Hey what's up you guys? I was just going for a little hike and I thought I would sit down for a second Catch My Breath and then I was just thinking about how it's almost New Year's and uh, it reminds me of when I started trading because for me and many of you guys know this but I dabbled a little bit in trading and I was interested in the markets when I was pretty young like in middle school and even in high school. that's when I had my first trading account but um then I took a break and you know I was working like regular jobs and stuff and I got to a point where I was in my 20s and you know this is like right after the Great Recession or whatever and there weren't a lot of good jobs and I I was just I was in a funk I was kind of depressed I wasn't really happy with what I was doing and you know in Vermont the days can be very short in the winter it's just I was feeling like I needed to do something different and I had been thinking for some time about wanting to kind of get back in the market but it was one of those things that like I would think about it and I would just get overwhelmed and I was like I don't know and then I would just do nothing and then another six months will go by and then I would hear something about the market or I would think man, if I just started six months ago, you know, think of where I'd be today and then I again would just kind of like I didn't have the motivation and so I ended up doing it as a New Year's resolution and I and for me at the time, so I had a lot of friends that uh, were working like uh in restaurants and so I was I was when I'd hang out with them and we would have you know House parties and things like that I was always up really late and I wasn't getting up even early enough to be trading at the open. So for me part of the New Year's resolution was saying you know what uh I'm actually gonna get up, I'm gonna set my alarm and I'm gonna start getting up early enough so I could sit down and start to watch what's happening at the open and that just that one step of making a New Year's resolution that I was gonna set my alarm and get up early. that for me was um, you know that I guess that was kind of the start and then of course I I had to figure out you know what I how I was going to trade and things like that and I was just mentioning this in a recap the other day.

but um, and many of you already know this but so not to be repetitive. but um, when I got started I had some money I was fortunate in the sense that I had a hundred thousand dollars. Um now I had gotten that because my father had passed away. which was, you know, still the worst thing that had happened to me I mean it's just losing a parent is terrible.

and losing a parent when you're young is is even worse. But when my younger sister turned 21, she got 100 Grand and I got 100 Grand that was the money that they had gotten from when they sold my grandmother's house and you know put, they had saved about 200 000 for his retirement. you know, whatever. And anyways, so he didn't get to live that and so that went to me and my sister.

and so I thought okay, I've got a hundred thousand dollars Um, and at that time it was, it had been invested with one of these, you know, kind of like just run-of-the-mill investment advisors. and despite the fact that the market was actually rallying off the low of 2008 or 2009, the account wasn't really doing that well. And so I kind of thought to myself I was like okay, you know this is money that I have when I was in Middle School and we had that semester on the stock market that was in 1997 or 98 and you know at that time we were all paper trading like.com type of stocks like Yahoo and um I don't know whatever different stocks like that. and then when I tried trading again in high school, I was trading these you know large cap companies like Exxon Mobil and U.S Steel and Caterpillar and the problem with that? So so now I'm coming back and I'm in my 20s and I'm like okay, I've got a hundred thousand dollars to work with and uh, I thought all right well if I were kind of a regular job in Vermont right now, you know when I was working in New York City For instance, I was making 45 000 a year in New York City and like a third of that was going to rent.

So in Vermont the same job that I had had gosh, I'm trying to remember now I can't remember off the top of my head what the hourly wage was. but I had applied for the same job in Vermont basically and it was I I Want to say it was it. It was like 70 of what I would have made in New York so I guess instead of 45 000 I probably would have only been making like 30 000 or maybe 35 000 a year and so I was like okay, well if I can make you know 25 000 to 35 or 40 000 from my investment account then that and I could. and if I could treat it like a full-time job you know then then that would be uh, I'd be making more than working a regular job.

So then I kind of had to back into the number of you know. Okay, well if I need to make, let's just say 25 000 a month or sorry a year. Uh, that's 500 a week, right? So a thousand a week will be 52 000 a year. So I was like, okay, well then you know 25 000 to 50 000 that would be growing a 100 000 account by 25 to 50 percent per year.

