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Transition to full time trader?


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Transition to full time trader?

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apo99
montreal
 
Posts: 1 since Feb 2015
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Transition to full time trader?

Hey guys

First post, so here goes!

I just want to introduce my self to everyone before hand. I am a 23 year old finance student studying in Montreal, Canada. When I was 11 years old, I fell I love with the sport of paintball, more precisely speedball. Anyone who has every played paintball knows very well that it’s an extremely expensive sport that can cost thousands of dollars which makes it almost impossible for young kids and teenagers to play. My parents were not supportive either since they thought it was extremely violent (which it isn’t), even tho they put me in MMA and contact hockey at the time lol. Anyways long story short I ended up working in the family business which is a manufacturing plant every summer break/spring break and pedagogical day to get some money to pay for paintball. My uncle was kind enough to pay me 10$/h when I was 11 which was crazy money for me back them. I worked for about 3-4 years and saved around 12000$ with all my birthday money. In my mind I was rich!!! And can buy all the paintball gear I every dreamt of! Thankfully my mom didn’t let me spend all my money on gear only 2k out of the 12k and told me I have to invest the money! I started reading up on stock/ bonds/ investments and couldn’t stand the fact that I would give some banker 10000$ and all I would get was a piece of paper saying I own 100 shares of some company.

I found a gold bullion dealer in downtown Montréal called Kitco that would sell and buy Precious metals. I said that was perfect! I bought gold and silver! I think I paid around 575$ for 1oz of gold and bought 12oz of gold and spent the rest of my money of silver which might have been around 12-14$oz back then. Every day I would check the spot price of gold and silver until I doubled my money a few years later (I don’t remember when exactly) So I was around 15-16 at the time and had about 18-20k which was awesome. (Long story short my mom took 10k and left me with 10k. She locked it in some crappy investment thing at the bank.

Around this time I was in college and took a class called personal finance. My teacher was a charted accountant for a publicly traded company listed on the TSX at the time. This is when I first found out about the stock market. He would tell me stories of how he knew people who became filthy rich because of the stock market. After hearing this, I was hooked. I opened a brokerage account with RBC and put $8000 in it. Commission was like 28$ a trade back then. I asked him if the company he worked for was good and if he thought it was a good company. He told me it was a solid company and had faith in it. So like a dumb teenager with a bit of money I went all in! It was around 1.50$ at the time and rallied to around $3.14 when I sold (went on to 5$ and got bought out later on). I now had $16000 and knew not to tell my mom this time lol. I took out 5K and put it as a down payment on a fishing boat when I was 17 that I still have. I had around 12k in my trading account but didn’t know what to do with it. All I knew is that I wanted to be rich and make money!!

So for about 5-7 months I did a few crappy trades made money on some and lost money on most. I was down around 2k so I had 10k left. I was on the stockhouse forum at the time when people started going crazy for a penny stock called (CUX) that was around 0.005-0.015 at the time, People were pumping this thing like crazy saying it’s the next big thing. I didn’t know much about it at the time other than what the pumpers where talking about. ( I was unaware of pump and dumps back then) So I put 8000$ in the stock at 1 penny took me like 2 days to get filled lol. About 1 week later the stock starts to move! Going to 0.015-0.025 and I think it was 7-8 weeks later it was at 0.07-0.08 cents!!! I sold it around there and had around 60000$! I thought I was a genius! The next Gordon gecko!! I thought it was the easiest thing in the world, and didn’t tell anyone how much money I made I was only a kid back then. CUX starts moving again so I panicked and re bought CUX and dumped 20k in some other dog shit company and in less then 2months I was back to 15k! I was absolutely heart broken and went into a mild depression for a bit after that. I stopped trading for a while and got a job with my friends at the local grocery store for some extra money. After about a 1 month break I was back into the market! No strategy no system no money management just hopes and dreams! For about 6 months it was just an emotional rollercoaster making money, losing money, breaking even, just wild equity swings. I pretty much traded everything under the sun and said to my self there has to be a way to consistently make money in the market. So I spent the next year glued to a PC screen reading charts, strategies, systems anything to do with trading I read it! I was obsessed with it. The following year I followed a money management system, and was actually taking the proper steps to becoming a trader but was still missing something. CONFIDENCE was the key. I know im going to catch a lot of flack for this one but I found the most predictable and easiest stocks to trade were penny stocks in the 0.20 cent range. I worked on my strategy for a long time and for endless hours every day, I knew this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life to become a trader.

For the last 3.5 years I have been consistently trading penny stocks I have had only 3 losing months out of the past 40 months and average around 42-55% a year. My system also allowed me to trade while in class and at work and allowed me to monitor my positions from my cell phone while fishing which is one of my biggest passions after trading. I have built up my account to around 60k and pay myself a small salary every month. Sadly I ran into a huge problem about 5 months ago “LIQUIDITY”. Trying to do this with more than 50-70k just doesn’t work. I have maxed out at this point and don’t think I will ever make more than 30-35k a year with my penny stock method. But I will keep doing it as my bread and butter. I was also trading regular stocks and some options for the last 3 years and have done OK with them.

I opened a futures account 3 months ago with around $5000 and started immediately trading the ES with very little knowledge and got my ass handed to me lol. I did a lot of reading and research the last 2-3 months and now only trade euro/us Mirco futures and sometimes the NQ. I have been doing pretty well for the last 1-1.5 months it’s just a huge learning curve for me. It did significantly better when I made my time frames bigger and looked at larger time frames/ took smaller positions and stayed true to my money management. Switching to the mirco contracts and assuming less risk was the real kicker for me. Going smaller made me more money. I also don’t use a technical system, just price action and volume and look at key levels. Almost exactly like my penny stock system which is more of an art form then anything else. If you approach trading with a purely mechanical system I think you will get cut down after some time. So that in short, is the last 10 years of my trading career. Sorry for the long story guys I got carried away and I apologize for the poor sentence structure I was always terrible at writing essays lol. Anyways I have a good part time job that allows me to trade at work and still finish school which is a big plus. My dream is to become a full time trader in the next 3-4 years and would greatly appreciate if you guys can tell me how you transitioned into full time traders and what were some of the challenges you guys faced. Also how is your life different?


Apo

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