My Trading Journey | Podcast Episode #468

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Hey everybody, this is Ryan Mallory with shareplanner.com Swing Trading the Stock Market. And today we’re going to talk about my trading journey.

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It’s probably been a few 100 episodes since I’ve touched on this. We’re on episode 468, getting close to that 500 episode here.

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Been doing this podcast since 2017 by the way, and we’ll touch on that later. But my trading journey, how I went from not knowing anything about trading to being a full time…

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…trader today and and doing what I what I do, a member of the trading block, we’ll call him Butkus because I always give people a funny redneck name sometimes or just a a good Florida name.

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This one actually is a Philly name off of the dog and Rocky 1. Rocky named his dog Butkus.

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Always thought that was a cool name. And I’m like, I don’t know if I’ve ever used the name Butkus, but here we are.

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We’re going to call this guy Bukus. Butkus writes…

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Ryan, I’ve heard your podcasts, but not sure I’ve ever heard or read a full narrative about your trading journey and to trading.

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I’m curious about it. I think it would be great to hear about your beginnings, the mistakes that you made, your reasons to…

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…get into trading, the changes that you made to improve yourself as a trader and how you became a full time trader in the challenges on becoming a full time trader.

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So that’s the unpack there. I’ll start off by saying my mom was raised by her great grandmother.

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Her mother or my grandmother died when she was two years old. So I’ve never met my grandmother before

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And there was this lady next door that took compassion, my mom because she didn’t have a mom in her life.

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So she became that mom for, for, for my mother. And her name was Grandma Adams.

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Grandma Adams took her to New York, took her to all sorts of vacations that she would never have been able to have had, you know, otherwise.

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She, my mom grew up very poor. And this, this woman, you know, gave her Christmases when there was no presents under the tree, just a fantastic human being.

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And when I was born, I got to get to know her as well because she stayed in her family all of her life.

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She used to come up all the time from Miami to visit, to visit the family.

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And she always bring like Cuban sandwiches. Man, those things are amazing down in Miami too, if you’ve never had one.

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Cuban sandwiches, Donuts, all sorts of goodies. So we love Grandma Adams, but she died when I when I was 11 years old.

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And so in 1991, she passed away and she left every one of my people in my family, my siblings. She left my my two brothers, myself and my sister, $5000 each 1991.

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That’s a good chunk of money right there. I mean, it’s nothing that you’re going to retire on, but terms of starter money, that’s fantastic.

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Now it was for college, but 11 years old, I’ve still got about seven years before I step, step foot on a college campus.

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My brother and my sister, they were already in college because I’m the youngest of four. So my brother and sister, they, they go off to college, they use it towards their tuition.

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I have another brother. He since it’s passed on about 25 years ago.

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He was, I don’t know what the heck, he was probably like 16 at the time. So he put the money I think in some stocks as well.

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I think he might have, I think probably the same stocks as me, but he didn’t really take an interest in it.

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The point is, is that my dad put the money into a couple of mutual funds for me $5000 twenty, $500 in each just to to hold me over until college.

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I said, dad, what, what, how do, what is that money doing? And so he started to explain to me the stock market.

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And this was, remember, this was in 1991. I think one of them was a Putnam mutual fund and the other one, I can’t remember what the other one was called, but these stocks I probably got in at the best possible time not knowing that we’re on this did the beginning of one of the greatest economic booms from a, from a stock market standpoint

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with the.com bubble. That was that I benefited from over the next 10 years.

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And so I got into these two positions and I remember to tell my dad, like dad, I’d like to know all, all about this stuff.

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So he explains to me, showed me how, you know, cuz back in the day, we opened up the newspaper and we go to the business section and look up our stock symbols or the mutual funds that we’re trading

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and we’d be able to find out what it did the previous day. It was none of this like electronic trading or charting or whatever.

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You had to call your broker and they were, you know, given the whole hand signals down on on the floor of Wall Street.

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So that’s how I started $5000 and at probably one of the best possible times that I could get started.

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So that’s where, you know, there’s a blessing there that that I know that at 11 years old, it’s like, you know what?

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My, my economic analysis tells me that we’re about to get into some crazy trading here. The market’s just going to go through the roof for the next 10 years.

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No, I didn’t even know hardly what a share was. That had to be explained to me.

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So going forward, you know, I remember my teacher used to bring in the newspapers each day and he, you know, there everybody be fighting for the sports or for the comic section.

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I was going for the business section. Nobody, nobody fought me for that.

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I always had full access to that. And and that’s where I was learning how to chart.

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I would, I wanted to keep track of how my, my prices were doing. So I started charting without even realizing I was charting.

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I would actually write down the share price everyday and I would just connect the dots. You know, I put a dot share price and then put another dot the next day and I connect the lines and

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without even realizing it, I was starting to, to, to read price and being able to get a feel for price movement.