So now what ended up? You know quickly I realized I'm not going to be able to buy Caterpillar which pays probably like a two and a half percent. um, dividend two and a half percent on 100 grams 2 500 bucks I'm not gonna make enough on that now. Not that that wouldn't have been fine if I was still working a regular job dividend and then the growth of the stock. you've been fine, but in my case, that wasn't going to work.

And then you know some of these high interest, um, corporate bonds and stuff like that. even those ones at like 10 12, 15 that's still not quite there. So then essentially what I ended up having to do was go further and further up on how much I was willing to risk for the return. And so I've talked about this a million times.

Also, I had a friend in high school who made like sixteen thousand dollars trading penny stocks. hey, I don't know how much money he put into it, but you know he that was. That was obviously one really great trade and so I thought if I was able to do something like that even just like twice a year or three times a year, that right there would get me the goal that I had of you know, making enough to not have to have a regular job. And you know part of the reason for me that I didn't want a regular job was I didn't feel that I was actually able to keep up with the uh, the stress and the responsibility of a regular job because I had been suffering from panic attacks and it was really, really hard for me to imagine being able uh to really? uh, I I felt that I could do a job to have less responsibility and had less pressure.

but then then I'm back to like minimum wage and you know I had a college degree and I had a good job in New York but I left that in a large part because I didn't feel that I could keep doing it because I kept having these panic attacks at work. So anyways, I kind of designed my life a little bit around what I could do given these sort of constraints that I had. and so with trading, you know I kind of was looking more and more higher on the risk profile and I started looking at penny stocks and things like that and I Unfortunately, you know I realized pretty quickly that that was not gonna be a consistent way for me to make any money and I didn't even know if I'd be able to make it period with penny stocks because I just couldn't figure out sort of the Rhyme or Reason of why someone go up and others wouldn't and and et cetera et cetera. So you know I ended up over the course of a couple of years getting kind of more and more honed in on really over the course of a couple years just trading a lot of different things mid caps, large caps options, penny stocks, swing trading day trading and you know as I got all of that data, I was just able to kind of look at what I was making the most on and then I I cut out the other stuff and focus just on what I was doing well and you know that I stuck with that and I turned the corner.

You know my results of course aren't typical. So I say that as always as my disclaimer that there's no guarantee you'll find success. The strategy that I trade works for me, and of course I'm happy to share it with anyone who wants to learn it, but there's no guarantee to work for you I think the strategy works for me because it's a good reflection of my personality and my risk tolerance. I'm willing to take some risk, but I'm also um, sort of risk-averse in other ways and the strategy just sort of fits that.

like. one of the things with my trades being really short is because I always feel anxious when I'm in a trade that something's going to happen like the Stock's going to get halted pending news or you know all of a sudden news is going to come out it's going to tank. so I have shorter trade times to accommodate in a way my own risk, my own anxiety about you know, getting stuck in something like that. um but but it all kind of goes back to this um idea that I had of like okay this I'm going to set my intention New Year's resolution and I'm actually going to commit to following through with it and you don't have to do that as part of a New Year's resolution.

you could just say like okay starting today I am going to do this and then have the discipline to do it so you know we're here at the new year and I encourage you guys to think about what your goals are for the year ahead and if you start learning something today where you'll be in six months or a year. So the best time to start is now because the sooner you get started, the sooner you start learning and not necessarily just with day trading, but just with anything in general that you want to do so. I Hope this is sort of interesting I Just was taking a little break and kind of thinking about it as we're coming to the end of this year and a new year around the corner. So here's to an awesome New Year I Hope we have a ton of great opportunities I'll be trading as always and hope to see you guys in the community and see you soon.

So all right, that's it for me. I Just want to come on and say that All right. Talk to you soon! bye.