How trading changed my life (A story)(featuring @rules169 as author)
It all started with a video on youtube.
A trader called Marcello Arambide showed his Penthouse in Brazil in one of his videos. He did a housetour and talked about how he lived. I got interested in his lifestyle and in what he did for a living.
I can't find the exact video back. Here is a picture from one of his other videos.
At the end of the video I saw he had a trading academy. I didn’t really know what it was, so I went to his website. Apparently he was trading futures. There was a basic course to show what trading was and how money could be made with it. I was hooked. Trading looked sexy and easy with his strategy. It felt like I found a gem on the internet, but then I looked how much his trading course was priced. The basic one was 5000 USD. Way too much for me because at that time I just started college (18 years old) and I was as good as broke. After reading some reviews, I got the idea that the basic course wasn’t that good. I left the idea of trading alone and moved on.
One year later I stumbled upon Timothy Sykes
He was promoting heavily on several instagram pages at the moment, using his Lamborghini to catch my attention.
I looked him up on google and found out he had a lot of complains about him and his course. Then of course I didn’t look into him anymore, but I did look into pennystocks (that’s what he traded). Pennystocks had bad reviews as well. I read they were super risky and basically a gamble when placing a trade. Not one thing kept me interested in trading anymore. I thought all these trading gurus were a scam and gave up on the idea of trading on my own.
Oceansky
About a year and a half later, I discovered the millionaire called Oceansky on instagram. He had supermotivational speeches on his Snapchat. Every time I finished watching his story, I was pumped up and ready to conquer the world.
These days were also the first days of Periscope. It was a better platform for all his business advice. He told me and the audience some good strategies when starting a website, a landscaping business, etc. After he got a ton of followers on Periscope, he started to share his life story on how he became a millionaire. Most of his wealth was created with trading forex. The skill was hard, but he didn’t mind to teach us in the next sessions. Oceansky also told us to write a 1 million-dollar-check and everyone would cash it next year. I was ready for it. Ready for financial freedom. No 9-to-5 job for me, only forex.
Several of his free forex lessons on Periscope learned me the basics. Analysing the charts by drawing lines became second nature. He then started repeating all these forex lessons to gain more and more followers. These followers were perfect for the website he was creating. The site would have a ton of lessons every day, giveaways, business advice and a lot of other promises. I bought the monthly subscription 97 USD, watched most of his sessions, placed my first live trades and in the meanwhile I met some awesome people in the chatroom. Months later it turned out he didn’t teach me anything extra next to drawing lines and learning how some indicators worked.
I canceled the subscription
I left with a trading account that went to zero. One good thing was that I found a good friend by being active in the chatroom. He became very good at trading. When he was improving in trading, I was busy with college and trading was on the background for me.Months later I finished my exams and went on holiday to Lisbon, Portugal. I was still in touch with my trading buddy and he didn’t live that far away from Lisbon. On my last day in Portugal we had a meeting. It was fun with all the things we did: going for a coffee, then Sushi, a walk in the ancient city... We spoke a lot about trading. The strategies he found and how his new trading group was going. He told me some of his students left him already because they were killing it on their own. I decided to join. The lessons taught me a strategy that was simple. These days it’s going very well. I still have ups and downs, but I’m not losing 80% of my trades like before.
Trading changed my perspective on how to succeed in life
Before I discovered trading I believed I could only get successful by studying hard, having a great carreer and being smart with money. After discovering it, I found out that I didn’t really have to get the best degree possible.Working for your money isn’t the optimal way to become wealthy. Let money work for you by investing it. There is no limit how much you can make from investing money. The more money you have, the more you can earn.
When you work for your money you do have a limit. It’s called time. This perspective led me to finishing school next year already. I’m not going for a master degree anymore. My plan now is to finish college next year, to go working with my degree, to save almost half of my salary and invest that into several projects. One of the projects is forex trading, another one on my list is of course Steemit :)
What I learned:
My road to trading forex learned me to be careful with what people promise you online, to be patient and calm, not to take irrational decisions when you are in a panic, and made me some great friends. Also the eight wonder of the world was one of the best things I discovered during trading: compound interest. I probably learned a lot more in other aspects of life.
Please follow my account if you liked my article:
Rules169
@gavvet features authors to promote new authors and a diversity of content. All STEEM Dollars for this post go to the featured author.
