subject: Millionaire Day Trader The Miserable March To Riches [print this page] Can I still be a millionaire day trader by the time I am 65?
When I first began investing in 1995, I began in mutual funds. I did not have a large amount of money. I kept adding a small bit of money every month from my day jobs and night job to my trading account and when I had a sufficient amount, I would buy more of the same large funds. I built my trading account up to $10,000 which was also the majority of my complete net worth.
I grew weary of the little gains every year from my mutual funds and then Janus got in trouble by the SEC for allowing their favored patrons to trade in and out of their funds while small guys like myself had to buy and hold.
I started looking at penny stocks and greediness filled my mind with how much I would earn quickly provided I went long the right one.
I was innocent, easy to fleece white meat for the next polished penny stock con that came along.
I invested $1,000 in a pink sheet stock named Plasticon. I heard about this company from Investor Business Daily. The publication looked of good reputation. Afterward lots of penny stock gurus profiled Plasticon, and finally Green Light. Truly this was the next searing penny stock.
I was youthful. Everything published about this pink sheet company was a tall tale. The CEO Jim Turek even went on Investors Business Daily streaming video news show and lied. I remember telling my wife he looked honest and she agreed.
Following my first $1,000 invested, the stock fell 50%. Therefore what did I do? Why double down of course. I purchased an added $2,000 worth of stock.
Then Yahoo Finance ran the news story that Plasticon was filing for a listing to the OTCBB. This stock is a jumper I thought! Thus I researched the topic of stocks that went from the pink sheets to the OTCBB and found that some did really well after uplisting. Thus what did I do? Well I bought $1,000 more as any respectable penny stock investor would do.
The stock fell a further 50%. I was a little upset. But then a news story came out that Plasticon had just signed with a major distributor to sell their plastic re-bar supports! This could be like Tazer I thought. A small penny stock supplying product to a major distributor means mad pay-day profits! I bought an additional $2,000 on the news.
The stock dropped another 50%. I was getting very panicky now. But suddenly, like a present from God (I used religion in my stock trading back in those stupid trading days), James Turek announced that Plasticon was not going to file for an OTCBB listing, oh no, they changed their mind and were going to file for a listing to the AMEX. So what did I do? Well if I thought that an uplisting to the OTCBB was worth $1,000, then certainly an uplisting to the AMEX was worth $2,000. Hence I purchased $2,000 more!
All this happened over a 2 year period until finally, the penny stock dropped under $0.001 and Plasticon filed for bankruptcy.
There were so many mistakes that I made along the way to losing everything. Clearly I was completely despondent about how much I had lost. What made it doubly discouraging was that it was my entire life savings. This money was everything to me. It was all my hopes and dreams, particularly when you compound that amount at some 4% or 5% for maybe 40 to 50 years ahead of me. I sat down long and hard, reviewed all of my mistakes, and tried to learn my stock trading and investing lessons. My wife asked why I was doing it at all, waking up at 6:00am PST for so many mornings to trade stocks, reading hundreds of books about stock trading, and thus far I had zilch to show for it, but a whopping hole in the pocket and heart. It was a good question, and I had an unusual response.
My own response was "I prefer to lose it all now in my thirties, rather than losing it all in my fifties. Provided I be taught my lessons early, I would not make the same big mistakes much later. At the moment, I am stock trading and investing some $15,000. One day, I hope to be managing and investing one million dollars. I can afford to lose $10,000 in my thirties, but I will not be able to afford to lose even 20% of a million dollars when I'm older." Right, I was in grief from my deep loss. But I was so unwavering in continuing my stock trading and investing, and I was confident that one day I would be managing a much larger amount. Since I knew I would be investing for the next 30 years or more, the earlier I learned how to do it the better.
All of my past investing and stock trading errors has continued to help me to become a more improved investor and smarter stock trader. My giant loss of my entire life savings in my early thirties has made me a much more careful and well-informed investor. He who has grabbed a bull by its tail knows twice as much as he who never has. I know some of the lessons you can never learn from books. All the bona fide meaningful lessons must be learned from agonizing mistakes.
This is a video of some of the dreadful lessons I learned.
