Confession of a Successful Trader
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Over the last few years, I have been sharing various information with you regarding forex trading, binary options, and other finance-related topics. I would like to ask you, have you ever wondered how people who are successful in forex trading life, whether they continue trading or switch their attention to something else? Have their goals, dreams, and key concepts of success changed for such people? Did they quit forex trading after they made their first $100000, $500000, or a million or do they continue to do so?
Not so long ago, one of my long-time subscribers shared his thoughts on what success in trading is and how his life and the lives of his successful fellow traders changed after achieving success and moving to a radically new level of income. Ten years ago, he was 30 years old, working as a clerk in an ordinary office with a monthly salary of $1000, and had no idea how to break out of this vicious circle. But with a lot of effort a lot of time and some personal savings, he was able to grasp the market and make significant progress. Now his monthly income is measured in tens of thousands of dollars, he invests in real estate, in stocks, and he has organized several businesses offline. I think that his analytical reflections, which I call the confession of a successful trader, may become interesting and useful for you. So, here is the story.
When you were starting…
When I was starting, I was always incredibly curious to peek beyond the rainbow. If investments, trading, and other financial endeavors were a potential source of very high income, then what does the life of those who’ve made it look like?
However, you are immediately met with bitter disappointment. All the YouTuber gurus, Telegram gurus, and other forex gurus quickly fade away, revealing that they were gurus only on screen. You learn to distinguish between fluff and someone knowledgeable in the field, but how often did you come across a genuinely cool blogger or a participant in any financial forum who wrote such amazing things many years ago, and then… disappeared? Where are the heroes of the 2000s and 2010s?
Where do they disappear to? YouTube gurus don’t disappear anywhere, they are always with us. But here, on the internet, very often, such cool mentors vanish without a trace. A person permanently dissolves into the mist.
On the internet, it’s always the same “traders” who are well-known, but here’s the thing… you lose interest in them fairly quickly. When the romantic aura fades, and “mentoring” evaporates from your mind, you suddenly realize that even experienced people are simply old divas who keep singing the same song.
We are all familiar with this image. Once upon a time, 20-30 years ago, some singer released one or two hits and… is doomed to perform them forever. Throughout their life. Because they never produced any new hits.
Actors face the same fate. Sometimes in their youth, they play a role that resonates with the entire country and touches its cultural nerve, and they will forever be associated strictly… with that role. Even when they are over 50, and nothing equally significant has happened in their life. Forgotten and washed-up actors are a sad reality of the industry.
In trading, the story is absolutely analogous. Some traders may have shown real wonders and unique results some 30 years ago. In a short period of a few years. This period will go down in history. Dozens of books will be written about it, and their example of market success will become a parable, but the problem is that besides that story, nothing equally significant will happen in the trader’s life. Never.
But there will be other episodes. Where they lost investors’ money, made unsuccessful investments, and simply spent years in obscurity (let’s not mention real names). Only that spark of “exceptional” success becomes their hit, and they will continue to recount the same worn-out truths until old age.
At first, it’s annoying. Then it becomes boring. Then you start to openly disdain them. Yes, a person who has spent 50 years in trading always has something to say, and retirees have earned the right to their memories, but… it’s mostly stories of their glorious youth and a repetition of the same things described in the same old books. Boring.
It creates a bitter void. Some disappear into the mist, while others constantly loom under your nose but are utterly uninteresting. So, where are the heart and soul of the industry, the traders without “legendary” (often purely invented) results? Where are those who make up its most substantial part? What do they live on, what drives them, how do they spend their day? Incredibly interesting. And unattainable. Nowhere is it described. Frustrating.
So, I scratched my head and thought that perhaps I should describe how things stand for me and some acquaintances years later.
I’ll just write what I would have liked to tell myself ten years ago. I wonder if today’s me would have liked me from back then? I don’t know. Probably not. Damn, I’d like to imagine that meeting.
Where do all the successful people go?