Compound Interest :
Love it!!
there are those who understand it and those who pay it.
Amazing right :D
Yeap! :)
I really enjoyed your post. I've traded regular stocks and Penny stocks but never forex. The stock market can be a gamble pretty much any day.
Awesome. These days I'm also looking to learn more about futures. Every heard of it?
I've heard of it but never looked into it.
Glad that you succeeded to make those changes.I'm trying to do my best to make some good changes in my life too.I find your post another motivation for me. Nice post bro!
Thanks :) I'm glad it was a motivation for you.
Beginner to trade Forex is very dangerous. Easier to start with regular trading on the crypto-exchanges.
Message me on steemit.chat please. I'm interested in crypto-trading, but I've never done it. Hit me up :)
Thanks @gavvet for posting money education blogs, your story of reminds me of mine. I've been posting some educational blogs too and done well so far, you appear to have a sincerity through your blog that I connect with. thanks mate
Nice picture of sushi! Your last two paragraphs summarizes it!
I would recommend you invest with a goal in mind - and know what you sacrifice!
If you can buy a car with what you have now, and you are willing to give up that car for the prospect of getting something better... do it. But know what you want, so that you know when to cash out. Otherwise you will never know when you have made enough! Also, be content that if you lost it all, all you lost was a shitty gas guzzler.
Forex trading is a "soft job". In the bigger scheme, all it does is it helps globalisation - it makes all the world currencies more dependent on each other so that if something bad goes wrong in one country, it affects everyone. It works a bit like a club, where those who have learned how things work can take money from the newbies who haven't learned yet... with a huge dose of randomness thrown in.
In short - there are better ways to spend your time and to make money, than trading forex or speculating on anything, really. If you put more than 5% of your capital in there, you deseve to lose it all.
Thanks for the info! My goal is to gather $2.5 million to reach financial freedom. Forex isn't the only way I want to go. Real estate, futures and the stock market look interesting as well for me. Maybe a business if I find a good idea.
But please tell me why you think forex isn't the best way to spend my time.
The way I see it, all kinds of trading - whether it be forex or stocks, can be broken down into two aspects: Speculation and whales. Whales do what they want when they want, they jump or dive - cash out, cash in, randomly and these cause big price movements. The speculators are like the waves, they try to make the ocean smooth again to find the balance... so a whale can be a high net worth country, company or individual, and they might cash in or out slowly over time, rigging a market in their favor or in line with their goals. Some of this you can see coming, but most of it you can't, unless you're working for the whale. If you are a speculator, you can get taken by surprise by these movements at any time and it is mostly completely random, so in a way all the money you make is pure luck. You can only chip away at luck with good data, but in the end it's still luck.
Add to this that most of the biggest scam artists and greedy lying thieves are in financial services, you need a think skin and sharp wits to survive - AND YOU NEED TO KNOW WHEN YOU'VE MADE ENOUGH.
$2.5m for financial freedom... that's a lot, that's more than 99.999% of the world has. Think about it long and hard if you really need to aim that high. In most countries you can achieve financial freedom with less than $500k... in many even less than $200k - and from there you might be reach for that goal from a position of relative safety, without having to risk the freedom you've already achieved.
I've played around with Forex and trading for a few years, as well as copy trading and algo trading. To put it simply, I've only really seen two kinds of traders/algos: those good at following a trend - but when market conditions change, they fall off the end of the trend and lose everything they made during the trend (because they didn't know when they made enough!) - some of these trends lasted for months. I have not come across anyone who could spot a changing trend 3 times in a row.
The other one - and the only way that I've seen people recover from big losses is by going Martingdale. That means you're just risking more and more to make up for past mistakes. 4 or 5 wrong guesses and you're out.
Why beat around the bush, if you're going to gamble like this, why not just make one big bet, either win, or lose, once, and save yourself a lot of time?
The vast majority of people lose, and the ones who don't are either the ones who were already the richest, or the handful of lucky ones, or some upstream broker, LP or bank that took advantage of everyone else's ignorance.
You might trade up to $2m, and congratulate yourself on how well you did... and then lose everything back down to $100k or less, wasting a few years of your life doing this. Whatever you do, is going to take time - do you like sitting in front of a screen? Maybe it is for you. The thing is, just knowing the positions and movements aren't enough, you need to stay pinned to the screen and time it perfectly if you want to beat the algo's that the broker uses to game you, that his liquidity provider uses to game him, that his bank uses to game him... you're at the end of a long chain of getting gamed, and at the end the only way to really beat this is to work for the guy with the biggest stick, and good luck getting in there. Property bubbles come and go. If you find one, get in early and get out early, you're good. Do you like driving around checking out properties, dealing with people, micro managing paperwork?
