Starting Over: A Trader's Story

After arriving at work on a Monday morning, a middle-aged, married man found himself unemployed. He had been with the manufacturing firm for nearly 24 years and it took him by surprise. He had thought he would retire from this company. It had never occurred to him that he would have to start a new career when his kids were just entering college.

His wife was supportive and told him he could do anything he wanted and he should take a few weeks to think about it. After he had gone through the want ads and his finances, he realized that he didn't want to try and start over in the already crowded workplace struggling to compete against younger men for the same job. What he really wanted to do was to have more freedom, more time, and more money than his current job had given him. He wanted to start a new career but one he could control. He never wanted to be laid off again.

He had heard plenty of stories about people who were trading the stock market and making good money at it. The stock market had always intrigued him, but the only investing he had ever done was his 401K and a couple of mutual funds. He didn't know anything about the stock market and he didn't know where to begin. He had two friends, one was a day-trader and the other was an options player. He decided to talk to them to see if they could help him get started.

The Options Player had been trading stocks for years and encouraged him to go with him to an options class. The unemployed man worked hard to learn options during that weekend, but what he began to realize was that the options training didn't seem to give him everything he needed. There was a vague discussion about charts and technical analysis, but when the class was over, he felt that he really didn't know much about charting or technical analysis.

When they got back home, he posed the problem of learning charts to his friend. But the Options Player admitted that he didn't use technical analysis much and relied on news mostly. His options were not going very well. He was able to make small gains, but often subsequent losses wiped out his profits. He had hoped that another options class would help. This worried the unemployed man as he didn't want to take his money out of the Mutual Funds and lose it in options. He got even more concerned when he discovered that his friend had taken numerous options classes over the past several years but his trading was not improving.

So he decided that perhaps options weren't for him and went to visit his day-trading friend. Every day his friend went to a day-trading floor to work, and invited him to join him and watch day-trading that week. The place was big and expensive looking and filled with day-traders sitting at their terminals from early in the morning until the market closed and often late into the night as they worked on their trading. There was a frantic atmosphere with traders watching the news and rushing to their terminals to place orders, and more often than not a frustrated yell or shout and a slam of a hand on a keyboard. After a day of watching the day-traders sweat and complain about the stock market, he asked his friend why anyone day-traded. Was there any money to be made? It seemed like a lot of work and a lot of stress.

The Day Trader admitted that it was a very stressful job and frequent big losses were part of the game, but the chance that a really big win would happen was always what kept him coming back. This shocked the unemployed man who felt it sounded a lot like gambling. He didn't want to gamble with his life savings. He was frustrated at this point because neither options nor day-trading seemed to be the answer he needed.

He decided to start searching the Internet for information about stock trading and came across the TechniTrader Stock Training Course. It was 1/3 the cost of just one options class and 1/5 the cost of the day trading class. But what really appealed to him was the no-hype presentation. Unlike the other classes this course stressed technical analysis and how to develop and hone trading skills. The instructors encouraged him to practice paper trading on a simulator before going live in the market. They taught him how to find stocks using a step by step approach that was simple and fast. He really liked the direct, practical trading methods. And he really appreciated the fact that after the course, he was able to have direct support for his questions. He felt the student support was far superior to anything he had seen.

He practiced and paper traded until he was confident and successful, then he started trading the market. It took him longer than his friends who had started immediately trading after their day trading and options classes, but that didn't bother him as he saw the benefits of taking his time and gaining experience and skills.

That autumn, he took his wife on a cruise to celebrate his success in his new career as a position trader. He had never felt better in his life and he realized that losing his job was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

It wasn't long afterwards that his friends began questioning him about his success as a trader. They were surprised that he spent only a couple of hours a day working on trading and had free time that they only dreamed about. His profits month to month were impressive and his capital base had grown. They wanted to know his secret. So he told them�Knowledge, Tools, and Skills. That was what TechniTrader had given him.

Both of his friends decided to take the next TechniTrader class together. During the TechniTrader Course, the options player learned that what he lacked for consistent success in his options trading was strong technical skills and the ability to read the market direction, as well as understanding the risk vs the potential of an options trade. Once he applied these new found skills and tools, his options trading became consistently profitable.

The day trader realized that he was spending a huge amount of time every day for a very small gain and that he had no control over his risk and no way of calculating his potential gain vs that risk. After the TechniTrader course, he chose swing trading as it was still a fast style of trading, but was far less stressful, it took only a couple hours a day, was highly profitable and low risk. For the first time, he felt he had control of his trading and his confidence grew. Within a short period of time, he too was consistently successful as a swing trader.

Nowadays the three men spend their free time playing golf together, often challenging each other as to who is making the most money in the stock market. They joke about which style of trading is better, but they have learned that it is not the trading strategy or style that matters but applying a step by step methodology, that makes the difference.