So where do successful people disappear to? The answer is actually quite banal – for those who have truly squeezed some cash out of the market, new opportunities for earning and investments open up, and they venture into them. It’s that simple. At some stage of development, your entire life becomes an investment market, and you simply calculate what you’ve been doing for a long time.
Everywhere, you start to see risks and opportunities, potential returns, and probable losses. The world becomes a statistical matrix. What’s better, to lose in a high-risk market with a 98% probability or enter the real estate market with an 80% win rate for this cycle? What’s better, a bond with a guaranteed return or a speculative asset with leverage? Or maybe a combination of both? And if so, in what proportion?
At some point, everything in life becomes an investment portfolio. You come to realize that this portfolio is simply filled with a multitude of elements, and speculative markets are just a tiny part of it, far from the most interesting.
You also realize that markets are absolutely boundless and require entirely different approaches in different segments. The difference between buying a physical stock on the exchange without leverage and a speculative currency “bet” in the retail offshore forex market with 1:500 leverage is, to put it mildly, staggering. These are entirely different worlds, requiring different perspectives, market mechanics, balancing acts, and technical and fundamental tools. The basics may be common, but the nuances, where the devil (read: profit) always hides, are radically different.
The more opportunities from different markets you discover, the more you see where you can make “easy” money, i.e., substantial profits on low-risk capital.
In general, the understanding comes very quickly that giant leverages, high percentages, and other externally appealing things are all just entertainment for the impoverished simple crowd, for whom $1000 is a lot of money. It’s just the cost of a cheap Chinese laptop, i.e., categorically insufficient capital for the market. It’s not even capital at all. It’s nothing.
So, if you happen to have enough capital at your disposal, if you haven’t spent it on computer games and naive dreams, you can use the financial leverage you’ve gained with minimal risks and achieve almost guaranteed profits. Whether it’s government bonds, ETFs on QQQ, or Apple stocks whose quarterly results continue to break records in the late cycle.
This is when traders leave the “forex” or “binary options” forums/communities because only beginners hang out there, trying to multiply their couple of hundred dollars (not to mention the ten dollars for a school breakfast received from their parents). Even if there are situational successes, they are short-lived. There are no serious investors there, almost no people with long-term capital of at least $50,000, and therefore, there’s simply no one to communicate with.
With big capital, your communication opportunities expand exponentially, and you simply enter a different world where different people, different circumstances, and entirely different topics for conversation exist on a completely different level.
There is a popular opinion that if someone “disappears”, then he’s a “loser”. This is very funny because it accurately reflects the thinking of newcomers who judge everything based on their own experiences. Since trading is like a game to them, they can “lose their lives” in it (lose their $10 deposit), but they have a few more bucks left, i.e., extra lives. It’s all like in a game.
In the professional world of trading, losing your entire deposit is inconceivable. Because any “deposit” is merely capital in the market, a cash flow. Losing capital completely is impossible because any flow has numerous directions.
Your financial opportunities with $1000
To explain this, imagine the following. Let’s say you have that infamous $1000 (very important to you) from selling an old iPhone, and you want to multiply it. At the same time, you know the statistics of the retail market, for example, forex, where more than 98% of participants will be out of the market by the end of the year, losing this amount.
However, this amount is discounted. It’s like a brick that you can use as the foundation for a backyard toilet, or for a future skyscraper. So you have a choice:
- Invest $1000 in forex/binary options with a 98% probability of losing and less than 2% probability of multiplying it, because the higher the percentage you want to “boost” on this amount, the lower the statistical chances (but still, such chances are real with the necessary experience, which can improve this mathematical expectation);
- Invest $1000 in a currency deposit and guarantee a small percentage, but with no losses, absolute profit (and your deposit within this amount is insured by the government);
- Invest $1000 in government bonds;
- Invest $1000 in “blue-chip” stocks, such as Apple/Amazon, and get nearly 100% returns in a good year without leverage, or 500% with leverage;
- Invest $1000 in the S&P 500 index without leverage, with leverage, and if with leverage, then with what leverage?
