One of the more common problems have as newer traders is shiny objects. You hear about one thing in the market, so you focus on that. Then you hear about something else, and before you know it, you are off focusing on that. While there is certainly nothing wrong with having multiple tools in your trading toolbelt, you must master one tool in full at a time. Thanks to our guest’s openness and transparency, “GeeSama” from the community, we get a great look into just how annoying and frustrating chasing shiny objects can be. To bring things full circle, we all get to hear the benefits of simply slowing down and putting all your brain power into a single tool. This is an interview any new or veteran trader can benefit from.
Notes:
In today’s podcast we speak with community member GeeSama. His introduction to the market was through the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, that was passed around at his day job. It outlines a few ways to get out of the ‘rat race’ and he gravitated toward the stock market to achieve this.
After funding an account, Gee had some nice fool’s gold to start with a sizeable gain on his account. He never actually had any blowout losses because he had a max amount of money to lose per trade in terms of a stop loss. While it helped, his stops were not always in logical locations.
After joining the community, Gee realized that he wanted to learn from Clay and purchased University. After he would finish each course, he would paper trade each strategy for a few weeks but recommends that people paper trade longer.
While he was focusing on shorter term day trades, he eventually realized he has a much larger success rate at a longer term time frame. This is what ultimately led him to advanced options trading. Unfortunately, Gee has a bad habit of ‘style hopping’ and he ultimately abandoned that successful strategy to try to day trade futures.
Futures actually led to his largest loss which totaled about $5,000 dollars in one day. After that he took a 6 month break to regroup and figure out how not to repeat the mistakes of that day. He went back to advanced options and finds he trades much better being the casino versus the player. He is a big believer in the probabilities.
Quotes:
“I didn’t have any business ideas. I’m an introvert so real estate was out. The only option I had left was the stock market.”
“I decided to take a leap. Obviously he knows what he’s talking about. I have no idea what I’m doing. I wanted some sort of structure.”
“That led me down a bad rabbit hole of averaging down on contracts to try to get to break-even.”
“I was pretty much riding the coattails every day I came in and had significant profits. I was overleveraging myself.”
“I’m taking a little bit out of each paycheck and funding the account so I can consistently add more positions.”