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So reading the tape didn’t even know it at the time, what I was doing and how that would actually shape me and influence me down the road.

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But that’s what I was doing. I wanted to keep track.

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I wanted to keep a log like a like a diary, like a journal. And so as this continue progress all the way through high school, I’m looking at these newspapers

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each and every day and not knowing that, you know, when I’m getting towards the end of my high school career, we’re getting towards the end of the.com bubble as well.

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Things were about to blow up. You know, the, the whole, the whole market was about to go into a three-year pull back where you

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were going to see stocks like Microsoft pull back more than 80% or the NASDAQ drop more than 80%. But during that time, to give you a little bit of perspective of what it was like to be getting in

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to the stock market in 1991, the queues were trading at $6 per share. At the peak at 2000, it was hitting like $121.00.

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So my money, my, my investment went from $5000 all the way up to $50,000. Now that’s a lot of money for a kid coming right out of high school to have that in his pocket.

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The cool thing about it is, is that going into college, it funded, it funded my first computer, which was sweet.

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It was a gateway computer. I don’t even know if they make gateways anymore.

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Possibly, but back in the day, gateways were really, really nice computers. I think it had like 500 megabytes.

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No, I don’t even think it maybe. Yeah, it might have had.

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No, I think it had like 200 megabytes on it. So it wasn’t that much, but to me, man, that computer was amazing and I used it all throughout my

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college years. It was, it was wonderful.

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I also had my 88 Oldsmobile transmission fall apart on me one day coming home from college.

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So I was able to take like $1500 out and get my 88 Oldsmobile.

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Love that car, get that one fixed. So between a computer, which I think probably cost somewhere around 1500 or $2000 in a transmission

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that was like $1500, I was able to get some money out of it before the.com bubble blew up. And then when it did blow up, we had the, the, my, the value of that account went from like 50,000

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down to 15. So that was, that was depressing.

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I was in college so I, I didn’t really care too much about it at the time. Yes, it it’s, it’s stunk, but I hadn’t really understood risk management at that point.

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I thought at any point this stock is just these stocks are just going to go right back up. And I had moved beyond just this to mutual funds.

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I think I went to like four or five mutual funds in the account. So I was learning a little bit about diversification as well going putting not all your eggs in one

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basket.

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So with all that 5000 to 50,000 starts to come back down.

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I was able to get some money out to pay for some necessities and life came away with $15,000, which, and I want to say like 2003, I purchased my first home, put 10% down on the House.

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So it, it, it paid, paid some pretty good dividends over the, the years. So essentially my you add up all the, the, the value that I was able to extract from the market

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duringthe.com. Essentially that 5000 went up to $20,000.

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Pretty good. I’ll I’ll live with that and I’m pretty happy about how how much of an impact that had because if I

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hadn’t experiencedthe.com bubble, I probably wouldn’t be as strict of a risk management person as I am today.

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I probably wouldn’t be as big on stop losses like I am. I realized because I experienced it how fast gains can quickly get wiped out of your account.

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I experienced it this past week with NVIDIA.

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I have played the bounce and I had taken some profits along the way. I think I took, I think I got in at like 1, 31 or or I don’t remember the exact price, but I got

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some gains. I took some gains out at like 4% or 5% and another at like 10%.

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And then it came right back down and I took on Friday of last week, it started dropping and I really weirdly to it, it just didn’t add up because it wasn’t mirroring anything else that you were seeing

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in the market. So I got out for like an overall 7 1/2 percent profit on the trade.

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And then of course, Monday deep seat comes out and that just crashes the whole, the whole stock that that is.

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I was probably benefiting from some of the things that I experienced as a kid from the.com bubble to, to just seeing a lot of money go up in smoke.

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I don’t trust stocks. I don’t just assume that stocks are going to go up forever.

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That’s why it used risk management. I know how bad things can get, and I got to witness that again back on Monday when NVIDIA completely

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fell apart. So that was the early years of trading out.

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I go from college. I wanted to become a lawyer, wanted to go to law school, even wanted to like get into politics and

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stuff like that. Glad I didn’t because I don’t want to be a politician.

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Man, those people are so sleazy, so awful. But I did get a lot of good experiences up in Washington, DC.

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I put trading on the back burner. I wasn’t really paying attention to it.

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I had my, my, my first house, I had just taken a job with a defense contractor. I hated it.

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I was just a paper pusher. I was doing contracts for them and it sounds good.

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I think the official title manager was, or the title was a contracts manager, which it sounds like OK, he he did pretty good for himself or whatever.

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No, it was, It was just basically a glorified paper pusher. I hated it, honestly, the procurement process, the supply chain stuff, I learned a lot from it, but

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I hate it. I absolutely despise it.