- Invest $1000 in CFDs on gold or a “hypothetical Brazilian index”;
- Invest $1000 in cryptocurrency, but which one, as there are thousands on the market;
- Invest $1000 somewhere else (there are dozens of options).
The more a trader knows, the more skills they have, the more opportunities they have. And these are just the beginning and the basics, without complex structural derivatives. And these opportunities are only within the field of financial markets, but there are billions of other applications for your thousand dollars.
Buying Tesla stocks is great because they’ve grown by 200% in three months, but you can also buy CFDs on these stocks with a 1:4 leverage from a forex broker, and then your profit will already be over 800%.
What if you take an intraday leverage of 1:20? What if you buy physical stocks and CFDs on them? What if you also buy exchange call options on TSLA? What if you hedge potential losses with an ETF index on the auto industry? What if you expand your portfolio with other car manufacturers and play on structural imbalances?
And on top of that, add the yen during the VIX rise and short the Kiwi? What else to add? How? What? How to calculate risks? Where to exit? Where and how to manage all your assets? How to analyze, track, think through, control, study, and examine all of this?
Experienced trader deals with these questions every day, and their circle of competencies is multiplied by thousands of hours of practice. An experienced trader is in space distance away from a newbie, who is nervously pondering whether to enter this 30-second binary pin bar, perhaps making a profit or not (of course, enter, because they don’t value their ten bucks and lose them anyway).
So, of course, they have nothing to talk about. Experienced traders disappear from the public space, where the most active and the most clueless, retail traders hang out. Those beginning traders who are just taking their first steps on the thin ice of the market, statistically, will end up in the market minefield.
Losses at a higher level are entirely different, as you have the entire range of options at your disposal, starting with guaranteed profitable ones, and the whole task is to regularly rebalance your portfolio, which is sometimes done once every six months to a year.
Do people lose interest in what they started with, retail forex and binary options? Often, they leave some unserious account balance just to relive their youth and have a fun evening. For example, I gladly rob one broker when I’m in the mood, and this non-binding trading serves as an entertaining hobby for me.
What about “clean” traders of binary options and forex?
Of course, there are professional Forex and binary options traders working with very (very) large sums, but they also have absolutely nothing to discuss with the $10 pin bar and bounce hunters. Social stratification in trading is in full swing.
Here’s something you can learn from the inside. For example, big money in retail Forex is often made not on currencies but on indices and metals, specifically, CFDs on them. This is because indices and metals are derivatives of the stock market, and CFDs are literally derivatives of exchange futures. At certain times, these assets show very beautiful and volatile trends, which, with sufficient leverage provided by retail Forex companies, allow for profitability.
However, currencies (and this is what beginners often don’t understand) are ultra-low volatility and non-trending assets that move less than one percent in a day. Only leverage allows you to squeeze some profit out of this micro-movement, so Forex without leverage is completely useless, unless you’re talking about the spot Forex with clean sums starting from at least $100,000. In contrast, a stock can grow by 50% in a day without any leverage, and with leverage, it can go off the chart. Day traders have long been putting options with daily expirations because it’s more profitable than any casino.
Currencies are moving invariably in currency corridors determined by the central banks of countries, and it’s quite understandable why. Would you like the yen to grow by 50% tomorrow and then fall by 80% the day after tomorrow? What? Of course not. What, did it actually fall? Well, you know where to send your complaints, right?
The currency of any country is, first and foremost, a political asset, and the stability of a currency is sometimes ensured at any cost, leading to various amusing tragedies, especially related to elections.
Therefore, Forex, with its focus on currency assets, is a very specialized market, and those who don’t understand this lose all prematurely. Of course, most traders never even think about it. Isn’t it amusing that people use their country’s currency every day but have no idea how it affects currency speculation?
In terms of its characteristics, Forex requires meticulous risk calculation. Virtuoso handling of spreads, the ability to analyze the impact of spreads/commissions/slippage on your Sharpe ratio, dozens of different accounts with different brokers and liquidity providers, and much more—all of this implies a professional approach to the business.
