Quote from lescor:
My story is similar to yours and I eventually quite a secure job that I liked to trade full time and have been doing so for 5 years now.
In 1993 I got hooked on Canadian junior gold and diamond exploration companies. I had moved to a city that was built on gold mining and the North American diamond discovery story was in full bloom and in your face every day. Everyone had a tip or an inside connection to the latest discovery. I didn't know a stock from a hole in the ground, but I borrowed as much money as the bank would lend me ($6,000, I was only 23) and put it all on a 75 cent stock. Long story short, I lost money hand over fist, consistently for seven years. I busted out and refunded numerous accounts, but kept making the same mistakes. I finally gave up on the gold mining stories and decided to join the free money dot com train. I again borrowed as much as I could, put it all into a retirement account and put 100% of it into tech stocks in March 2000 and rode it all down 90%.
Obviously I was a sucker for punishment with a high pain threshold and a habit of burying my head in the sand when things went wrong. But I never gave up because <i>I absolutely loved trading</i>. It was in my blood and I wanted to crack this nut more than anything in the world. Eventually I had to fess up and realize that I was a habitual loser and take responsibility for everything. It really was like the 12 step addiction recovery process.
I knew that this was what I wanted to do for a living and that I had to make major changes to make it happen. I swallowed all my pride and started from square one with hard work, modest expectations and more determination than anything I'd ever put my mind to.
For the first time ever, I was not losing money trading. I wasn't making much, but was treading water and learning, keeping detailed records and a journal of how my emotions affected me in every trade.
At the end of 2001 I quite my job, wrote my series 7 and joined a prop firm. I had 18 months of savings set aside. I left my wife and two young kids behind for 3 months and went to the firm's head office to trade and work 15 hours a day and hopefully speed up the learning curve. I lost money for 4 months as I tried various strategies and tweaked things to make them my own, to come up with a method that was mine. By my 6th month I had my account back to even and took my first paycheck in 8 months. At the end of my first year I had made about the same as I had at my old job. In year two I quadrupled that and in year three I paid more in income tax than I had made in my entire 8 year career as a fire fighter. In year five things are still rolling along better than I'd ever imagined.
I think the reason I made it is that when I decided to seriously go at it full time I had already made every mistake in the book numerous times. I had experienced every emotion that a trader can face. I had hit rock bottom and faced all those demons and exorcised them. Everything from that point forward I took 100% responsibility for. But I had a passion that ate me up. Trading is the only thing in my life that I truly felt a yearning for. I HAD to do it.
The passion is still there, though it doesn't burn with the same intensity. I will pull the occasional 15 hour day when I'm going hard on a new idea, but I'm also plenty happy to work only 4 hours a day and look forward to weekends off. Trading is comfortable now. I do not worry about it just stopping. I know that no matter what, I can always grind out a living. I've learned to swing hard at the right time and to reign things in and play a tight defense when things are tough. If it's in your blood and you approach it the right way, stay humble and you make it over that initial hump (and it's a big, steep one), then I think the odds of you sticking around for a long time are pretty good.
