I started investing after saving up a bit of cash in my first I literally knew nothing about investing. I knew there was a stock market, I knew that people invested in it somehow, and I knew that unless I understood what I was doing there was no way I was going to make a reliable profit over the long-term. Sure, I could have sought out a professional money manager... but how the hell could I know exactly how "professional" this person was? If I had no concept of how investing works, how could I expect to properly judge the quality of their strategies and decisions? The hard truth was that I simply couldn't. I'm pretty young, but I've seen enough "professionals" suck at their jobs to know their title is no guarantee of expertise. I knew I'd rather risk losing money investing in my own ability than risk losing it by investing in the poor decisions of someone I don't know. My next step was figuring out my first step.

I wasted no time and dove right into the deep end. I had about $10k and started sifting through products. I bought some a few individual and a couple of advanced products with prices that naturally decayed over time (unbeknownst to me). I also tried my luck trading and Understand, I had no idea what I was doing. I was just trying stuff. Looking back, it's a miracle I stayed in business. Somehow, I managed to that year. I made money, I lost money, I made it back. One thing was certain, blind investing – basically gambling – was not the formula for my long term success.

As I became more comfortable buying and selling I began making spread sheets and journaling my thoughts in an attempt to develop a strategy. I studied charts, news, product types, explored various time-frames, established limits, and scoured the internet for tips... anything and everything I could think of to build some sort of mechanical process for my decisions. All I wanted were some rules and a little structure for my process. I was getting too emotional when my ideas did not work and I knew it was driving me to make increasingly bad decisions. In hindsight, I was emotional because I was risking far too much money – one of the most important lessons I've learned. I traded for several months before deciding that my "strategy" was little more than a list of hopes, fears, and worthless predictions. My spreadsheets and journals became an unmanageable mess and none of it subdued my emotional decisions. Clearly failing my objective, I decided to dig deeper and discovered the on my trading platform. I had no idea what were, but I felt open to anything at that point. Lucky for me, it was the window to a world I now love.