As for binary options, experienced traders love to exploit special tools like spreads or corridors that brokers offer to lure newcomers with the seeming simplicity of “winning” (because all newcomers generally consider trading a game). An experienced binary options trader pounces on this opportunity (such as 100% options with a spread) like a hungry piranha, and there have been many cases where 2-3 traders could bankrupt a broker in this little-known retail instrument literally to zero, after which the broker records a loss or closes down.
And all this while newcomers enthusiastically push the most primitive “up/down” buttons and lose their paltry pennies for years. And a newbie can be even someone who has spent 5 years in the market or even 10 years, it’s a very common situation.
Experienced traders are very flexible and clever individuals, and they spend most of their time not looking at charts but studying broker offerings and all possible market themes. A list of thirty brokers is often the minimum where a normal trader has accounts. He will give away anything without thinking twice if there’s even a half-pip spread difference.
In general, pros work flexibly, powerfully, and effectively. They know when to enter, when to exit, and study absolutely all available tools. They know practical financial mathematics. Newcomers, on the other hand, invariably lose their money on the most basic instruments, pressing a button, which is a good thing. Their money is needed by other guys.
Big Money
Everyone has their own interpretation of “big money,” but for the sake of a round number, let’s consider it as capital of at least $100,000. That’s an amount that an ordinary office worker or a regular clerk wouldn’t earn in their entire lifetime. It’s quite a significant situation. Oh, how people love to dream about it.
As practical experience shows, reaching the next level (and $100,000 is by no means the ultimate “highest” league, it’s just a basic minimum) usually happens in an exceptionally fortunate year for certain investment decisions. Before COVID-19, there were two such years: 2017 and 2019, where U.S. stock market indices broke all records, and stocks soared to the skies (hello, BYND, TSLA, AAPL, and others), metals outperformed any charts (look at palladium and rhodium), and several currencies broke out of their corridors. Thanks to CFDs, this added hundreds of thousands of dollars to traders’ pockets in this field, leaving many still in absolute awe to this day.
Yes, guys, it happens that the market throws at you much more than you expected, but only in proportion to the capital you’ve invested, of course. Because you’ve already understood that there are no fairy tales of getting rich from a hundred dollars, right?
Such periods of supernormal profits naturally pass in some time. Here’s where the mental limitation of many, including public influencers, becomes amusing. For instance, in trading, there’s a public clown (active on several websites) who has been trying to “short the U.S. market” for several years, betting on its decline. However, the U.S. market itself in 2017 broke a 100-year growth record, and in 2019, it came close to doing it again.
One might think you’d have to be mentally challenged, a complete degenerate, to go against the best trends of the century, but no. This guru continues this circus act actively. As a result, many traders lose substantial sums because their consciousness is overwhelmingly influenced by TV and current news agendas. Similarly, hordes of such geniuses shorted Tesla and Apple and lost tens of billions of dollars. Well, at least they had something to lose, unlike the destitute gurus.
The U.S. is done, the dollar is finished, Tesla is bankrupt, Ukraine is on the end, and Russia is ahead – do these familiar theses ring a bell? In reality, it was all the opposite. The U.S. stock market was the best in 100 years, the dollar strengthened for three consecutive years, Tesla broke all Wall Street records in the winter, the Ukrainian hryvnia led in strengthening, and Russia… well, it’s still where it is, in the ass hole.
Absolutely false, laughable theses for the gullible only brought colossal losses. There are characters who have been shorting the S&P 500 for a year or more (against, I remind you, the strongest trends of the century), constantly adding to their positions to avoid margin calls, and as a result, losing $200K-$300K from their personal accounts in such a “brilliant” trading.
Everything was different. They lie to your face, and you don’t even notice it. Because they consider you not just an idiot but a brainless biomass.
While some make money, others simply pour it into their pockets, and the circulation of big money in nature continues uninterrupted.
What to do with real big money?
