Sounds like he's going to give it all back ... Well he took it out by fear of blowing it out. He put the money into ETF, Tech giants (Amazon ...) Stopped going to work and he stopped trading as well He basically kept shorting WTI from 20 to 15
hey everyone it's adam here and i know we've all heard a lot of crazy trading stories online but this might be the craziest one i've ever heard and it didn't even happen online it happened just down the street from me this isn't one of those videos with somebody driving around in a lambo or trying to sell you something thomas isn't selling anything i'm not selling anything this is just a great story for some inspiration and uh maybe you can take some lessons from it so here's thomas who's a laid-back guy in his own words on a day that he's going to remember forever and a day where he turned two hundred dollars into a hundred and ninety thousand dollars in just four hours [Music] okay so i'm here with thomas today and this is the craziest story i've really heard in a long time about trading and the insane thing is that thomas is my neighbor more or less he lives just down the street from me and i'm friends with thomas's dad and he came to me about a month ago and said adam i know you're you're into trading i don't know much about it but my son thomas came and he made quarter million dollars and it was i don't know how he did it and it was uh he basically took very little money turned into a quarter million dollars and um he told me for starters about how you called him up so kind of before we get into the trade tell me about how you you know that sort of moment picking up the phone and calling your dad uh well i was just driving home from work and um i tried to call him on highway 28 on the way home about half an hour away and then uh didn't pick up and he said he was just in the tim horton's parking lot when i called him the second time he picked up and then didn't believe me didn't believe me and then when the night came he finally believed me so take me through the conversation kind of if you wanted basically it was just dad i just made so much money i made 190 000 u.s off this amount of money 200 and obviously he didn't believe me what did he say uh there's no way that's not possible like there's no possibly way that that happened that's great and at this like it was sort of dawning on you at the same time like when did it first like so you did you made this trade from 200 to 190 000 u.s and like at what moment did it really sink in for you uh i don't know probably about the 50 000 mark i kind of saw it and then it started to build and build and then i kind of felt sick at the 190 so then that's when i pulled out but then it didn't really hit me until i was driving after i hung up with my debt right and you're doing this all at work yeah yeah so yeah but it didn't hit me until on the highway just driving staring off into space yeah it's just yeah oh my goodness yeah clutching the wheel nice and tight just want to get home safe get ready something's bad is going to happen yeah yeah it's kind of like when a lottery winner gets a winning ticket they just want to cash it in before they lose it okay good well we're going to get to the trade itself but first i want to like go back to the start um so you at this point you've been trading just over a year a year and a year and a half okay and just take me out to like let's go right back to the beginning like why did you start trading like what was it i mean it must been even before that something clicked or when i started trading it was terrible thought but it was a get-rich-quick scheme when i started right because all the internet and all the advertisements and so forth is get this much money real fast in a couple hours and then obviously i blew accounts i think i've blown what four or five accounts now and then uh that's when i started to trade fake money accounts practice over the time and then here i am so i first really met you we started to talk about trading it's about a year ago um and you were looking into automated strategies then and how like so you started out with that and what was the sort of thought process there uh easier simple way out right right uh didn't work long story short and you you spend a lot of time yeah yeah i spent probably about three four months on that uh building expert advisors for automated trading and so forth and testing testing them back testing them which doesn't really help a whole lot because it can predict it and so forth but long story short didn't work they didn't work and so they you got to trade in real money around that time yeah just a couple months after that when i started to get a little more confident or a little less confident kind of giving up on everything and just throw some money in see what happens right and so at this point it's what kind of trader do you become now is this technical discretionary uh scalper when i see it i hit it and then i pull out as soon as possible so you're waiting for setups yeah pretty well basically i was mainly trading uh usjpy okay so you're trading fx you're looking more yes just repairs itself volatility yeah okay so so you're trading just just fx at this point yeah one pair which is not a bad way to start out because you're yeah you kind of get the feel of one thing the higher volume pair one of the more popular ones i figured right okay and so now you put in money what was the first deposit you made 700 u.s which was a thousand canadian at the time which lost that how long did that take i think three four days oh yeah so what was that like it hurt of course i heard it at the time now it doesn't really learning process learning curve now did you like at the time was you you were kind of out or you were had you always didn't end up giving up but yeah i i