I started trading in late August 2023 as a way of taking back control of my wealth management from the hands of the so-called "financial planners" who duped me with a classic insurance scam.  Read all about that here.

I knew absolutely nothing about trading when I started.  The prospect of doing this by myself scared me silly.  Yet there was no other way forward since others couldn't be trusted.   Essentially I was going in based on discouraging myths from what people said:

-- "Stocks and Wall Street is a big casino.  You're taking unncessary risks"

-- "You're playing against the big money sharks, you will lose"

-- "You can't do this, it's not for you"

-- "You'll never make a million dollars"

And on and on it goes.  While these people would say things like this, I challenged them about how they actually invest.  They say all manner of things.  Most have no plan, some put it in a bank, others trust the experts who make more money from fees than actually helping their clients.

I then realized that we don't learn any financial literacy in school, starting from the very basics like how to make a budget.  When it comes to the higher level stuff like trading, we are totally clueless.  So it kind of made sense where I was starting from.  It's downright deplorable the lack of knowledge and skills that most of us have.  But it's not fatal.  We can learn this stuff as early as possible, start taking some risks, and experience successes.  It's all very true:  no risk, no reward.

Of course for trading to work by yourself, you need to spend a lot of time reading, learning strategy, researching companies, paper trading, backtesting, but most importantly at some point you need to take some risks and trade with real money.  The financial advisors won't do you any good.  They'll ask you a bunch of questions, gauge your risk level, and design a plan with various index funds or whatever.  Regardless of your risk preference, your money will go into the funds that pay them the highest fees.  Think about it, if the market goes up they'll make money from the aggregate of all their clients put in.  They are spec funds.  Whatever you invest individually won't matter to them, except for them getting more clients to earn more fees.

It's been 10 months into this and my portfolio is holding steady with a 20% earnings growth rate.  But that's not really the point.  It's about the skills being learned with active trading.  I was not expecting to learn so much so quickly.  This is a learning account.  But the fact is my trading account is pushing the $100k mark already.  If this keeps up, it won't be long until I double the money that I cashed out from the insurance last year.  

Update Oct 25 2024:  That has now upped to a 40% return and my account exceeded $100k.

They say new traders always fail in the first half year.  Well I guess I'm not a failure then.  Having gotten used to the volatility in stock trading, I then stepped it up by trading options.  This has introduced a whole new level of risk, but also some returns that have added on.   Yes the volatility can be scary.   When the portfolio now swings $5000 each way on a given day, it can be nerve wracking for sure.  But as time goes on you learn to keep your emotions in check as well as get better at managing fear and greed.  

The other day while riding my bike it suddenly dawned on me:  I'm making on average about 1/3 of my salary in profits by trading at current levels.  It won't be long until I'm able to double my account and then make 2/3 of my salary.  This has potential to be a reliable side hustle.  It's that passive income that will accelerate my way out of the rat race.

Even so, patience is required.  It be quite tempting to start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel that financial freedom is very attainable and then get overly aggressive.  Pullbacks are inevitable as I've learned.