As many of you know, I love me a good analogy, and in this episode we have several of them… the one that really stood out though was in regards to pitching in baseball and trading. Chris is our guest (‘thekidcanrake’ in the chat room) and he shares with us the many important lessons and realizations he has had since beginning his journey. Thanks to Chris’ grandfather, he had an early introduction to the markets; unfortunately, also thanks to his grandfather, Chris witnesses some events that shifted his mindset to the better. Even with that mindset shift though, there were still some kinks that needed to be worked out. This is the part I’m extremely happy Chris was transparent about as it shows just how sneaky the voices in our mind can be in regards to tricking us. All in all, get ready for a solid discussion on the realities of the market and trading! Notes: Today we interview community member, Chris. His initial introduction to the market was through his grandfather. He would keep an eye on the market for the purpose of monitoring his portfolio. About 20 years later, Chris started to get more involved because he had money going into a 401k every month. After watching his grandpa take a large loss during the 2008-09 meltdown, Chris decided it was time to start focusing on his education so something similar would not happen to him in the future. Since Chris is a pitcher for baseball, he saw the parallels between how emotions affected him in sports and could see the same pitfalls happening with trading. Originally he would buy into the stories that various biotech companies would tell. This would lead him to buy and hold for quite a long time but he realized he wanted to make returns faster than that (shorter term time frames). After joining the community, Chris recognized very quickly that there was a lot of things he still did not know. While he rarely jumps into anything blindly, he decided to continue trading while learning with very small amounts because he felt that he needed to have skin in the game. Chris closed all his positions and is now in savings mode to achieve his goal of joining the University program here. He owns up to the mistakes he’s made and is ready to learn and move forward. He’s taking steps in the right direction to make this a future stream of income. Quotes: I could micromanage my 401k a little bit. Trading with your emotions, you want to stay away from that. I watched quite a few Claytrader videos before I knew who he was. The ‘trade without emotion’ is what I really liked. My money was all tied up so I wanted to get involved in some shorter trades. That’s what led me here. You guys have a really good thing going on with the community. Lot of interesting and cool people. My biggest hurdle in trading will be to step back and slow down before making a decision.