There’s a curious phenomenon associated with “big” money, though in reality, there’s nothing amusing about it. When you receive a truly substantial capital and cross that psychological threshold, you encounter an extraordinary complexity that’s hard to fathom for those earning a “respectable” $1000 salary.
In the rosy fantasies of the average conqueror of the neighborhood supermarket, $100000 is the sum where their life will dramatically change, and they will become the best version of themselves, akin to Alain Delon in his prime.
In reality… no, it’s a relatively small amount. It will barely suffice to purchase a nondescript one-bedroom apartment in a somewhat decent area of a major metropolis and perform basic renovations (and how do I know this, oh well). Furthermore, receiving such a sum and immediately spending it on housing is the worst possible use, fatal.
Capital should not be spent, it should be invested further. Ideally, personal expenses should be covered by side or insignificant incomes (which is what I do with profits from real estate). Any amount taken out of the market sets you back by months, even years.
What the poor folks who try to increase their $1,000 don’t understand is that they withdraw meager profits immediately because their wife needs new boots and their kids want a new PlayStation. They will linger in the sewers of unfulfilled dreams for years, because the mathematics of capital is entirely against them.
What’s even more interesting is that dealing with such sums is extremely challenging in principle. If you come from a not-so-wealthy family, even a 1% movement on $100,000 amounts to $1,000, and it disrupts your entire world. Of course, you won’t put these funds into forex and other speculative ventures for maximum capital growth, you will seek the lowest-risk markets, from deposits to government bonds, all within a well-balanced portfolio. Your head will be in a constant and stable state of pain.
The problems of “small” money can’t even compare to the challenges of real significant capital, where every percentage point stings you with memories of an impoverished childhood and moments when your family dined on expired supermarket goods. It’s tough.
Old Friends
At some point, despite your new circle of acquaintances, your old friends resurface in your life. Childhood friends, schoolmates, college buddies, former coworkers, and various others. Somehow, they sense that you’ve got money jingling in your pockets, and just like a shark can detect a drop of blood from kilometers away, they reappear in your life orbit.
By that time, you might be overwhelmed by your own problems of a different magnitude, and the reunion with old friends from a time when everything was bright and carefree could tempt you to fall into that life trap.
After indulging in elite French cheeses and seeing your “old friend” (who, in reality, you don’t need, but you deceive yourself), you may hatch a brilliant plan of compassion. Specifically, you’ll want to “help” him in some way.
This always unfolds the same way, and I’ve fallen for this bait several times myself. “Friends” somehow magically sense that you have some cash (and if you happen to mention it because you got carried away, well, hold on tight).
How they do it is sometimes a mystery, as you may be dressed in California sportswear, which is quite expensive (but not Gucci or Versace, which is associating with a luxurious life). Because they are often utterly disappointed when they meet you personally, thinking you’d arrived on an Aston Martin, not arrive by subway.
Apparently, all these factors combined create something in your head, and before you know it, you find yourself trying to “help.” Well, for a poor friend like that, even $500 seems like a HUGE sum of money to them. And they look at you with sheepish eyes, and of course, this feeds your self-esteem, though you scold yourself (and rightly so, if you indulge, the market won’t forgive you, don’t doubt that).
And then, you don’t even realize it, but you’re simply giving, just giving them a thousand or so dollars, because they seem to be trying, and they can even distinguish Japanese candlesticks on a chart from hemorrhoid candles. Of course, you’ve deceived yourself.
Painful relationships develop, as this friend, naturally, will lose everything and hound you with the dumbest questions for months and years, all while demonstrating unimaginable arrogance (because, strangely enough, they respect themselves and consider themselves smart). They’ll be constantly orbiting around you, seemingly genuinely interested in you and your life, though in reality…
In short, this story has been repeated many times among my trader acquaintances, and I’ve experienced it myself more than once. It’s horrible, absurd, and embarrassing to even talk about. And it ends predictably: you angrily banish your “old friends” and drown your sorrows with a glass of wine in the evening. As it’s well-known, a sucker in your face must suffer, and there are no exceptions here.