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And I don’t like working in the defense industry either. That was an eye opener as well.

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So I got, I got kind of frustrated with working in the defense industry and I wanted that way out. I had started trading maybe a couple of years earlier work there was this like little small

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brokerage, little boutique, can’t remember, but I remember it was like $1.99 per per trade. If you trade it at 9:00, if you had your order submitted by 9:00 AM on Tuesday and then they would

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put all their orders in at like the open for, for whatever order you had. So sometimes you had to wait a week in order to be able to get it.

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Otherwise you’re paying like $2627.00 for a Commission. And that was just outrageous.

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So I was, I was using that. That was kind of cool, but I wish I could remember what it was.

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It was share something, not share planner, but it was share something else. But the, the company, I don’t even think they’re in business or they got acquired, but I was, I was

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learning a lot about stocks or I was getting my feet wet, at least, you know, and, and one of the things that I learned was about the biotech stocks and how I had bought this one company.

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I was going through their through their, through their like balance sheets and, and analyzing their fundamentals.

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Like, I think this is a good company. The next day, I don’t know what happened to them.

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They got some kind of news piece like an FDA approval on the stock shot up like like 600 percent or something crazy.

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And I remember telling somebody in the office like, yeah, I got this. And he’s like, oh, sell it.

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It’s just like, no, no, no, I’m, I’m more the Buffett type. I’m a buy and hold.

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I’m, I’m in this for the long run, man. Somebody throws 600% at you the day after you get into a stock, you get out.

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But not me. I was, I was the buy and hold.

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I was a sophisticated investor. And as a result, that stock price came all the way back down.

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I think I took a $200 loss on that investment. So that was that was one of the turning points.

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I was like, OK, maybe there’s a better way to extract profits out of this market and to be able to ride momentum waves.

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And so that’s where swing trading started to become more relevant to me. I remember buying some Walmart and Home Depot.

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And back in those days, Walmart and Home Depot were not like what you see now. They were very boring stocks and they just weren’t moving.

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Like I would wake up and maybe it moved a fraction of a penny that the previous day.

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So again, it started getting me to where I wanted something that gave me some movement, some some action and I wanted to be a little bit more involved in the market.

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They didn’t want a day trade. They don’t want to be a invest long term investor.

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And that’s where I found the swing trading.

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And so I, I dedicated myself to swing trade. I was reading every book that I could find on the topic, really getting into technicals, charting

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candlesticks. There’s a lot of good books, but stay away from the things that are promising your riches in the

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stock market or things that are saying, Hey, you know, these patterns here, will you know, or these, this trading system will make you, you know, I, I think back in the day, if there was like red

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light, green light systems, you know, it’s like green light, you buy, if it’s red light, you sell. And people work all over those things, avoid those kinds of things.

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Learn the basics, learn the technical analysis, learn the patterns, learn how those patterns correspond to making profits in the stock market.

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So my risk management is is rapidly growing here. I’m learning.

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I still have everything that I’ve that I went through from 2000 with the.com bubble blowing up in my face.

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And then I started a blog. I started shareplanner.com back in 2006, started off as a blog.

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I was just writing and a lot of people found the blog. In fact, honestly, some of the names that I’ve seen come out since then.

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Like you see some really cool websites like Wall Street Bets. I think that’s a pretty cool sounding name.

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I wish I would have been a little more creative with my company name like Share Planner. OK, it, it, it works.

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But you know, hindsight, I’m like, I could have probably come up with a cooler name than that.

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Whatever it’s a, it’s, I’ve used it for too long to change it now.

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So I start share Pointer as a blog. It starts to gain some traction.

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I quit my job at the defense contractor. I got to a point to where I couldn’t do both.

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I was taking extended lunch breaks, using vacation time, trying to to get blog posts out.

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I ran out of vacation time. It, it was just bad.

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So I eventually had to quit my job and, and thankfully so.

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And that’s Share Planner, really. So Share Planner is probably one of the longest lasting financial blogs out there.

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I mean, how many other ones have been out there since 2006? I know you can say like Seeking Alpha and others like that, but just in general, I would say 99.9%

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of them have gone by the wayside. So I’ve seen a lot of transformation in the industry, especially since I started share Planner from,

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you know, how people are trading to, you know, when everything went Commission free and then to the COVID crisis and just, you know, that the huge influx of refit retail traders that have been part of

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the stock market ever since. One of the things that I have learned as a full time trader, one of course being, you know, risk

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management’s the absolute most important thing I’ve, I’ve learned to, to live by three things. One, plan, plan out your trade. 2 manage the risk.

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And if you do #1 and #2 #3 the profits will take care of themselves.

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And I still believe that holds true today. Manage the risk, plan out your trades and let their profits take care of themselves because by doing

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the first 2, the profits will come. It’s where people’s just focus on the the third part and don’t manage the risk.

