WELCOME TO TRADINGBAD.com

Let me explain how I got here.  About eight years ago I had great success with trading stocks. I left my salary job to become a full time stock trader.  It was the best job in the word.  I soon realized is that it isn't very hard to make money when the market goes straight up.  Trading stocks was pretty stressful and I was always worried half-to-death.  With my profits I decided to leave the markets to join and put ALL my money into a couple start-up companies.  I soon realized that the stress of the stock market isn't anything compared to the stress of working with cash strapped start-up businesses.

In 2007 I decided to go back to stock trading.  For about a month I was doing okay but the markets changed.  They no longer were going straight up.  I discovered I really had no idea what I was doing.  In December of 2007 I took a 4,000 share trade in SanDisk around $60 per share.  Generally I put in a 3% stop-loss but didn't do that on this trade.  After the first day I was down in the position.  SanDisk was a great company and I elected to ride out the short term loss.  A month later, I was down $40,000 in the stock.  No worries, because I was sure it had hit rock bottom. I sold the stock and bought CALL options 3-months out.  Well, SNDK went to $6.00 per share.  Long story short, I lost about everything I had within 45-days in this stock. These poor results were all because I didn't put a stop loss in and most of all because I was an idiot.  I left the markets at this point.

In 2009 I found myself missing the stock markets and wanted to take a different approach to become a profitable day-trader.  It was my goal to educate myself and read as many books as possible about day-trading.  I found myself with incredible knowledge and ready to come back to the markets.  I understood candlesticks, doji candles, Fibonacci charts, swing trading, support/resistance levels, breakout trading, etc.

In June of 2009, I funded my day trading account and began my quest to make it on Wall Street.  This time I was truly ready.  Within 30-days, I blew out my day trading account for the 4th time.

In October of 2009 I was trying to find something to that would stay between me and the bullet. I was on youtube.com when I came across a video "live trading with Shoot."  The guy in the video was a day trader from Kenosha, Wisconsin who put up videos of his trades.  It was pretty interesting and I found his website called tradingapples.com.  He offered a trading course but he also offered a few free lessons.  I watched the free educational videos and later that day purchased the course for around $99.  It's a pretty long course but I watched it all that night.  What I quickly realized is problem wasn't that I didn't understand the market but how the stock market actually works.

Tradingapples.com also had several references about Sam Seiden, an equities and futures trader from Chicago.  Sam has many free videos and publications online which I read each article several times.  Sam made the markets very easy to understand with his supply and demand teachings.

What I realized from tradingapples.com is that I was the uninformed trader. After taking his course and watching the videos about a dozen times, I have a new perspective on the stock market and being a day-trader.  He gives some great strategies for make money but more importantly he changed the way I think about the trading.  It made all the books I read over the past year pretty irrelevant.   I’ve decided to give day trading one last try.  My goal is to blog about the transformation from being an unsuccessful trader to a profitable day trader or go completely broke in 2010.

I am not a teacher, I am not selling anything, and I am certainly not offering advice.  My trading and real life is a disaster.  I am the guy kicking pebbles outside wondering why these traders are so successful and why I am a not.  My goal is to keep my trading accountable.  If a band is constantly rehearsing for a big show they aren't accountable if they make mistakes during practice.  However, if they take the stage for the big show and mess up, they are accountable because their fans witness it.

It's the same idea here.  If I lose money the 2 or 3 people who will ever visit this website will be able to laugh at me as the bank takes my house.  However, if the transformation can be made to a profitable day-trader, then it's an incredible victory.  Simply, if I can become a profitable trader, than anyone can.

It’s about being a uninformed trader and becoming an informed trader…

*** My personal disclaimer.  If you ever decide to take my advice or think I know what the hell I am doing, do yourself a favor and jump off a building.