Charity
All respectable traders, as far as I know, without exception, engage in charity work. Personally, I primarily support cat shelters (because cats are incomparably better than people) and orphanages because little people haven’t done anything yet, but they’ve been unlucky, which is terribly unfair.
And this pattern can be seen everywhere, whether it’s animals or young children. Adults, on the other hand, do not evoke any sympathy or compassion, not the slightest bit. The vast majority of them, with rare exceptions, can perfectly well solve their own problems. You just need to learn something in life, find a job or your life’s purpose, and, in general, get your act together.
They all have a full set of hands, legs, and eyes, yet they go around begging for handouts from life while dreaming of a fairy-tale windfall. Your inbox is constantly filled with desperate stories like “Give me money,” and they are all absolutely ridiculous, enough to make you sick.
“I’m a self-sufficient and successful man in life, I just took out a loan against my apartment, put it all into your Forex, and now the bank is kicking me out of my apartment. Give me money.” Or “I’m a healthy young guy, I hit the binary options button like crazy, but I still can’t make it work. Help.”
Apart from the sorrow over why Gmail still can’t filter out such human garbage automatically, these appeals do not elicit anything else.
Shelters and children, on the other hand, receive funds constantly, and it warms the heart. In certain circles, it is customary to measure the size of charitable contributions to orphanages, not gigabytes in plastic chunks.
Certain Circles of Acquaintances
The world of trading is small. Since there is almost an insurmountable gap between novice and experienced traders, only a small number of people bridge that gap. However, it seems small only when compared to the total number of participants because sometimes it may seem that everyone around you is making money and much more than you are. But this is just a cognitive illusion caused by the fact that you are significantly changing your circle of acquaintances.
In South Africa, for example, there are only a few thousand professional forex traders (i.e., people who consistently make money from the market), and they are not active on forums and chats (where mostly newcomers gather). Instead, they often get to know each other through acquaintances and various events (such as forex conferences), including through brokers.
Brokers (forex, binary options) are highly interested in high-volume traders (contrary to a well-known stereotype) because they have long mastered hedging, and high-volume traders allow them to extract a lot of money from liquidity providers. The problem is always whether someone is genuinely high-volume in reality or just got lucky and turned over those 5,000 lots because they had good fortune.
Therefore, when a broker sees someone moving millions of dollars back and forth, a good broker often tries to establish contact and meet in person. You may be invited to the office, and introduced to the chief dealer, and it all feels somewhat like a scene from “The Godfather,” where you are, so to speak, being inducted into the “Family.”
It’s quite fascinating. They often introduce you to other members of the “Family,” in short, your connections expand, and it’s all extremely valuable. I think it’s unnecessary to mention that there is no way to stumble upon such opportunities on the street, so the poor individuals who pay for “secret Telegram chats with trading gurus” are simply getting nothing, as mentioned about the people above.
New problems
Your new life brings about new problems that you couldn’t have anticipated before. Taxes – how to pay them, how to legitimize your big income? It’s a hassle right from the start.
Are you in Europe now? Get ready for a tough time, your adventures are just beginning. The fantasies of magical “offshore” accounts from television end with the first practice, as banks uniformly refuse to open bank accounts for newly registered companies from poor countries. They might even scoff at you because you’re about 15 years late with such a scheme. For every question they ask, you’ll need to provide five pieces of documentation if you want to become their client.
There are solutions to such problems, but finding working variants will cost you a fair amount of blood. However, along the way, you’ll gain a lot of interesting experiences, including how to carry a bag with a large sum of money from a currency exchange center while checking if anyone is following you.
Sometimes money flows in such a continuous stream that it significantly exceeds all your needs, and you find yourself facing an unexpected issue – you don’t know where to put all this money. This seems unimaginable to newcomers because the poor always dream first of a car, then a penthouse, and further on to a model with a huge bust if they are already married.
