits across ES, NQ, MES and MNQ from real evaluation and funded accounts, and Prop Backtest scores strategies against prop-firm rules.

The Traveling Trader's career timeline

Prop firms Z works with

Both firms carry code TTT in the descriptions of his uploads from 20 September to 14 October 2026. The same descriptions offer code TTT20 for Tradezella, the trading journal he calls his favorite.

His 2024 trade copier tutorial runs Topstep and Apex accounts side by side through NinjaTrader.

We list a firm relationship only with dated public evidence from the last 30 days, re-checked each editorial pass.

THE TRAVELING TRADER: FREQUENTLY ASKED