Freedom of time is a very noble goal as it allows for you to pursue avenues of life that may not otherwise be realistic. This is what community member "Dukes" (same name in chat room) used as his motivation to learn how to trade the markets. By using trades as a vehicle to free up his time, Dukes is able to strive after his dreams of building upon his acting career. I really enjoyed this interview as it goes to show that trading does NOT "have to be" a full time thing. It can simply be a tool to help you get ahead in other areas of life, which Dukes is a pristine example of. Notes: Ben is currently pursuing his acting career and while on the journey he was a manager at a clothing store. Because of his position, he was given stock options and that led him to get interested in the market. He would take odd jobs here there as well to further his career along with decreasing the debt in his life. A key point here is that Ben didn’t get into the market to ‘get rich quick.’ His interest in the market was to free up his time to pursue where his real passions are and after seeing Clay’s live trading videos he thought the market would be a good way to supplement his income. Once his life was at a stable point (stability defined as clearing all his debts and not trading to ‘make ends meet’), Ben opened up a trading account and just invested into household names as many new traders do. It oscillated up and down and he realized that he had much to learn if he really wanted to grow the account. After learning about technical analysis, risk management and options, Ben decided to focus on options specifically because of the significantly lower cost. Using the options as stock replacement has allowed him to trade larger names without putting his entire account in one trade. Ben strongly suggests that people spend more time paper trading since he only practiced for a short period of time. While everyone struggles with greed, especially when it comes to trading, it is so important to realize that trading is a business and a journey. It takes a healthy amount of time and effort. The slow and steady approach is the real way to improve upon yourself and your trading and Ben is a living example of this. Quotes: “I decided instead of a 1% savings account to try my luck in the market and I’m not too upset with what’s been going on.” tweet this quote “If I can replace a day's worth of work in 4 hours, I got my whole day to do all the things I want to do.” tweet this quote “I was so completely ignorant to the way that everything worked that you couldn’t even call it trading.” tweet this quote “I’m definitely a option trader now. In doing so it helps me avoid pattern day trader. I like that I can get more bang for my buck.” tweet this quote “Even though you don’t want to you start to put the stop losses in. Sometimes you were just wrong and have to deal with it.” tweet this quote “Spend a little more time getting educated before you start burning through your money.” tweet this quote