didn't give up i just i kind of kept going perseverance okay you know if you keep trying try until you fail i'm like you mean what sort of mistakes were you making i mean and you did this a series of times yeah so i was getting a little overconfident i wouldn't take the profit when the profit was good enough i would hope for more i would chase the market and i would just overall overextend myself i would have leverage of one to two thousand brokerage offered it so i took it okay so this is like a consistent theme right where you are you were like you weren't you're not afraid of leverage yeah oh god no if you know how to use it risk management to me it's just a number right because risk management was sort of tougher than it was tough because i didn't really research it at the time and i didn't practice it so all right so this sort of goes on and on um right this is sort of the same pattern yeah yeah so just vicious circle for quite a while for all those accounts that i had right and then sort of what the pandemic starts to hit is that was does something change for you then or did like your interest or i'm trying to think not necessarily no just stayed the same okay and now you start to see a lot more volatility right yeah 100 instead of like .23 on the atr it was at like 3.0 or something like that and then that's when i started to make really big scalp trades okay and then i would blow the account again because i would be overextended and what about okay take back up and tell us a bit sort of where you ended up in terms of the technicals that you're looking at and like what's on your chart uh so really i just have broilinger bands um i think it's the simple wow what is it it's one of the green dots i forget what it's called oh well that one i i forget entirely but it's not really relevant and then i use uh smas i used three i had a 15 a 5 and a 20 point i think okay um one's exponential and the rest are just regular and then i also use uh just the atr at the bottom just to kind of see what the trade ratio is and at least to me that's what i thought it was right well it sounds good yeah and you but so you're using those to manage risk finances yeah just kind of give me an idea where a good entry point is and so forth and that's what i settled on for all my indicators so what is your trading frequency like it's sort of on the time that at least around this time how many trades you'd be making a month or a day or a day probably 30 a day okay so yeah pretty actively trading really trying to get the money in really trying to get the experience again not really managing the risk well that's i mean at least you were getting a lot of trade you were blowing up a 200 account on one trade yeah it's got some value out of it in terms of experience took my time figured it out okay all right so let's go back now this is so that day this happened april 21st right you're 19 years old um you just turned 20. and take me back to that day and you just i guess a week before blowing out an account yeah so basically i just got a notification on my phone saying the oil went negative a couple days prior and then maybe i think it was the day prior to that yeah yeah just when the contract before expired and then i was like okay well i told my parents saw that and uh when i was at work i was watching the charts i saw oil start to go down so then i was like all right let's jump on it so i deposited 200 real fast so you had it like an instant deposit yeah yeah like a credit card i guess or something yeah so i just used my credit card deposited that and then hopped on the trend right so now which tells you so you work in in a factory where but you're able to trade at work you work the night shift and so we're here in in uh near toronto but this is sort of uh early european session for the most part i guess into asia and then into the start of europe asian kind of indo-european in around that time kind of when big push and big movements start to happen right so you've never traded oil before no all right so you make your first trade and how how big of a trade is it at first uh .01 to see the cost of the lots to i didn't know how much a lot would cost or all that and then uh i figured it out figured out the risk that i could use and so forth and how much risk i i it worked right yeah so you're and at the same time you were a little bit long dollar cat i guess on the same yeah so i i was online before i even deposited the 200 to see what was in correlation with oil and it was u.s cad was kind of in correlation with it because when the u.s dollar goes up oil goes down or vice versa but basically i use the trades opposite of what i was selling oil great great and okay so now so this is um and explain the whole trade takes place over less than four hours right so you're 200 and you go to 190 000 in less than four hours and so you sort of dabble at first right yeah so i got into a point where where i entered my first trade it started to go down started to dip and it was a cell and then it went above the cell and at that point it was to me it was only a 200 account i blew my account not like just before this and i just gave up so i shut my phone screen off i threw my phone away you thought you were about to get started yeah i thought that i was gonna get stopped there my account was gonna blow out and i was just i was done for the night and then i threw my phone over went over did some work and then came back i saw it and it was positive like ten dollars so on a 0.01 lot that's pretty good so then i was like okay here's the volatility so then i started to just roll with it and just keep going in and so the basic the basis of this trade is it was all oil and as oil fell you would get more margin available in your account and you just kept yeah so explain that so as soon