This may sound like some lame ad, but I’m not selling anything at the moment. I’m simply so excited that the reality that a steady income can be made in the stock market actually does exist. There’s a reason why 90% of all people who try to play the stock market lose some or all of their original investments, and I was determined to figure out how to be the 10%. To accomplish this, I didn’t just want to learn how fly the plane, I wanted to take the entire plane apart, and rebuild it exactly the way I wanted from the ground up.
And that’s exactly what I’m currently doing in the stock market. Yes, it might seem at odds with my training in Zen Buddhism, but to me it’s a natural extension of living my life as authentically as I know how. Also, Buddha himself said that Buddhism is meaningless until we make it our own. That’s exactly what I’ve been doing with the stock market.
In 2016, I decided to take an intense, difficult, accredited 2-year course to learn how to be a Chartered Market Technician. I enrolled in the same course that hedge fund managers are required to take in order to able to give advice on investing. I did this because I wanted to know how the institutions and market makers who are the few who actually win in the stock market actually think. With the advent of computer-based trading, and “PaperMoney” accounts, I could practice in real time in the stock market with all the tools that used to be available only to professional hedge fund managers and Market Makers. But, just because the playing field has been leveled; it doesn’t mean that everyone will be able to take Picasso’s paint brushes and paints, and be able to make a masterpiece.
I wanted to find out if I could use this seemingly analytical, Mensa brain to figure out how to be not just that 10% who made money in the stock market, but the 1%-2% who actually generated enough of a regular, reliable income to provide me the freedom to live the life I wanted to live while relying on no one but myself. When ShamansGarden was at it’s peak in the mid-2000’s, I had 23 people working for me to make that success story a reality. Once the machinery was running, I got to spend a lot of time simply living my life. I got spoiled during that time as I moved to Mexico for a while, became a Dive Master, built a house in Cozumel, came back to Chicago, met the love of my life, packed up and moved to California, where we bought a house in a sleepy seaside surf town north of San Diego, where I then got my pilot’s license, and built the plane that I will hopefully have for the rest of my piloting life. During that time, I had the time to study Zen Buddhism as fervently as I had studied music, as I learned how to surf, and to heal the wounds of my youth.
I can’t help missing certain aspects of that amazing time in my life, and now that I’ve recently built an 8,000 sq/ft FDA-manufacturing facility and testing lab, it currently requires a great deal more of my time than I ever imagined it would. I’m having a blast crafting high quality products that better people’s lives (like www.Kava.com and www.Sextracts.com), but it can get intense quite often. So, I’ve been hungry to have that massive amount of free time again, to go back to living my life with more freedom than I imagined possible.
Almost immediately, I fell in love with the stock market, especially when I learned it’s only like gambling in Vegas if you choose to make it like gambling in Vegas. There’s a professional way to trade that will cap your rewards, but will also move your trades to a very reliable high probability of success. I choose simple to complex options trades that carry an 80% chance of success. That means for every 5 trades I place, 4 will make money and 1 will lose money. the only trick is to have that one losing trade lose less than the 4 winning trades. Most people get greedy, they get emotional, impatient, and they either place highly speculative trades to “cash in” on the market, or they hang onto losing trades far too long. Remove the emotion, create a strict set of trading rules, and then follow those rules to the letter is the key to success in the stock market. I am hoping to have the time to show you how with SmallTimeTrader.com and a Kindle book that’s nearing completion called “How to Win Small in the Stock Market”. Both will outline, in vidid detail, my trading system and discipline. I’ve written several unique scripts that help me time the market far more accurately than standard indicators such as MACD and Stochastics, and will provide full proof of accuracy in all of these indicators, live during market hours.
I was shocked at how building a reliable trading system and then strictly following the rules of my trading system began not only to bring me returns, but have begun to bring me steady, reliable returns in the 30% range. I’m still just 9 months in to my formal training (with nearly a decade in casual trading using OmniTrader since 2004), and have only started to see a return of this level on my investments for the past few months. But, as each day passes, and my account grows by $250.00 – $1500.00 in a single trading day, 4 out of the 5 trading days during the week, my confidence is growing by the day. And my excitement grows at the possibility of the kind of freedom I had when ShamansGarden was shipping out 350 orders a day, every day.
So far, I’ve accelerated my learning, and made my way through Beginning Stock Investing, to Technical Analysis, to Options Strategies and then Advanced Option Strategies courses with a 4.0 out of 4.0 possible in all courses so far. (See my certificates). I’ve got a ton more to learn, as I make my way through my Fundamental Analysis, Advanced Weekly Options, and Futures courses, but I’m finding that the more I learn, the more I trade, and the more I refine my own rulesets and systems, the more reliable the stream of income becomes. And, finding such joy in this battle of wits and market psychology makes it an ever-changing challenge every day I’m planning out my next trades.
I continue to gain confidence that I’ll be able to teach anyone with some common sense, discipline, patience and a heavy dose of determination to trade exactly the way I trade. I’m building a set of scripts so I’ll be able to get you set up exactly as I’m setup, and you can follow my trades, trading on PaperMoney in your own account until you decide to take off your training wheels, build your own trading systems, and move to RealMoney. It’s illegal to promise any kind of returns, but it is legal to say that my trading system is currently netting me a 30% return, and I can at least teach you to trade exactly how I trade.
As with all my projects, time will certainly tell. Full Disclosure, a snapshot of my current portfolio is below. (Update, the below portfolio is now current as of May 5, 2017). Most positions are Bullish, some are neutral (Iron Condors), and a few are Bearish (Bear Call Spreads). The beauty of trading advanced options is that you can make money whether the stock market is going up, sideways, or down.