Stock trading changed my life, and not in the way you might think

It’s quite embarrassing for me to say, shameful really, that the 2013 movie The Wolf of Wall Street inspired me to finally make the necessary steps to get involved in stocks. Now don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of making lots of money as much as the next guy, but Jordan Belfort aka The Wolf of Wall Street was obviously not a favourable character. He was a crook who hurt many people. And the things he did in the office were not admirable. Somehow I distilled from watching it that it’s possible to make a bit of money on stocks, maybe even a huge amounts. Or it might have cemented what I was starting to think already.

I thought about trading stocks before, but I got as far as looking up the web site of a popular broker in Canada. The paper work that I would have had to fill out seemed very daunting. I should provide some context: at that time in my life I was really indecisive and easily gave up. I would start something and then quit at the least sign of resistance.  

Sometime in 2014, after watching the movie, I scoured the web looking for anything about stocks. I viewed quite a few webinars. The final one I stumbled on was of a guy who taught how to day trade stocks. It sounded like a quick way to make money so I joined and finally opened an account with a broker. I spent quite a bit on educational videos but I never had much success at it. And I lost lots of money. One of the reasons for this was that stocks move up the most in the morning hours and it was difficult for me to be up so early. I am physically disabled and with the markets opening at 9:30 am EST (and that’s not counting the pre-market hours) and me living on the west coast, I couldn’t expect people who I depended on to wake up at such a time. Otherwise I probably would have fared better.  

In the summer of 2017 my sister came to visit. On one of the days we had a good talk about many topics, including my trading. I had already thought about quitting day trading, but what was mostly holding me back was that I didn’t really know what else could keep me busy. The thing is that I enjoyed trading, even though I was losing money. A few weeks later I got an email about a deal on an investment service I had considered before. I signed up for it. 

It was in mid-August of 2017 that I quit day trading for good, which still gave me a chance to enjoy the sunny weather. Now it may seem that day trading was a complete waste of time and money for me, but that wasn’t the case. Not only did I learn a huge amount about stocks and trading (a lot of which can be applied to investing), but, more importantly, it taught me to be much more decisive and not to give up so easily. You’ve got to have patience, it takes time to build success.

I didn’t really find that investing service I bought as good as it sounded so I didn’t continue with it (fortunately I had purchased only a 3 month subscription). I later tried some more of the more expensive services (US$2000+) but they didn’t seem so great either, until I received emails about services I can actually afford. I am still subscribed to two of them.

Recently I have been learning about call and put options, they aren’t that difficult to understand. I also paid for a service that allows you to either buy shares or call options, depending on your risk tolerance. We’ll see how it goes…

The Wolf of Wall Street by Goksan Ozman is licensed under CC by 2.0