Mike Bellafiore and SMB Capital: The Playbook Method

Mike Bellafiore runs a prop desk in Midtown Manhattan and has spent two decades watching new traders fail the same way. They collect setups. His answer is two books, a framework, and a piece of homework, and the homework is the part that matters: build a written archive of your own best trades and trade out of that instead of out of somebody else's system. This is a plain write-up of what the Playbook method actually asks you to do, which setups SMB teaches inside it, what the education arm publishes for pricing, and the one place where a static chart grade and his whole methodology point in opposite directions. No affiliation, no affiliate links, and a section near the end where I say out loud what the tool I build cannot do.

Quick Answer: The Method in One Paragraph

Who Is Mike Bellafiore?

Co-founder and partner at SMB Capital, which its own about page describes as a proprietary trading firm co-founded in 2005 and based in New York City, where traders work in equities, options and futures on discretionary, automated or hybrid desks. He built it with Steve Spencer. Bellafiore is a graduate of the University of Connecticut School of Law and a former member of the university's Board of Trustees. Spencer holds a BS in Economics from Wharton and a JD from Fordham, and started trading at Heartland Securities in 1996. Two law degrees behind a trading desk is an unusual origin for this category, and it shows in how much of the firm's output is written rather than streamed.

The books are the part most people meet first. One Good Trade: Inside the Highly Competitive World of Proprietary Trading, published by Wiley, is a culture book more than a setup manual, and it is why a lot of traders know the firm at all. The PlayBook: An Inside Look at How to Think Like a Professional Tradercame later through FT Press and is the one that matters for the method, because it is built around long written trade reviews rather than around a catalogue of shapes. The firm's about page also says he has trained traders internationally for fifteen years. Read that as a self-description on the company's own site, undated and not independently audited, which is the same caution worth applying to every reach claim in this category.

One structural distinction is worth getting right early because it changes what questions are fair. A proprietary trading firm trades its own capital. It does not take retail customer deposits and does not execute orders on behalf of retail clients, which puts it in a different regulatory box from a retail broker. That matters when you go searching for reassurance and land on a site that scores forex and CFD brokers by their licences, because those scorecards are pointed at a business model SMB does not run. A missing entry there is a category mismatch, not a finding. The fair questions are the ones you would ask any training provider or employer: what it costs, what happens if you do not make money, and who owns the upside. On the record itself, no SEC actions and no lawsuits against Bellafiore or SMB Capital surfaced during research for this piece, which is not the same as asserting none exist. The same evaluation problem shows up across every name in the series and is worth thinking about generally in the write-up on how traders evaluate what they are being taught.

What Is a Trading Playbook?

Every other profile in this series can be summarised as a shape plus a rule. Aziz has the ABCD. Velez has the igniting bar. Minervini has the Trend Template. Bellafiore does not have one, and the absence is deliberate rather than a gap in his material. What he teaches is a process for producing your own.

• It starts with a trade you actually took
  Not a chart from a course, not a screenshot from a chat room, not a hypothetical. A real fill, in your account, in the market you actually trade, at the size you actually use. Everything downstream depends on that, because the point is to learn what you do well rather than what somebody else does well.
• The write-up is the work
  Setup name, the context around it, what the market was doing, what you saw, why you took it, where the stop went, how it resolved, and what you would change. Long form, not a spreadsheet row. The exercise is forcing yourself to articulate the reason, because most bad trades cannot survive being written down in full sentences.
• The archive compounds
  One entry is a diary. Fifty entries is data about you. At that point patterns show up that no single trade reveals: the setup you think is your best is your third best, the one you keep skipping is the one that pays, and the losses cluster in a particular hour or a particular kind of market. None of that is visible from a single chart.
• The output is a personal system, not a copied one
  The finished playbook is the short list of situations you have evidence you handle well, and the instruction is to trade those and pass on the rest. Two traders on the same desk running the same framework end up with different playbooks, which is the strongest argument for the method and also the reason nobody can sell you a finished one.

If that sounds like journaling with extra steps, the difference is what it is for. A standard journal is a record you keep so you can look back at it. A playbook is a filter you build so it can say no on your behalf later. That distinction is the same one running through the piece on keeping a trading journal that actually survives a losing week, and it is why the entries have to be long. A one-line note that says "flag, stopped out" tells you nothing in three months. A paragraph explaining that you took it forty minutes after the drive when volume had already gone tells you exactly what to stop doing.