Without realizing it, they transmit dreams from the period of their poverty, which various predatory individuals from social networks easily catch to shake them down for whatever they have left. Cheating a fool based with his old dream is very simple.
People who have truly earned substantial sums treat it with great care and try to preserve it at any cost. None of these people buy expensive cars, if they do, they are very modest and simple workhorses. Public transportation and taxis are quite popular for getting around. None of the glamorous pictures on Instagram about “traders” are true, their only goal is to excite provincial traders and siphon off a portion of their income.
It turns out that you were never taught the science of proper capital management. The entire education system was built on the assumption that you would be a salaried sucker for life, just like your parents and their parents. That’s why you continually face new challenges and try to tackle them using all your experience and knowledge.
Business investments
It comes to mind rather quickly, why not open something, let’s say, “physical”? You start coffee shops and auto repair shops, launch a small fast-food chain, and a mountain hotel. You try to diversify your capital in various ways, but immediately find yourself in an entirely different world with its own rules of the game. All of them differ from financial markets, to put it mildly, quite dramatically.
You discover that it all seems simple, but in reality, there are a huge number of nuances, and the actual profits are quite modest. You realize that you need a certain type of mindset, which you may not possess despite all your achievements in the financial markets.
Facing this, I understood that I would fail miserably because I don’t understand the intricacies of such ventures, no matter how much money I have for starting my own business. Therefore, the only effective solution that has shown its efficiency is to invest money not in the business itself but in a competent person. This person becomes a co-owner, is passionate about it, and is ecstatic to be liberated from wage slavery. Such person feels a full sense of responsibility.
In the end, it works, provided, of course, that the person doesn’t start embezzling. Fortunately, the skill of identifying individuals works in this context as well, allowing you to find a worthy person. It’s never someone off the street through a job posting, that’s why having extensive connections and being social are highly desirable.
Socialization
The overwhelming majority of people who enter the world of forex and other binary options are introverts, making it extremely difficult for them to communicate. There is also their complete opposite, but they quickly exit the market due to their recklessness, and you don’t even have time to remember them. Being dull lovers of keyboards and secluded corners, in other words, anywhere there are fewer people, introverted individuals deprive themselves of socialization skills, spending too much time alone or with their cat.
Being with a cat is wonderful if you plan to continue living in the cat’s world. However, to reach a higher level, it is essential to learn how to communicate with people because, to cats, we are just other cats, albeit stupid and hopeless ones.
At first on the internet, and then in real life. In trading, personal connections are priceless. Sometimes you can spend several years trying to find the right person who will advise you on the best niche for your capital. Everyone knows everyone, and the circle of “people in the know” is quite small, and they all speak English, so conversational English is a must.
However, industry representatives are incredibly sociable and are happy to respond, especially to competent questions. But you should understand that they are public figures and are overwhelmed from morning till night. The truth is, you won’t get much from them. Nevertheless, there are unexpected bonuses from time to time.
The most reasonable thing you can do is to get to know traders near you, whether it’s a forum or a Telegram chat, make friends, or meet up for a beer in person, and it doesn’t matter where you both live or how much you earn. Our world is fully globalized, and it’s a 2-hour flight from Cairo to Berlin.
Forex expos and events, even events your broker invites you to, don’t be a recluse. Attend them. Get off your butt and go. In the worst case, you’ll just have a good laugh at what you see, and in the best case, you’ll meet someone new, expanding your social circle a bit more. You have no idea where all of this can lead.
You’re not who you think you are. Usually, you’re just a person going through life in a rut. So, shake things up and get out there. Communicating is a crucial skill in our world.
Real estate investments
Well, of course, you’ll start buying real estate because poverty and dreams of having an apartment have defined your entire life, and trading (in my case) only added to that. For example, my parents didn’t have their own apartment until they were well over 40.
The question of your own living space naturally becomes sacred, and inside you, you always feel the void that’s so hard to fill, no matter how many apartments you eventually buy. Because, as is known, if you didn’t have a bicycle in your childhood, then you didn’t have it. Even if you, as an adult, bought 20 of the most expensive ones.
