In a recent article I sent out, with the subject line “Convert my car to ‘burn water’?!?”, I got back an interesting comment…

“YOU LOSE CREDIBILITY WHEN YOU EXPRESS INTEREST IN A VERY OBVIOUS SCAM.”

I’m not sure why it was sent all in caps… I’m not sure what they’re yelling about, but I did find the comment interesting.

The fact is I’ve always been interested in a lot of ‘fringe’ things… in fact if I really stop and think about it, my whole life has been encapsulated by doing things differently from everyone else.

When I was a pre-teen, and delivering papers as an after school job, I didn’t take all my earnings and buy clothes, or video games or comic books… no… I didn’t even spend that money on fast food or girls… you know what I did with that money?

I saved it up for about 2 years, and opened a trading account.

That’s right, a trading account.

In fact because I was so young, I wasn’t even legally allowed to have my own trading account. I had to convince my Mom to set it up, and put me on as the power of attorney.

So there I was a kid with the power of attorney on his Mom’s trading account… funded with money he saved up from a paper route… pretty strange picture isn’t it?

But then again, if I worried about what others thought, I wouldn’t have done it…

What I did on the weekends was even stranger…

Instead of hanging out with friends playing baseball or hockey… or going to the mall or the movies, I’d hop on a train to head downtown to the library… yup, that’s right… the library…

It was an hour and a half trip each way… what did I do there?

I poured over the stock and commodity charts. (Remember back then there was no internet, or ability to pull up charts on a computer.)

I’d spend the day there looking through stock charts… making photocopies of any charts that looked promising. Then throughout the week I’d have to update those charts by hand by peeking in the stock section of the very papers I delivered.

Not very normal…

Fast forward to today… and I’d have to say that few of my friends and family would really think that I’m normal…

• I don’t wake up at the crack of dawn and head off to work like everyone else… instead I stay home and spend time with my family…
• I don’t watch TV, instead I stare at funny “pictures” on my computer screen (aka. charts)… squinting at them and drawing even more lines on them…
• I sit out in the backyard while writing an article or two like this one…

Really strange stuff…

Heck, because I can be spotted wandering around the house or chasing my toddler at all times of the day I think most of my neighbors think I’m either unemployed or engage in some type of illegal business {laugh}

The fact is, following what other people do will lead you to what they have.

It IS true that some of the stuff I talk about MAY be strange… may not seem legitimate… may seem like a scam… but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t arrouse my curiousity.

And I guess if it wasn’t my for my curiousity and willingness to look into everything… including “obvious scams” I would probably have a nice 9-5 job right now…

The whole point to this “rant” is to tell you that if you want different results in life, you’ve got to be willing to do different things, and not be afraid of being labelled.

Continued Success!

Ray

Categories: Trading
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I was at a barbeque over the weekend, and was talking with a friend of mine about a trade he currently had on oil.

Now this was a guy I went to school with… smart guy, so being ever curious I started to question him about his position and his thought process.

Now I knew he traded stocks during the tech boom, but didn’t do too well during the bust… that’s why I was curious about how he was trading oil.

He taken a short position on oil…

Ok, so what was his reasoning…

“Oil has been going up like crazy, and there’s no way it can just keep going up like this… its due for a correction.” he told me…

Ok…

So I asked him what his exit plans were…

“Exit plans?” he replied?

“Yeah, where will you exit if the trade goes against or for you?” I inquisitively asked…

“Never really thought about it. I guess I’ll know when the price gets there.”

We’ll see how the market shapes up over the next few weeks, and how he does (if he’ll share with me)… but this leads to a couple of good lessons…

1. There is no such thing as too high or too low. YOu can ‘reason’ and ‘hypothesize’ as much as you want, but in the end the market will go where it wants to go. While picking tops and bottoms are great, the fact is you can make just as much (if not more money) by simply trading the trend in motion.

2. Trading without a plan is a recipe for disaster. In other words making trading decisions on the spot, in the heat of the moment is something that I’m willing to bet NONE of the professionals do. All trades and decisions are made before hand… scenarios are mapped out in advance and simply executed in realtime.

Don’t fall into this trap! Learn from other people’s mistakes!

Continued Success!

Ray

P.S. Many courses on the market aim to teach these 2 key principles… I KNOW that my two courses www.market-millions.com and www.trend-range-trading.com both cover these elements in great detail.

Categories: Trading
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