The honest cost of this method is time, and it is the reason most people abandon it. A useful playbook is months of work before it starts filtering anything, and during those months you are still trading with no filter. There is no fast version, and anyone selling you one has changed the product. That is also the argument in what actually separates consistently profitable traders from the rest, which is much less about the setup than about the number of repetitions behind it.

The Setups SMB Teaches Inside It

A framework needs raw material, and the raw material here is a set of named intraday setups. They fall into four families, and separating them is useful because a grading engine treats them very differently.

The continuation family is the largest: bull flags, bear flags, pullbacks, and consolidation patterns. All of them are the same underlying event, which is a move that already worked pausing before it tries again, and the bull flag is the cleanest written version of it. Volume behaviour is the qualifier here rather than the shape. A flag on fading volume that then expands on the break is a real one. A flag where volume never left is usually distribution wearing a costume, which is covered properly in reading volume on an intraday chart.

Next come the level trades: support plays, key intraday levels, and bounce and fade pairs. A support play is price returning to a level it has already held and holding it again, which is the highest-confidence version of a level trade because the level has been tested in front of you. Fades are the opposite trade at the same level, taken against the prevailing move, and they are a genuinely different risk proposition even though they use the same line. Getting the lines themselves right is most of the work, and the mechanics are in marking support and resistance so the levels mean something.

Session-anchored setups are the third group: opening drives and scalps. An opening drive is a strong one-directional push in the first minutes after the bell, and it matters for two reasons: it sets a directional bias, and the low of an up drive tends to become the level the rest of the morning trades against. The failure mode is treating every fast 9:31 candle as a drive when it is really a wide spread and two orders, so the volume behind it is the test rather than the size of the candle. The mechanics of the surrounding window are covered on the opening range breakout page, and where high relative volume sits in the selection process generally is in the momentum trading playbook.

The fourth family is not a chart pattern at all, and it is the one that breaks tooling. Relative strength and weakness means trading the strongest names in the strongest sectors, or shorting the weakest names in the weakest ones. It is a comparison, not a shape. You are asking whether this stock is outperforming its sector or the index, which requires at least two charts side by side and often a whole watchlist. Nothing about that is visible in a single chart of a single instrument, and no amount of reading one frame more carefully will produce it. That is a real ceiling on what any screenshot-based tool can contribute to this part of the method, and it is worth being blunt about rather than hedging, which is also the honest framing in what a momentum scan can and cannot do.

The Bionic Trader Idea

One thing Bellafiore has pushed harder than most educators in this category is that discretionary traders should get more bionic, meaning they should adopt trading technology and tools to augment their own decision-making rather than treating automation as a threat to it. Coming from someone running a desk where discretionary, automated and hybrid traders all sit, that is a fairly grounded position. The claim is not that software replaces the read. It is that a trader with tools measuring the things they used to eyeball will be more consistent than the same trader without them.

The place where this genuinely overlaps with a chart-grading tool is narrow and worth stating precisely rather than stretching. A fixed rubric applied to a chart gives you the same criteria on your third loss of the morning as on your first trade of the week, which is the one thing your own read cannot promise. That is a consistency argument, not an accuracy argument, and it fits the wider case made in grading a trade before you enter it and in the mechanics of how a chart screenshot actually gets read. Where it stops is also clear: a grade is one more input into a discretionary decision you still make, and the moment it becomes the decision you have swapped a method for a signal service, which is a worse trade than the one you were trying to improve.

What Does SMB Training Cost?

Two numbers are public and the rest are not, and the split is the interesting part. The education arm at smbtraining.com lists four named training programs, none of which showed a price on the pages we read, alongside two tools packages that do publish figures. Those tools packages are not the curriculum. They are the radar screen, the scanner, the written game plan, real-time positions and the Inside Access meetings, sold as access rather than as instruction.

Those two figures were read directly off SMB Training's own site at the time of writing, where Trader 90 is listed at $1,397 per quarter and Trader 365 at $5,000 per year with the annual option framed as saving over 10 percent. Education pricing moves, so confirm at the checkout rather than trusting any review page including this one. We are not quoting course prices because we did not see any, and inventing a range from third-party listings would be pretending to knowledge we do not have.

The structurally useful thing here is the same as with Aziz: the methodology is in a book. The PlayBook is the method, in writing, for the price of a paperback, and you can run the entire framework on your own trades for months without buying anything else. That is a genuinely low-risk way to find out whether this style of work suits you, because the work is the product. If you read the book and never write a single review, no course is going to fix that, and that is a cheaper thing to discover than a refund request.