as i would go positive or like i would place a 0.01 trade 0.01 lot and then it would give me 10 profit i would take that and whatever left i had equity in the account i would throw back into another cell trade a little bit bigger and then i would hedge the two trades that i had take the profit throw it back into another cell and then i would just basically hedge my account and keep going just you know you just kept hammering on the other yeah all the way down and it would grow and grow and the lot size would keep growing as i kept getting bigger and bigger right and so all right we'll go through sort of we'll look at the video and we kind of talk through it but it's just before like so what's your sort of thought process as you're you know you're selling oil then it's 200 is 400 and so on and so on yeah go big or go home i didn't have much to lose at the end of the day it was just 200 so it it wouldn't have really put a big dent in my life it was just 200 loss at that point right yeah and and but you i mean i guess the i mean a lot of people have taken a 200 account turned into 400 or whatever 600 2 000 it's a pretty good accomplishment in and of itself yeah but to how do you you know what was your just what was in your mind that like what was your mindset kind of going into the day because that's the real magic of this trade is that you kept adding to it you know and and you were obviously in the right mind space to do that i got a good sleep i think i got nine hours of sleep which going into a midnight shift is amazing i could stay up the whole night i was happy just i had a coffee beside me i was in a good mood basically right and this is all on your phone yes yeah i don't like trading on a computer okay too many things happening at once okay well let's get you know there's a little bit of a lesson in that right let's keep just all right focused on the one thing and when we look through it you're switching between the chart you're looking at the yeah basically just the one can't just right candles yeah just to make sure that it's not pulling back up into a green candle would have been pretty bad and so so the tree you're just selling oil selling oil selling oil um and larger and larger size and eventually you get to really just like 160 lots yeah there's too many that anyone should be trading unless you have like massive massive amounts of equity right but at this point you're just like you're just feeling very overcocky really right once i got to a certain point because i wanted to get out of the night with a thousand dollars profit and then once it passed the thousand it was five ten twenty at that point you just kind of kept going and it was just why not keep going see what i can do okay and you know we're gonna watch it and really the bulk of the games from 20 000 to 190 is in five minutes yeah yeah um and you know what is sort of you know what's going through your mind is this time to slow down i think at this point or i think it's sped up honestly yeah because i was back and forth back and forth back and forth as soon as i got just enough equity in the account or margin i placed a trade as soon as that time came no time in between that basically so there was just not a lot of thinking like and you weren't you know you wouldn't even have time to see the account balance yeah no it wasn't i didn't look at the account balance i would just go to place a trade and then hit sell and it said not enough margin i'd back out do it again back out do it again until it let me place the trade and then i would keep doing the same thing over and over again yeah and like i guess a lot of the people who you hear about who are able to manage large trades they don't think about the money so much is it there you think about it like points on a pinball machine or in a video it's just numbers at that point basically and that was that's sort of where you i mean other days i'm sure you're thinking about the money yeah well i was happy with the thousand dollars so really anything above that like i said it was 200 account so it didn't matter much and past a thousand was just extra money it was just numbers so and yeah that's just how it felt in that moment right you weren't able to step back and say twenty thousand dollars that's what i mean most people watching you that's sort of the sort of the magic what happened is yeah there's people at a thousand which was their goal or yeah two or twenty thousand people hey listen that's 20 grand mm-hmm they'd take the money and they'd go out and then they'd put it back in on a different day take their profits right cut their losses if it came but no was it just the day or was it was something about how you're feeling i don't know it's probably just the day i don't know if i'd do it again well yeah and what would you say to someone who was who was trying to do it like what sort of mindset would you want them to put themselves in uh you gotta get excited you gotta really hope for it and just watch it and you have to be getting excited as you watch the numbers grow and the chart go your way and be willing to bet big yeah be willing about big high risk and just not a care in the world can't be afraid of losing can't be afraid of losing the money if you need that money for a car payment don't use it if it's just extra cash lying around so it doesn't matter if you lose it right so we'll get it we'll go into the trade here and i'm saying and now take me to sort of getting out of it now so you hit almost 200 000 us dollars and then you start to see it go and now the full oil move here on the day that we're talking about with five six dollars right when you were trading it um and in this time i think it eventually fell a lot more yeah when i was sleeping after the midnight shift imagine going to sleep yeah unfortunately