This episode holds a special place in my heart as our guest, Louis, from the chatroom was quite the customer service challenge. He was about as hard headed as it got when it came to him actually deciding to come aboard, but I'm glad he did. He's one of those traders who even after making a boatload of money, was still aware enough to know that he need to tap the brakes a bit. He started off guns-a-blazin' and rolling in the dough, but where did that lead him? Well come along for an enjoyable discussion about the bumpy road we call trading. Notes: Louis’s introduction to the market started as a child. He would farm crawfish and he wanted to know why the prices would change all the time. He was witnessing supply and demand at it’s truest form. While Louis was stationed in Iraq, he saw someone on base looking at charts and struck up a conversation with him. Since Louis was always outside of the base, he was unable to really trade similar to this guy but he decided that once he got back stateside he would start to learn how to trade in the market. He joined a buy and sell alert service and his first and only trade was to go long gold (as a hedge against the ‘end of the world’). He put his whole account into this trade and then left it for 6 months. This resulted in him just about doubling his 100k account. Louis heeded the advice of a co worker who warned him that he could just as easily lose all that money he recently made. This led him to start investigating how to further his education. After utilizing as much free education as he could find, he realized that it wasn’t the whole picture so he eventually joined Claytrader University. Recognizing that he shouldn’t risk all the profits he came into, he stopped trading and spent time going through the training. He was also paper trading while going through the courses. This has led Louis to become a completely methodical trader who has a process for spotting entries, managing risk and determining logical places to take profits. Quotes: “The price always changed. That’s what really got me interested in the market. I wanted to know why they changed.” “Well I just forgot about it. I treated it like the Fidelity account. Six months later that trade made me 90,000 dollars.” “I’m cheap by nature so I didn’t want to splurge on the courses. I got to the point where the free stuff stopped working.” “I only put 4 grand in there and wanted to see what I could do with a small account. I saved that money from shoeing horses.” “I experienced a big gap down and my stop loss got hit. My co workers are still hanging on to it and hoping it recovers.”