One of the worst things you can do to yourself in the world of trading is forcing yourself into the markets because you “need to trade”. As odd as it sounds, the best time to learn about the markets and trading is when you have no pressing need to do so This is exactly what we have with our guest Orval (his chatroom community alias, ‘Sandman’). Orval is a police officer who enjoys his job and has done a great job of rising through the ranks. With this being the case, he has put him in the ideal situation of wanting to learn the markets, but not in a high-pressure type of way. At times people can get blinded by the glitz and glamor of trading and look to it as a solution to all their problems. However, in many situations, this comes with people “needing” to have success, which in a cruel way, makes achieving success that much more difficult. Lots of lessons to learn from Orval and his journey so far, let’s get to it! Notes: Today we talk with Orval who goes by Sandman in the community. In the 90s, Orval was a drill sergeant for a program designed for at-risk kids. This was his introduction to long term investing where he set aside a portion of his paycheck pretax and then never thought twice about it. After seeing the gains from his mutual funds, Orval decided to open a brokerage account to individually pick stocks in an attempt to beat the mutual funds' return. While he had some winners he also had some losers considering he was relatively new to all things trading. In his younger years, he was familiar with living on a very low amount of income between him and his wife. This was the spark that led him to always have the goal of padding his retirement by saving and living well within his means. This has become a habit for him to the point where he doesn’t even think of the additional money he saves every month. Orval started to look into more trading resources and this led him to StockTwits. After a short time there, he saw Clay’s analysis on one of the stocks he held and Orval investigated further. He really appreciated that Clay had no problem showing his losers along with his winners. He decided to focus on the guaranteed trade (a JOB) which led Orval to take a break from his trading education. While he was also working on his personal fitness, he once again found the energy to continue working through the University program. Instead of picking a hard date to start trading live trading, Orval will go live once he feels comfortable on paper. He realizes that it takes everyone a different amount of time to get there and forcing a specific date would be foolish. Quotes: I threw around 100 bucks in this stock and let it sit. It went up 1200-1700 percent. Never took profits on it … I figured it was going up and it would keep going up. That wasn’t true obviously. I really didn’t know anything. Maybe just a little bit of success is a dangerous thing because it makes you think that you know more than you really do. I understood that I got lucky and I didn’t want to blow up my account and lose the progress that I made. If you don’t have your health you don’t have anything. Regardless of if you are a successful trader or not. Yeah I got kind of lucky but it could have gone the opposite way. I wouldn’t have lost lots of money but it still would have hurt.