Becoming A Day Trader — My Story
So how to become a day trader?
Day trading is a journey. You have to take it step-by-step. And that’s the fun part of it. Learning one small step at a time.
So before we go any further, I want to give you more of a background of how and how I got into day trading. So I’ll kind of make it as short as I can.
I was born in the USSR back when it was still a communist country and I moved to the United States when I was six years old. We moved to New York and I pretty much grew up, you know, like a typical US kid.
Then we moved to the suburbs after we moved from New York City, and then I had to do the same thing as all my other friends did. I had to go to university even though I had no idea what I wanted to do.
I think 18 years old can be a little bit too young to be pushing people who don’t know what they want to do. But anyway, I ended up going to university. I ended up transferring five times, graduated on time with a tourism degree, which doesn’t make any sense for anything in my opinion.
However, during that time of my life, I did get to travel.
I did a study abroad program and I lived in London, which was an eye-opener for me. And I was totally hooked on travel. And I knew that somehow my life had to revolve around having travel as part of my everyday life. It became a part of me. I didn’t really know what to do. So I traveled. I ended up living cross country all over the United States for a couple of years.
I was a ski bunny, a surfer. But during my time of living across the United States for a couple of years, I became a fitness instructor.
I was actually I was very passionate about fitness and it gave me a lot of flexibility.
I moved back to New York City and was actually quite a successful fitness instructor in Manhattan.
And it was really fun. But during that time, because of being a fitness instructor, I had a lot of free time as well. So the great thing about fitness instructors is you work super early in the morning, lunchtime and then dinner time. When market hours for the financial markets are dead. So I had the free time when the markets were booming to start to find out about my passion.
How To Become A Day Trader
When I lived in New York, I was in my early 20s and I started going to all these different financial market workshops. A lot of day trading workshops. And back then, you know, Wall Street was just high. It was before the 2008 crash.
So everything was booming and beaming and a lot of the day trading courses I went to or ridiculously expensive after the free workshop or USD 20 that you paid for a workshop and they all were telling us the same story that you needed twenty-five thousand dollars to start before even paying for their products.
So it kind of really put me on edge.
And I never fully went for it after the workshop because I was scared I didn’t have that kind of money. It wasn’t a very inviting field for me, but I knew that I really wanted to do it. Yet I didn’t know how to make it happen. So at that point, I kind of put on my back burner.
When I was twenty-seven years old. I decided it was my time now to travel. So I just put on a backpack, said goodbye to my family, my friends, and headed south.
I headed south to Mexico, and went cross-country U.S., south to Mexico. And in Mexico, I wanted to learn Spanish. And everybody was constantly telling me, oh, Guatemala is the cheapest country in the world for Spanish lessons.
Before that, I had heard of Guatemala, but I never met any Guatemalans. I didn’t know anything about it. But I was like, hey, why not?
So as I crossed the border from beliefs to Guatemala, within a couple of hours, I was in my most beautiful Mayan ruins of the Mayan route called Tikal. I was in this tiny little cabin at their campsite. Right next to me was this Guatemalan guy who spoke perfect English and started to follow me around.
Well, here we are 15 years later. We’ve been married. I have two kids with him now. We moved to Costa Rica and now we live in Guatemala.
During my time in Costa Rica, he was a student. So that’s when my firstborn arrived and I had some time. I had time to get back into what I wanted to do, which was always the financial markets.
And at that point, this was now it was 12 years ago, there was very little online about the stock market, about the financial markets, about and all of this in general.
So I didn’t know what to do. How to become a day trader, which is something that I’ve always, always had an interest in. It was almost impossible to find online something easy to understand.
But I was able to find some stuff and completely self teach myself how to invest in the markets, mainly in the stocks and EFT’s. But that’s long term investing, right?
That education for long term investing didn’t require me to sit every day as I do now with day trading. So during that time, while I was finding investments, I still had a lot of time and I became a travel writer.
I just started a travel blog about our lives in Costa Rica, are traveling in Costa Rica with my family. Something that didn’t exist at that time on the Internet at all. And they became really popular.
It took a life of its own and began to grow organically to the point where it became my full business. And once again, I put my financial investment ideas and education to the side because I love to travel. Travel has always been a super passion for me. And here I am being a travel writer, running my blog, working for myself and traveling completely through my Web site.
And it was fantastic!
So during that time when my site was booming, we were traveling a lot. We moved to Guatemala because my husband got a job here.
In Guatemala, if you are not a self-employed person, it’s really difficult for you to get really good work, even if you’re a very highly educated person as my husband is. So he decided to get his PHD. To make that happen we were supposed to move to Santiago, Chile.
At that same time he quit his job and went to Santiago, something happened with the travel industry. (this was several years ago, maybe 5 years). My business almost came to a halt. And at that point, I was the one going to be carrying my family entirely on my shoulders until my husband finished his PHD.
