Charles' Story

I never gave a single care to idea of the stock market. For most of my life the word “investor” brought to mind the image of old men in tuxedos twirling their mustaches and sipping martinis while plotting how to rule the world. I was a dreamer, an adventurer, I was living for the moment and there was no reason for me worry about the future.

I spent my 20’s on a carnival ride. Film school, followed by a few years working on movies, TV shows, music videos and commercials. I did every job on a film set. Worked hard, played harder. Around 25 years old I decided I needed to experience the world. I got a one-year visa and a plane ticket to New Zealand and never looked back. That lead to about five years of travel. I worked a dozen random jobs and lived a dozen random lives. Until around 30 years old when I felt ready to settle down and get around to enjoying the simple life. (Don’t worry we’ll get to the trading part soon)

I moved back to LA and started working in Post Production. Landed a plum gig at a TV network as a promo editor. The first six months or so it was freelance, but then they offered me a staff position. I got a call from someone on the HR team asking me how I wanted to set up my 401K. “No thanks I hate running” I joked to hide the fact I had no idea what that was. She laughed and said “no, but seriously?” so I replayed “I don’t actually know what that is, can you just set it up for me?” Her tone changed, “ummm, well, no. I can’t give financial advice that would be illegal” There was a long pause. “Why don’t you research it tonight and get back to me tomorrow?” That night I typed “what is a 401K” into google with no clue that from that moment on my life would never be the same.

I was big shot investor with a 401K now, so I needed to learn a thing or two. Well, two led to three and to four, and before I knew it value investing in low-cost index funds turned into a deep dive into Satoshi Nakamoto, macroeconomics, and international capital flows. I was hooked.

As time went on, I got really comfortable in my day job, the work was fun and the money was great. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t living paycheck to paycheck. I had money to spare!

This is where Maslow comes in. The idea is simple; when you’re broke, you’ve got bigger problems to worry about, but once those money problems disappear a whole new set of fears start to come up.  “What if I lose this job? I don’t want to go back to a broke ass life. How can I turn my money into more money so I can grow my savings at super speed?” And so on…

My passion for editing started to fade and all I cared about was trading. I rushed home every night to trade crypto until 2:00 AM then got back up to trade the stock market opening a few hours later. In hindsight I was clueless. I was buying random Altcoins from overseas crypto exchanges purely because some youtuber said to, or because I liked the look of their website. I was trading penny stocks, forex pairs, mega caps, ETF’s, and index futures. I tried every tool TA has to offer, Fibonacci, Pivot Points, Measured Moves, Ichimoku Cloud, Bollinger Bands, Moving Averages, etc.

I’d take a course, read a book, or watch a youtube video and decided to completely shifty my strategy to something new. I never stuck with anything more than a month or two. It was late 2017 and even a clueless gambler like myself was making a killing with crypto. I remember at one point I turned $5,000 risk capital into $40,000 in like two months and was thinking when I got to $100,000 I would quit my job and go fulltime with trading. That was December 2017. A few days before Bitcoin began to crash.

Over the next year I was watching in shock and dismay as crypto markets just kept crashing lower and lower. I lost all my gains from the previous year and kept putting more and more of my income into trading. I was convinced it had to turn around sooner or later…. It did not. In November bitcoin took another huge dive and I decided, “f*ck it. enough is enough, I quit.”

However, I couldn’t stop thinking about trading. It was so much fun when I was winning. I just couldn’t imagine going the rest of my life without feeling the rush again, so as far as I saw it I had only one choice; I had to learn how to trade properly. Professionally. For the two years that followed I read dozens of books, listened to hundreds of hours of podcasts, took at least 10 different online courses. None of them lead to consistent profitability but what I didn’t realize is that I was building a base of understanding. My brain was beginning to make sense of things, I just needed that one, final thing, to snap it all into place. Then I got fired.

CBS and Viacom merged and my entire team was let go at once. I was on vacation at the time. True story. Three weeks later Los Angeles County declared Covid lock downs.

I might be the only person on earth who remembers the covid lockdowns fondly but I really did enjoy it. I’m introverted so it felt amazing to me to listen to everyone complain about loneliness, I loved being alone. I was flush with cash from my severance and literally had nothing but time.

Que to Rocky style action montage. I decided to use this as an opportunity to finally shift into trading full time. I’s wanted to take classes with Jim Dalton for years but had always felt they were too expensive. But now, it seems worthwhile as an investment into my education.

Jim opened my eyes to three simply truths:

1. The market moves based on an auction process.
2. No one else can teach me how to trade, I had to figure out each and every setup myself. Do all my own research, back testing, and stargazing, because that is only way my system can adapt with the market in real time.  
3. I am not trading against anyone else. Any improvements in my performance will result in an improvement in my P/L. Everyday it’s me vs. me from the day before.

Within 6 months I was trading profitably, had birthed Pirate Traders, and was comfortably settling into the idea that I really turned a termination and pandemic into a career change and whole new life.

It’s the best thing I’ve ever done, in my honest opinion.