Nevertheless, in our time, real estate is a good investment because we are in the late financial cycle, and the probability of a recession in the next 15 years is quite significant.
This is a very extensive topic for discussion, and the story is already endless. I’ll just say that you need to distinguish between real estate for yourself or for business. If it’s for yourself, with the right amount of patience, buying in the construction phase in a good area and waiting for 2-3 years (in Eastern Europe, for example), usually pays off quite well, and sometimes even brings excellent profits.
However, all of this is nonsense. Remember, renting out an apartment is a lousy business. There will be no profit from a basic 1- or 2-bedroom apartment purchased in a new building in the middle of nowhere, the apartment will simply be destroyed by tenants, that’s it. It’s profitable to rent out either expensive apartments in the city center or at least those with a larger area and a better location. Or you need dozens of such apartments for wholesale renting.
The best option is commercial real estate. Warehouses, parking places.
As for personal use… My dreams, my wealth. All those junk purchases during your renovations, all of that simply warms your soul. For yourself, yes, you can afford anything. But there’s still a limit that you’ll never exceed. That’s how you’re used to it, so no golden toilets.
How to start and achieve success?
Crush the pauper within yourself. By any means necessary. For the market, $500 or $1000 is not money. It’s not capital. It’s nothing. Garbage. Do you really think you could conquer the market with the value of an old iPhone? You must understand the mathematics of capital from the start.
In the USA, young people spend 10 years after college collecting money, saving on everything, denying themselves everything, and sacrificing everything, just to invest their accumulated capital in the stock market and begin the journey to success.
There will be no significant changes in your life with a few thousand dollars. There won’t be any serious long-term results from small sums. The market is not a charity, it never has been and never will be for the destitute.
Any self-deception will cost you dearly – you will lose time, money, faith in yourself, and everything that comes with it. You’ll deceive yourself, tell yourself that you’re special, that a different destiny awaits you, that $1000 will “feed” you – you’ll deceive yourself just like millions of people did before you and millions will after you.
There’s no point in being in the market with a couple of hundred dollars, that’s how much a pizza delivery courier earns in a week. People enter the market to grow their capital with minimal possible risks. To scale it. Not to get a fairy tale from scratch. No jumps and dreams of millions, made from $1000, will lead to anything good, they are statistically doomed. Not understanding this… you’ll still jump in and get what’s coming to you. It’s predictable and predestined.
Business requires significant investments and not just financial ones. If you’re not up for it, don’t get involved, pull your weight where you can. Save. Save money. Accumulate capital. Don’t fantasize about making 10,000% every month, try making 10% a month for a year. Aim for at least 100% annual returns. Still, calculating profits from a “lucky week”? How many revelations await you ahead (though you’re unlikely to live long enough to see them)?
Judge not by needs, but by opportunities. Otherwise, it doesn’t work.
In the end… if you understand anything with age and experience, it’s that movement is everything, and stopping is spiritual and physical death. A year without self-improvement, without learning a new language, challenges, books read, travels, new acquaintances, new skills, and abilities, is a year forever crossed out of life. An irretrievable year that will never come back. A wasted year, another meaningless step into nothingness.
Only through movement can you truly learn something in this life. And if I’m going to give any advice, it’s quite simple – don’t pity yourself, you miserable fool, don’t pity others. Don’t expect anything from anyone – life will pass quicker than you think.
No one will give you anything, no one will help you. You’ll drag your life down just like your parents and their parents, all the people around you, your destitute friends and their friends.
Unless you lift yourself up by the collar and start… doing foolish things, making mistakes, going insane, uncovering the depths of your frightened personality, and moving, crawling, walking, scraping out fragments of your life. Doing everything that enriches you with experience and knowledge. Doing everything that pushes you to a new step, after which there will be another and another step else.
From this you will fall, inevitably, and often lose a lot in the process. Sometimes, even very much. And all just to crawl back in. That’s how it was, that’s how it will be.