So my husband is already in Santiago and we find out that Santiago is almost as expensive as living in Manhattan. But on top of that, the schools are really bad. So you need to send your children to private schools, which are like 20 to 30 grand each. I have two kids at this point and the decision was really strong at this point.
It was like, do I go and sacrifice myself? Because at this point, my travel business, which was super certain for, at that point seven years. Became completely uncertain and so moving to Santiago was having no real money coming in anymore and paying these enormous bills.
I made a decision that while my husband is studying there, which is going to be another three years to stay in Guatemala where I can afford life even if my business isn’t booming.
That’s when I said I’m either going to work for somebody else or I’m going to invest my time right now and the little money that I have and do what I’ve always wanted to do and was day trading.
Five years ago, there were plenty of opportunities out there.
However, they were they still aren’t easy to understand. As beginners, if you are interested, you will be deterred instantly. Because the obstacles are big, the language is different. It’s a very aggressive industry where you don’t get a lot of help from people because it’s all about, you know, if you can’t do it, you know, then don’t even try. And that’s not true!
But I knew that it’s something I wanted. It’s something that I’ve wanted for so long that I said, screw it, I’m doing it right!
So I decided at that moment that we’re not moving me and my kids aren’t moving to Santiago. And I started my day trader education and my journey. And it was really difficult.
It was the most challenging experience of my entire life, and I have to admit that more than half of those problems and challenges, probably did not have to happen. If it was easier for me to find the beginnings, the basics.
Think of it this way. There is not a single profession out there in the world that you could just go in and throw your money at and think you’re going to make it.
With day trading, you could do that because there are no barriers. There’s no one telling you, no, you can’t get in. You don’t know what you’re doing. Oh, you’ve got cash? So come on in.
But is that going to make you money? You do need an education!
Whatever that education may be, you could be self-taught, which is just time-consuming. And I found that you end up losing money anyway when you go into the live market because you don’t have a strategy. You need an educator!
However, when you do find an educator, a lot of them already think you’re at a level that passes the total beginners. They talk about the market movements, the trends, the different indicators as if you know about those things already. And they’re really tough to understand.
A lot of the academies I found are three to six months. So in three to six months, you’re paying for the service and they’re expecting you to do nothing and then just go live. Yeah. Maybe if you’ve already entered knowing that there are trending markets, the market moves up, it moves down, and moves sideways there are divergences, there are reversal patterns, there is support, there’s resistance.
There are all these terms. And not only are they terms, but you have to understand, you have to know what they are.
It’s like music. If you sit down at a piano and they say, here’s a Mozart sonnet. Go for it and play. And you don’t even know, you know, the first notes like Do, Re, Mi… or, you know, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, as we do in the US. You don’t know what they look like. You don’t have any idea what they sound like. And then on top of that, the scale.
So it’s the same thing with day trading When you went to the academies, a lot of times they overpass that beginner part and that was the biggest challenge for me.
That and also understanding a platform, realizing that I need to work with a platform. None of this was explained to me. None of this was helped. I ended up doing this on my own. And a lot of other people that I’ve started to talk with had similar challenges.
And because of that and what also happens is when you enter these academies, you’re already jumping in where there are students that have been there for years or the teachers have been teaching for years and training for years.
But it sounds like at one point they just jump right in and they just did it. And you feel compelled to do so yourself, even though you don’t have a solid background, you don’t understand fully that the market moves in this particular manner or that it’s going to do such a thing. So you get anxious and you jump in on your own and you lose.
You will lose. You will lose when you do this.
This was such a huge, huge, monumental challenge for me once I got past the basics, once I woke up and I’m like, wait.
None of this was necessary if there was just somebody who gave me the one or ones from the start. The super beginner information, I would have cut so much of my time, so much of my losses out. I
And then also these misconceptions about, you know, that is stressful and that you have to, you know, trade tons of time and you have to do all this. You have to jump in and be a shotgun trade.
None of these are true. Right. But they sound good. So when you’re doing these classes, it sounds good to be in every valid trade, whatever that means. So that’s when I realized, wait. None of this is true. And I woke up. It took me almost two years to realize this. And I woke up and that’s when my trading changed remarkably.
First of all, now I am a conservative day trader. I look only for the best. I compare myself to like a sniper. Even though I don’t believe what snipers do. But snipers have this patience. They will never start shooting at, you know, somebody that might be their target. They have this patience, this serious discipline, and that’s what is necessary for a day trader.
But most importantly is because they know what they’re looking for. When you know what you are looking for, it doesn’t feel like patience anymore because you know, those trades aren’t good for me. You know what the green lights are. You know what the red lights are.
Your risk is in place.
All those components, all those elements put together is what makes a trader a real trader. And it doesn’t happen unless you start from the beginning.
From the very beginning.
So, once I became a successful day trader I created a Boot Camp for Day Trading and a free mini-course with all of the basics you will need.