it's pretty amazing you were able to sleep after that could have caught the second drop but yeah yeah needed sleep um and so you know at what point did you go from okay just keep pushing it to was it when the candle started to go against you or what was what what happened to make you get out something clicked i don't know i i say it's kind of luck that i pulled out really kind of luck and just a gutting gut instinct but once i saw the candles kind of start to fight a little more come back up that's when i said okay it's probably time to pull out and then and you close everything yeah so through the trades that i was placing i was closing smaller trades so my trade numbers would go up and then down but then towards the end i would start to close the biggest trades that i had to get the most out obviously okay and i guess why it wasn't about oil this day you just saw the volatility in the market and about the short side because i know a lot of retail traders when oil went negative they were piling into oil longs yeah i i don't really like going long i like to sell i don't know going long it kind of makes me feel uneasy because i know everything has to fall everything has to come down at some point it's like a ball if you throw it up it's going to come down so i knew with oil it was going to come down okay yeah and and that and it was just that confidence that it was it was the confidence that made me a little a little cocky through the trades great yeah great well you were right and okay so now you zero everything out um and how you it took you a few minutes to get out of the trade yeah so i think it was how many yeah over a dozen trades open and it was it was like five to ten seconds for each trade to even process the closing so i would swipe hit close and i'd be sitting there grinding my teeth then it would close and i'd close the next one and that was it was a couple minute process having to close them all which was painful because as the candles were going up i was losing just that little amount of money on top right but you closed up large trades first yeah as long as you close the large ones out first the 0.01 lots they don't matter right yeah yes at that point they sure even though you almost got stopped out yeah 30 minutes into the tray yeah all right quite one lot final one yeah okay all right so now you finish this obviously sinks in at some point you tell your girlfriend whoever um they've got a million questions yeah and what are you telling them uh well really it was only my girlfriend that had questions just like how'd you do it and so forth and then no one else really had any questions and there's some disbelief yeah no one believed me at the time no one said that that's possible everyone said it's impossible and there's no way that i was able to do that and then you came along and okay so now so what was this sort of the next step so your mom told me a story the next day she gave you two hundred dollars yeah so that that one was a gamble the the two hundred dollars the next day that was literally just let's see if the market follows the trend and it didn't the next day unfortunately but lost sorry about that yeah she wasn't too happy about that maybe we were hot yeah she lost 200 i put a thousand in on my own just to see if i could keep the money rolling yeah didn't at least at least you didn't i mean so how okay so now escape ahead of it you take out what the bulk of what you can yeah yeah right who's your broker by the way uh fbs right how is that it's good they've never done me wrong in any aspect great works for me great and they and like you were able to get the leverage yep platform worked well yep good and and so now you you're going through this process of withdrawing these large amounts and you need to did you take out you know the vast majority of it yeah so i took out all of it at once because i'd rather not leave money in an account because i would probably risk it again and possibly blow the account but uh i took it all out it took i think a day to process all of my transfers in total and uh yeah well that's pretty good yeah i mean it's always that that feeling of a trader okay i'm gonna make a quarter million dollars and then i'm not gonna be able to get my money out yeah somehow it's that nerve-wracking moment it's not really your money till it hits your bank exactly yeah and then how did that how would that feel when it okay now it's in your account yeah now it's really real well it it didn't hit the account at one point i got a call from the bank and when i got the call the banker said are you expecting this transfer it seems a little large into your account like you've never really had over a thousand dollars before you're poor you shouldn't have this and then i was like yes i'm expecting that and then that's when my heart was just filled with joy because you knew i knew that it was real and i had the money and the bank had it yeah right great that's a great feeling all right so now or what's next for you i mean you haven't stopped trading yeah so this is about to be cleared everyone's about two months ago yeah so i just i kind of i stopped for a bit but i would dabble in it i would trade every once in a while and then i would stop and then i would start and then i just took the vast majority of my money and i put it into big stocks like etfs amazon stuff like that that will just keep growing tech giants that won't really get stopped out and okay so and how are you feeling now relaxed yeah like how what's the change in you like do you you know a lot of people say there's no change between sort of two months to go in now well i could sit by the pool and obviously i'll feel guilty if i miss work but i could miss work if i wanted but i just live my regular life it doesn't it doesn't change any work