How He Differs From the Other Educators

The comparison here is a level up from the usual one. Everyone else in this series teaches a specific edge and packages it. Bellafiore teaches the process for finding out which edge is yours, which makes him closer to Rayner Teo than to anyone else on the list, and even that comparison breaks down quickly.

Against the intraday specialists

Ross Cameron, Andrew Aziz, Oliver Velez and TJR all hand you a finished edge and ask you to execute it. Cameron's low-float small-cap program works on a specific type of stock in a specific hour. Aziz's ABCD pattern is a defined four-point shape with a rule about where C sits. Velez's igniting bars off the 20 and 200 SMA are aimed at the first twenty minutes. TJR's ICT and Smart Money Concepts vocabulary is a different dialect for describing the same intraday events. Bellafiore teaches setups that overlap heavily with all four, particularly the flags and the level trades, but the setups are not the deliverable. The deliverable is a process that tells you which of them you should actually be trading, and that is a slower and less satisfying thing to buy. If you want a specific edge to run tomorrow morning, one of those four is a better fit. If you have run three of them and none stuck, the missing piece is probably the one Bellafiore is selling.

Against the swing traders and the generalists

Mark Minervini's Trend Template and SEPA framework selects position trades held for weeks and pulls in fundamentals and a catalyst, which is a different job on a different clock. Kristjan Kullamägi's three published setups run off daily charts, and since he sells nothing there is no commercial comparison to make. The closest neighbour is Rayner Teo, because the M.A.E formula is also a general framework rather than a niche edge. The split between them is where the personalisation happens. M.A.E is a fixed three-step gate applied to any chart, the same gate for every trader who runs it. The Playbook has no fixed gate at all: the criteria are whatever your own archive turns out to support, which means it produces different rules for different people and gives you nothing at all on day one. One is a checklist you can use this afternoon. The other is a project.

Can a Grading Engine Read an SMB Setup?

Half of it, and the half it cannot read is the important half. This is the profile in the series where the mismatch is structural rather than a list of missing fields, so it is worth stating the hard part first before getting to the table.

SnapPChart reads one static chart screenshot per analysis and grades it against a fixed rubric. It has no memory of your previous uploads. It does not build, store, or maintain a playbook. There is no archive of your own setups accumulating anywhere behind it, no learning from your history, and no personalisation to your style. Every upload is graded as if it were the first one you had ever sent. Bellafiore's entire method is the accumulation of a personal history and the study of it over time, so a stateless one-shot grader is structurally the opposite of what he teaches. Those two things are not competing versions of the same product and the honest framing is that one of them cannot substitute for the other in either direction.

What is left is the individual setups, and there the overlap is real, because the continuation family is exactly what the rubric was built around.

The yes rows are yes for a reason that has nothing to do with Bellafiore. The engine grades momentum continuations: a long is a pullback inside an established uptrend, a short is a rally inside an established downtrend. Flags, pullbacks, consolidation and the bounce half of a support play all sit inside that family already, which is the same reason the read lines up with Aziz's ABCD and with pullbacks into a rising moving average. The counter-trend half is a hard no rather than a weak yes. Fading a level inside a move that is going the other way is not something the rubric grades at all, so the fade side of SMB's bounce-and-fade pairing sits outside it entirely.

The opening drive splits in an interesting way. As a chart pattern it reads fine, because a steep one-directional leg with volume behind it is just a strong move and the fields for that already exist. What the engine cannot do is confirm that the frame is the open. Nothing in a candle says 9:31, so unless your screenshot includes a visible time axis, a drive and a mid-afternoon breakout look identical in the image. It also cannot watch price arrive in real time, which is the part of drive trading that actually happens live and where the decision is made bar by bar rather than from a still frame. Relative strength is the cleanest limit of all: it needs a second chart, and only one chart gets uploaded.

The rest of the usual limits apply and are worth repeating rather than burying. It does not scan a watchlist, so it will not tell you which name is strongest this morning. It does not read the tape, time and sales, or Level 2, which is a whole SMB course on its own. It does not predict the next candle and does not implement the Playbook, or any other named system, as a feature. What it does is apply the same criteria to the chart in front of you every time, which is a narrow contribution to a method built on repetition. Practically, the fit is that a grade can become one line inside a playbook entry you write yourself, alongside what you actually did, and the habit side of that is covered in what happened after grading every setup for thirty days. Sizing the trade off the stop rather than off enthusiasm is the other half, and that arithmetic is in position sizing off risk per trade. The product side of the read lives at AI chart analysis. Worth keeping the base rate in view while you do any of this: the FINRA investor page on day trading is blunt that frequent intraday trading on margin can cost you more than you deposited, whichever named method is behind it.