In '84, a friend of mine that worked as a local in the TB pit position trading the back months against the front months got me an interview with Shatkin Financial. I was hired and worked in the TB pit for a year [started out as a runner, and two weeks later I was in the pit]...After that, there were many twists and turns... nitro
My father, who is a farmer's son, did some commodities trading. But he was an emotional trader, and since it was before the advent of the PC, he had to work through those shifty churning brokers. He had to stop because he got headaches and aggravation out of it instead of money. This whole period gave me a rotten impression of speculation and put me off of it. Since he was always complaining about his what crooks all his brokers were, I got the impression it was all very dishonest stuff. Then came the great bull market. And the advent of the PC. My younger brother turned me on to E-trade and The PitBull Investor, which turned me on to Investor's Business Daily and CANSLIM. Hey, no brokers! Didn't make a whole alot of money, but thanks to Bill "cut your losses at 8%" O'Neil, I didn't lose alot of money either. From being stopped out a lot I learned that PitBull only works in a bull market because ALMOST ANYTHING works in a bull market. But I got stopped out alot because the market was toppy. I thank God for that because I got so disgusted I quit trading altogether and was out of the market when the implosion occurred and the big sell off after 9-11. After a long bout of depression after 9-11, I got in again in the brief rally that occurred after 9-11. I was sitting at my PC and happened to start fiddling with the settings on BigCharts when I noticed that the Williams%R indicator stayed in overbought territory when the stock when up, and stayed in oversold territory when the stock when down, and I thought, hmmmm.... After lots of books later, I still haven't figured it all out yet, but at least I'm using IB instead of E-trade. Thank you for that, ET.
Unemployed for over a year now. Over 1,000 resumes...< 5 interviews....no offers. A headhunter told me 40 was the kiss of death for finding a job because of discrimination lawsuit concerns. Since my family is living off our savings, I figured I'd at least give this a shot. Worst thing that can happen is I lose more of my savings. Without a job, I don't see much risk. If I keep going down this road, I'll be flipping burgers during the day and driving a cab at night. My past income was > 150k/year, so unless I can nail trading, our standard of living is going to drop anyway....
like most college students, I was a liberal by osmosis. I once met a girl who said I should read 'Atlas Shrugged.' A long while after that, I took a 'sabbatical' from college and found, on my mother's bookshelf, that very book. So I read it, and learned for the first time (as they don't teach it to lower level engineering students) what free enterprise is about -- and boy did I get excited. From that point on, I determined that I wanted to be paid what I was worth (whatever that was) as opposed to a fixed wage. I heard about a stockbroker who was once bartender where I worked. Now he was driving a Maserati or a Ferrari. I thought, 'there's a job where I can get paid whatever my effort earns,' so one thing led to another and some little firm wound up hiring me. There was a market-maker in the office. I looked at what he did, and thought it was soo cool. It made cold calling pretty pale. But, in those days, noone got to trade. The fact that there was a market maker in a Florida office was unusual in itself. So it was a long time and convoluted path breaking in. But from the very first time I learned what a trader was, I wanted to be one. When I was little, I would go for long rides with my father up route 128. The names of all the business just fascinated me. EG&G, Canada Dry, Digital Equipment, AT&T... business has always been a passion of mine. I don't really think there's much else I could do...even if I could play the guitar like Jeff Baxter.
i got into it for a few reasons- first, i love the markets and watching them in action, i love fighting other people for money who are all trying to take it away from me, i like the challenge of suceeding in one of the most demanding professions out there, i love watching and learning as stocks are driven by news and world events- learning how to profit from it. but really, i just love waking up in the morning, coming to work, checking the news, rolling up my sleeves and thinking "ok, i'm gonna get these bastards today- time to make some money!!" and the other thing- i don't think anywhere else (without having to work 80 hour weeks in a BS job i hate) that i could be making on average $1000 net/ day at the ripe old age of 26.....and the freedom of being an independent trader and not having to answer to "the man" isn't so bad either.......
It was 1994 and I had just moved to a mining town in northern Canada to be a firefighter/paramedic. The whole place was buzzing with 'diamond fever' as the first North American diamond fields were being discovered nearby. Everywhere you turned, you heard of someone staking a claim or making $500k on some 10 cent stock that went to 10 bucks. So when a buddy of mine called me to say that his room-mate pilot friend had just flow a geologist out of camp who told him they had diamonds on the property and the stock was going to the moon.... Well it seemed like free money, I mean I had "inside information", a hot tip, a sure thing. I didn't have two nickels to rub together but got my first bank loan ever, all they would give me- $6000 and plowed all of it into Mill City Gold. Of course I rode all of it right into the ground, but I was hooked and soon was subscrbing to newsletters and calling the George Chalikis hotline for the next hot tip. A high disposable income allowed me to loose 10's of thousands of dollars over the years, but I always chalked it up to the learning curve, never realizing that I didn't have a clue what I was doing. But the love of the game kept me coming back and I finally figured things out.