still watching the market yes much wake up the same times just didn't really change a whole lot i think maybe there's some lesson in that kind of from the outset right that if you're not necessarily looking for well it's the same as warren buffett he does the same thing every morning that he has for years and years it doesn't really change you as a person necessarily unless you let it right and you just have all these some opportunities yeah you just get extra opportunities on your plate that's right you bought a bike yes yeah one thing you buy the one thing i bought just to build my credit because money without credit is nothing that's the magic of money isn't it more money is much better than your own yes it helps your credit and got a new motorcycle new motorcycle looking to getting a new-ish car just have a little fun with it okay good good all right let's uh let's take a little break and then we'll talk and we'll like we'll go through the chart itself all right so back here i'm here with i'm here with thomas uh my neighbor who turned 200 into 190 000 and we're gonna show about five minutes and this looks like it's at 508 am yeah 508 am that's eastern time yeah and and you'll see this account so this picks up now uh to set it up you're you're up to you started with 200 yeah you're up to 21 000 here it was an incredible accomplishment at this point yes yeah that's why i started to record it because other people needed to see it because they wouldn't have believed it it wouldn't have any if we see uh let's bring up the it's not a great shot of it but we you can see this i guess this is the lead into it and this shows sort of where you start and these are every trade yeah and it's basically sell sell sell this is a chart of oil all the way down um and that so there's one there and then i guess this shows a little bit earlier maybe it's around so you took a couple screenshots as you were doing it is that yeah so it just kind of shows progressively how many trades i placed and so this is when you're looking at your screen now what are we so this year an atr here um bollinger bands moving averages on there moving averages and the green dots are the parabolic sar got it okay and so you're trying to manage some rare you're seeing a setup or i just i see when it hits it i know more than likely it's going to bounce back so this is around when you started to sell am i reading this right about there yeah okay and then we get um we're sort of right at the top of that so you are kind of on this little upswing in oil yeah so i placed a cell but then it started to go up somewhere in there and then that's when it came back down right right you almost got stopped out of this yeah all right so then we sort of skip ahead i've got a couple extra other charts here it basically shows the video starting right around i think it's around here and then you know when you scale out so this is the time the bottom fell out oil and you know you tell people about this trade it was they tend to think it was the day that oil went negative but it was the day after and it was on the may con april contract went negative right and this is on the may um and and it's sort of there and if we go out i don't know if there's like a daily chart here i have so that was this was the chart going negative zoom that in and that was the sort of the last days of the april trade yeah and then you're really the day this day the last day of the april contract but you're on the may contract yeah if i'm not mistaken yeah i was on the next contract yeah all right so this kind of shows it too this is around when your first trades were maybe a bit earlier than this and then the kind of video starts and catches catches this part here the early part of it um okay so let's now let's let's kind of go into the video now and just to set it up um you can see on these cell size this is very small traded point zero three of a lot and earlier it was point zero one of a lot yeah and it's not even showing them all here but you can see you've built some positives no [Music] the music helps with the mood and the confidence okay so you're listening to some hip-hop you got the earphones on your work and now you just see the speed of what's happening here and we're going to pause it i guess along the way um all right so what's happening here you basically you're watching are you looking to close the trade there is that uh yeah so i would have closed that trade there and i just placed the first three lot i think it was at that point and that's where it started to pull back but i just kept going because the candles just kept dropping and dropping so now so you're up to okay so you're changing the size of the line here you go from three to four yep you sell that you wait to find out if it if there was enough margin in the account it would be successful and now it keeps ticking lower and and then as soon as it would let me place even a bigger so okay now you're up to six again and you know you go on you narrate it yep and it just it kept going it would pull back every so often and then i would just place another one close out some trades if i had to get some extra equity in there you're closing out some trades here yeah so if i had to get a little more equity to place a couple more cells i would do that but even like it just jumped from 20 to 40. right so you see up at the top there now it's at 40 000. and you're not even noticing this really at this point no no it's really just kind of worrying about that it's going to pull back at this point and that's why i started to close some of those trades to get the balance up so that i would be able to uh place more cells in case of dignity now you go back and you try to this is when you really this is when i knew it was going to drop just my gut told me okay if