After The Entry

The price you enter at matters. So does the capital you leave available for what happens next.

In After the Entry: Hedging, Reserves, and the Discipline to Stop, Jesse Gusta examines how a long position, a smaller short, and capital held in reserve can change the choices available throughout a trade.

Through detailed worked examples, the book follows the money as prices rise and fall. It shows how each adjustment changes exposure, collateral, average entry, and the price required to close—while accounting for fees, funding costs, and potential losses.

Inside, you’ll explore:

• How a smaller short offsets part of a long position’s price risk.
• The difference between adding collateral and buying more.
• How averaging down and leverage change both recovery requirements and exposure to further losses.
• Why profitable individual trades can coexist with a losing account.
• How to define exits, track the whole arrangement, and test decisions against different price paths.

Alongside the mechanics is a candid personal account of what happened when managing trades became difficult to stop. Confidence encouraged more activity. Targets became pressure. The ability to make another adjustment kept providing reasons to continue.

The book brings those two sides together: understanding what an adjustment can accomplish, and deciding whether it still belongs within the plan.

Written for readers who want to examine trading decisions closely, After the Entry provides calculations to follow, assumptions to question, and a framework to test. Its worked examples illustrate the mechanics; they do not establish a verified trading record or promise future returns.

Digital edition · PDF · 95 pages · 12 chapters