We love to preach about forming good habits around the community, and this interview gives us a shining example of 'why' that is the case. Thanks to Donald's (chat room alias, "Speedster47") openness about his journey, we get to see not only how bad habits can creep into a strategy, but more importantly, just how annoying/difficult they can be to get rid of. If you take anything away from this discussion, I hope it is realizing how careful you need to be of avoiding forming bad habits. Notes: Speedster’s original introduction to the market was similar to many others, through his Economics class. Many years later following his college education and full time employment, he had a friend who worked in the finance industry and was day trading for small profits. This piqued Donald’s interest in taking his trading future into his own hands. Donald recognized very early that he needed to get educated. He decided to try to soak up as much free education as he could but as we all tend to find out, free education is usually all over the place and while bits of it may be helpful, it’s lack of structure ultimately does the trader no good. After not finding much success to begin his trading career, Speedster decided to start trading penny stocks. His strategy was to buy and hold energy penny stocks as an investor. He was smart to recognize that he was still trending down (losing money) and was able to lower the amount he as losing incrementally. This is always the first step to becoming profitable. Since Donald focused on self educating himself and had no support system at that time, he had developed bad habits that he has been working on ever since. Right now he is focusing on maintaining discipline. As you hear in the podcast, Donald is super hard on himself but he is still profitable for the year including covering the cost of Claytrader University! Trading always leaves room for improvement and maintaining discipline is without a doubt that hardest piece of the puzzle. Quotes: “I wanted to get some shares of my company, sit on them, hopefully take the rest of that money and potentially grow it.” tweet this quote “I figured I would learn by experience. Once I finished those books I wanted to put my toe in the water. That was the wrong thinking.” tweet this quote “If you think you’re going to be a penny stock investor, you’re just wasting your time.” tweet this quote “I was in the kool-aid camp. I was believing the pump and just thought it would come around.” tweet this quote