we i just want to pause it right there as you kind of scroll up and down and bring it back because it shows this is sort of all the open trades you have and i think there's about a 10 on the screen here and as you scroll down you can see these one two three lots and so you're all in massive profit with all of these but you're going as a three love three lot and then we scroll down and now you're into four six ten lots and you're a little bit underwater in these i guess but that's that's because 10 is yeah one cent is a hundred dollars yeah that was the spread on that it was pretty yeah and then instantly even as we were watching it went positive there yeah so we're sitting at 7.17 now oil is just in a couple minutes down yeah and then the chart really starts to take another hit here after that 10 lot now there's no level you're really watching no no it's just if it goes down i go with it and was that another 10 lot i think you see a series of ten two three tens and then it wouldn't let me place that ten oh no it did and so this is all in real time now you saw it yeah up to 80 000. yeah your phone is attached to a charger yeah i was gonna die i was scared it was gonna die and uh i would lose everything on 3g yep not even 4g lte and so now at this point you're about to cross a hundred thousand dollars you're still selling here yes and you can see just briefly there if i bring it back how many lots we're up to there so you have 10 10 10 10 so the five of those here now so now you're up and you're still we're down to another 50 cents down in oil or 60 cents just since you started hammering the offer again did you close out something there yeah yeah just to get an extra bounce in the equity so i was sure that i pulled out extra money and now you hear that was just a 20 yeah you managed to sell a 20 lot there and account just hit 148 to now 143 000. i tried to place another 20. at this point the trades i was trying to trade so fast that it wasn't doing anything because it started to pull back and it just yeah so we would sit at 160 and it bought it still falling here oil so you really caught this one huge candle from yeah 17 to 15. you just sold another 20 lot and that's where the video lands what happened the video ends you've run out of uh yeah it it wouldn't let me record anymore and then yeah yes so okay so what happens next how do you get out of the trade let me bring back so there's a little pop i guess you know if i if i kind of zoom it in here it starts to come back against you yeah so that was um right about when i was driving home i i left work early because i felt sick afterwards no but you were you you closed all these out yeah so uh right before i left i was starting to close them out and it was about a three four minute process because it was a couple seconds for every trade i had to close because of a delay but uh i was able to get out lost a couple thousand dollars on top because of the candles going up but you start to get really nervous at this point yeah yeah once it starts to go up you start to sweat because you have 190 000 on the table being handed to you and they're just slowly pulling it away so what was the net when you got out i was like 185 86 and you close it yeah all out everything even the dollar cadre everything yeah okay um great and then so and this is right at the end of your workday uh no i wasn't even uh done work yet i left work i left work yeah i told my boss that i just made 190 000. and he said okay go home why are you still here so that was all he said yep so i just walked away went in my car drove home i still had my safety glasses on earplugs in i was just driving that's great that's great okay uh well thanks so much for for telling us an amazing story um you know we'll maybe we'll check back in with you in uh yeah in the future and see how it all unfolds but see if i got lucky again well i mean there's listen when we you know if we talk about the lessons of it all it's yeah you were picking the right instrument to treat you were looking for volatility right yeah and you went into something you'd never traded before exactly that's the risk and you were following the trend which was negative at the time um you weren't afraid to bet big yeah on something that you were confident in even if it was just in that moment yep if you think it's gonna do it then go with it trust your gut and you you know you just got out at the right time yeah that i think was a little a little lucky on my part okay and when you look at the chart you say okay then an hour later or not even an hour later maybe a half hour later it fell another five dollars yeah that was when i was sleeping does that does that yeah that kind of hurt me but because if i would have uh left some of the trades in i would have got even more but i got it right yeah of course i mean you can always no complaints all right well thanks so much for sharing your story with us you
Brilliant, thank you for sharing this piece! It is quite a long read, and I am sure a huge chunk of it is a basic material, judging by the first pages. But obviously learning how to trade FX properly is a long journey too. I will turn this into my daily reading piece before I go to bed and early in the mornings and ill try to read it like a book from time to time, I am sure there are some hidden gems of knowledge in it. even If I don't learn anything new, I will have brushed the fundamental base of knowledge. That's ok too.
Betting on dog races and/or horses. I did ok using my Trifecta 3 all 3 method. Get in line, see the lowest odds and use those as your 3, for 1st place and 3rd place. Put all dogs/horses in 2nd place and hope for a long shot to come in second. I like it when there are a couple scratches so that it doesn't cost so much. You can also go in with friends on this.