I share his story today not because I think day trading risky stock is for everyone (in fact, I personally wouldn’t recommend it at all to the average investors given its risks) but because I believe there are various ways an individual can be successful at investing.  Whether you’re a fundamental expert, or a risk craving day trader, an economist from a renowned university or a video game champion,  everyone should be encouraged to learn the game of investing and find the best style that fits you the best.  I am a believer that everyone can succeed in this market with training, discipline, and passion.

I hope you enjoy his story. You’ll see his unique personality through his writing.  I bet you won’t see an interview like this anywhere else…because this is not the “norm” a typical investor would agree with.  I just believe in sharing interesting stories with the rest of you.  Enjoy.

What is your primary background?

My primary background is painting/sculpting/scribbling, which means I am free to interpret the world without pressure from hierarchy or medium.   The disadvantage is no structure, funding, or consumers.  I spend some of my time trying to invent a self inflicting pyramid scheme of product.   I try to start with small idiot devices of little use in order to bankroll more complex useful devices.   I have yet to fully file a patent or sell a product.  I also work on theoretical ideas that are somewhere between crank/imagination and perhaps usefulness but with little math skill or presence in an academic environment I am just making anonymous noise.

How did you get into investing?

I am a gluttonous and perhaps degenerate gambler.   I enjoy numbers, randomness, and risk.  I was interested in casino gambling a long time ago but I recognized there was nothing about it that could be profitable unless you found a manufacturing flaw and exploited it.   If you ever meet a gambler who says he has a system and makes money with it,  hes lying.   There is only one casino game you can play in the world and make money on the game itself and not the secondary systems around it, and that’s the stock market.  The markets “odds” are exponential to your skill unlike casino gambling with the possible exception of poker.

Two events led me to investing many years ago.  One is the death of my granny and the other are magical invisible boots I used to sell on ebay called J-boots.  The boots made your metame run fast within the medium of Everquest.  I noticed an emerging shadow market of the already shadowy economy within the game Everquest, and I thought I would take a crack at finding an area to exploit that I could dominate in. There were too many sellers already so I had to get very specific and sell one particular item.  I chose the J-boot because everyone had to have them, and the major sellers were not bothering to sell it due to its complicated delivery procedure.   So in a fairly short perdiod of time I had ammased a decent amount of money from death and magic virtual boots.   I then decided to take that money and push it into the markets.  I knew nothing about stock markets, and the year I made my first trade was 2001.  Both bad and good timing.  Lost more than I would have if I had started in a more prosperous time but learned a lot in the process.

When the market is plain old unsafe,  I will swing trade with hold times of a few days to a few weeks, to possibly but very infrequently, a few years.

If the market is even more unsafe I will day trade only with hold times of a few minutes to all day…. every once in a while I go overnight with something that has momentum.

Momentum is for day trading, which is either behavioral in terms of pure price action or news driven.  In the end the two blend together into a messy giant sundae, and I just try and get a few bites before it becomes a sloppy disaster.

5. They always say don’t rely on luck, don’t hope, and use fact not intuition.  I thrive on Luck, Hope, and Intuition, in fact I am hoping my intuition can find me a lucky trade tomorrow.

Thanks Brendan for the interesting story.   There are absolutely great investors who look at fundamentals.  There are absolutely great investors who come with multitude of ceritications and degrees.  There are absolutely great investors who rely on technical analysis to swiftly make successful trades.  Then there are great sculpters who take on Wall Street with a complete different set of views.