Business? You don't need a good idea - there are literally thousands and people throw them at you 24/7. It's more about the market... you need to do market research and find things people need, want and use every day. People test business models by selling stuff they don't have just to see if people will buy it. Most businesses just do something cheaper than another. Many businesses protect their interests through dirty tactics and you need to be either invisible or ready to fight back. Some businesses are easier than others... most businesses are just there to keep people busy.
Employment is underrated, especially if you're an entrepreneur. You know, some jobs can be heaven on earth... you don't have to worry about where your employees' next paycheck is coming from, who is going to try and squash you. You can stay in the suburbs, in a beautiful house, raise a beautiful family, have a beautiful social life and plenty of time for yourself... most people running a business give up at least one of the above if not all.
If you're an employee you can set your boundaries and do only what you committed to, so your boss won't expect more and more from you, and you can get paid to do what you're already good at. In most jobs if you stuff up, you will seldom have to deal with it yourself. Some work environments are toxic... but you're free to shop around and find one you love.
Haha, you asked for it. I type as fast as I think, problem of mine. Got to get to work now... I'm going on holiday soon... will put some thought into making all of this more palatable! :-)
Wow again such an amazing answer. Thanks for putting all the work in this.
I'm sorry that you didn't succeed in the forex markets. I agree that the big players control price. That shouldn't be a problem though. I just piggyback their moves. I've seen a lot of people succeed (most failed though), so it is doable. Btw if you play it smart then you can avoid losses like your 2 million to a 100k (aka stoplosses).
I know 2.5 mil is a lot, but that's actually my ultimate goal. The goal before that is 750k. It would give me just enough to pay for my food, rent, etc. 2.5 mil would give me extra luxury.
I've been employed and it's indeed easy. Most of the time is too easy for me. It's not challenging at all. Going to work, doing the same work everyday and going home. The security is the good thing about it.
Anyways ill figure it out. Thanks for your perspective on the things. It helps me to improve :)
Haha, thanks! I didn't say that I didn't succeed. I turned $100 into $5000 just learning the ropes. I think anyone who is sharp will be luckier than most, but me just saying that will probably cause another 50 people to each lose $100 to one other person who may make the same, so I'm not proud of it, and I know it was just luck.
I would probably do okay doing the same with $10k. But would I make it up to $500k? Would it work the same if I started with $100k? Is it the same amount of effort turning $100k into $5m?
I doubt it, because now you're a lucrative target for those who know even more than you do. I've heard of too many people who lost $10k+.
The problem is, that the more you have, the easier it is to risk even more getting debt and leverage and it's tempting.
What if the broker borks your stop loss? Do you have the means to get it out of him? Probably not, and he knows it.
Business is cut-throat and you only realize this once your very life has been threatened by business rivals.
I just sold a share in one of my companies for $100k. I'm not trading Forex with it, or putting it in these insanely overvalued markets - I've put half of it in property and I'm setting up businesses and buying and selling goods and services that people need with the rest, it's not easy money but it's honest business and if hyperinflation or some other crisis hits, I'll be able to add value. Rather than investing, I go to local startup-events and hackathons to see what people are working on and to see if I can team up and help.
And with the $5k I made in forex?! That's my upcoming holiday! Quit while you're ahead!!!
Love how everyone inspired you on a way and ALSO OMG that sushi looks insanely good!!! YES please! "My road to trading forex learned me to be careful with what people promise you online, to be patient and calm, not to take irrational decisions when you are in a panic, and made me some great friends" I think this can probably be applied to anyone who is a freelancer or starting their own thing!
I agree. Freelancers have to be cautious as well.
I love life stories! And even more i like people who are developing. Become better, realize what they want in life and how to achieve it!
I wish you success!
Thank you for the nice words :) Good luck with your projects as well!
Hey @gavvet it's been a while. I would love to post this article I wrote on my own channel, as a throwback/1 year on steemit. What do you think?
Also would love to have a chat because long time no talk!
I just started trading... learned a thing or two by now.. wish i had some mentors like you...