What did you do with the 1st million you earned ?

I bought a house, furnished it, and then I bought a Dodge Viper. No shit. That was a long time ago though.

 

This is pretty interesting because I've never really told my story to anyone. But since it's been 20 years now, I might as well.

I messed around with trading while I had a full-time residential construction job back in 1995. After a few months of trading on the side, I started doing good at it, so I eventually quit my job and went all in. My living conditions at the time could best be described as a redneck fraternity because I lived in a single wide trailer with a bunch of roommates in North Carolina, just outside of Raleigh. There were 4 or 5 guys in that little shoebox at any given time, and we were all in our early to mid 20's.

I quickly learned that trading from your own home or office was very isolating and lonely. So to fix that problem, I taught myself a couple programming languages and set up a chat room on a new web site I created in the summer of 1997 as a way for myself to be able to communicate with other lonely souls who were trading every day like I was. I named it Elite Trader because that's exactly what every new trader dreams of becoming:



The concept of the internet was brand new back then, which means that free little services like chat rooms that we take for granted today were actually big deals back then. I remember had to pay $4,500 just for the chat room software. But I didn't care. I desperately wanted to reach out to others who were just as passionate about trading as I was.

Sometimes people wanted to call me on the phone and ask a question about the course or the chat room. One day the phone rang and I answered by saying "Elite Trader - This is Baron!" and after the call was over, I looked across the room and couple of my roommates were laughing their asses off.

I said, "What's so funny?" and one of them looked at me and said, "You should have answered the phone by saying "Elite Trailer" instead! They must have said that same joke a thousand times after that whenever the phone rang.

Anyway, I traded for several years full time and certainly made enough to live better than most, but never enough to retire or anything like that. I eventually became a master at tape reading and Nasdaq Level II order flow trading along the way, so much so that I wrote the first course ever on trading profitably with Level II quotations, and it was called Advanced Day Trading.

I charged a $199 one-time fee for people to access the material online. The reason why I did it that way is because I was constantly updating the material as the regulations and order handling rules were changing. So with that setup, I could notify my customers when something significant had changed and they could log back in to check it out. So it was less like a static book, and more like an ongoing work in progress.

Between my trading profits and the course profits, I earned a million pretty quick. There's no need to ask me what the exact split was between the two, because I honestly don't remember. They were both in the six figures though. It was crazy because I had virtually no expenses as I was earning that money because of my living conditions. In fact, I was scared to spend any money because I thought I was just going to wake up one day to discover that the party had ended. It's a good thing though.... because that's exactly what happened.

It didn't take very long at all for the word to get out about my course, and within a couple of years, books were starting to appear in Barnes & Noble that were pretty much clones of my course. The first book I can remember that came along was "Stock Trading Wizard" in 1999, which was written by Tony Oz, one of my members. Hey, at least he listed me in the Acknowledgments.

More and more clones came out that year at the normal book price of $29, so that pretty much killed the demand for my course.

But it didn't make any difference. By the time that everybody else jumped into the game, I had already made enough money to move on with my life and live wherever I wanted. So I got rid of all the roommates and gave the trailer to a local church in late 1999. Today that trailer is still being used to give missionaries from foreign countries a free place to stay while they are visiting their supporting church.

I took my money and moved from North Carolina to beautiful Orlando, Florida because it seemed like an up-and-coming area that would be a great place to start fresh, buy a real house, and raise a family.... and that's exactly what happened.



I eventually migrated out of trading full-time, not because I wanted to, but because ET ended up becoming so popular that there was just no way I could do both. Even though I never had a losing year trading, I decided that devoting myself to ET was my "highest and best calling" because it was a way that I could truly help people by bringing them together in a way that they wouldn't have otherwise.

Shortly thereafter, the site ended up getting some notable mentions in the media. My dad called me one day and said, "I'm not sure if you're aware of this or not, but your web site is being talked about on CNN right now."

And from that point on, more media coverage continued and it was blatantly obvious that my life was destined to go from "Elite Trailer" to Elite Trader after all. It's been a hell of a ride for 20 years now and although I've made plenty of mistakes along the journey, I wouldn't change a thing about it.

 

Before I was in the construction business, I was in the car audio business. We would build custom systems for our customer's cars back when it was cool to have four 18-inch subwoofers instead of a back seat.

One of my coworkers decided he wanted to move back home to South Carolina and start his own car audio shop. He said he was going to name it "Elite Audio". And as soon as I heard the name, I immediately liked it and I thought "If I ever start a company of my own, it will have the word 'Elite' in it." I was about 20 years old at the time.