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It’s where they don’t ever see profits because their profits, any profits that they do get in the stock market is being consumed by the losses that they’re taking on and it and it can’t outpace

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those losses. Most of the people I’ve come across in my trading career, I’d say are not profitable in trading. Most of them, not that they can’t be profitable in trading, but they, they choose not to be

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profitable. And that comes down to risk management as well.

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Every, it’s so hard to get people to look beyond the profits, to look at beyond the profit potential and see the risk.

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They just don’t. Everybody wants to double down.

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Everybody just says I’ll wait for it to get back to break even. And what they don’t realize is that not all stocks get back to break even in the ones that don’t

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destroy your trading career. So that is my trading journey.

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Now before I go any further, I got to tell you about swingtradingthestockmarket.com. That is the the the product that goes alongside of this podcast.

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Like if you enjoy what I’m talking about, if you enjoy this podcast, you’ll really like Swing Trade in the-stockmarket.com.

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It takes you to my share planner website and you can see you can be able to get essentially all of my stock market research every day.

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If you want it, want a little bit more and you want it my actual trades, you can do that as well, but swing Trade in the stock market will give you my daily watchlist, the stocks that I’m looking to

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trade. I also do a watchlist review video each day at the end of the day telling you what worked, what

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didn’t work. Also, what I what I I do is I provide a mega cap updates each day.

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That’s going to be like on NVIDIA, Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and all those big wigs. I also do stock market updates via video and I provide a master bullish and bearish watch list at

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the beginning of each week so that you know what where my setups are coming from from that particular list.

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One of the biggest lessons that I have learned from the stock market or one of the biggest risk

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components is avoiding earnings and the, the desire to play earnings. And the reason why I bring this up is because it takes me back to when I was still working as a

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defense contractor. I, I taking a few $1000 out. It might have just been $1000.

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And I put it into my account and I was very nervous about this money. It was out of the savings.

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And I, I, I had like $333 that I was going to put on each one of the positions. I had to put them all in right away.

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What I didn’t realize is like, we were like in the thick of earning season right now. Yeah, I didn’t even know we were in earning season, didn’t even really care about earning season or

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what the impact was. So I went and bought 3 stocks and all three stocks were reporting that day.

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And then after hours I’m looking at this stuff and I’m losing like 2030% on my, I mean every one of

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them just blew up in my face. Next day, market opens. I’m trying to get out of these things.

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I’m getting just absolutely hammered. I get out of them all.

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I think I have a mouse right here. I had it when I was working.

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I think I might have chucked it across the the the room, broke it into a million pieces. And what was funny about that is that because I broke the mouth, I didn’t have a backup mouse.

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So then I have to go all the way down to the IT department and ask for a new mouse. Like what happened to the other one, like chucked it.

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They gave me a new mouse and they have to go back. Then I’m down even more because I chucked the mouse and I couldn’t sell it out from the 15 minutes

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earlier. I’m waiting in line to be able to get a mouse.

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And then, of course, you know, like all companies, you know, you got to sign forms and and whatever. By the time I’m getting hammered on these things, I get out and then by the end of the day they had

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reversed and went back up to the upside. I’m like, Oh my gosh.

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So that was one of the big rules that I learned. That was one of the huge lessons.

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Don’t trade earnings. And even still today, because I think the line between trading and gambling has really gotten

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blurry. I think because we see like DraftKings and we see stock trades as almost being the same thing where

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we don’t really decide, you know, see a difference between buying Apple and hoping Aaron Rodgers throws a touchdown pass so that you can get paid.

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I think we see that as the same thing. So I, I think we go into earnings now and we completely blow it off, especially the people who

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aren’t being serious about their trading. They don’t consider the risk.

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And then when they get into the the trade earnings goes against them and they lose, you know, 20% or

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15%. We can’t be making our trading like we do like sports betting or going to the casino. That is how you absolutely ruin yourself.

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You’ll never be successful as a trader. Now, I do think that there is a lot of things that you can learn from, from people who are skillful

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at playing poker, like Texas Hold’em, the people who are really good and make careers out of them. There’s a lot of parallels there.

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And that’s one of the things I think I’m going to do this year is read more about poker playing and, and some of the strategies that they use and see if there’s anything that it can actually apply to

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trading as a whole. So in any case, that is my trading journey.

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There was a lot to it. There’s a lot of blessings along the way.

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I don’t doubt the fact that, that the, that the Lord had had me directed into this area and, and this was what, you know, my, my full time career was going to be and blessing me with share pointer.

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And cause swing trading can be boring at times.

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And I’m really thankful that I do have share pointer to kind of let the day’s speed up a little bit there.

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So I’m not completely bored waiting for sometimes the, the trades that the trades that you’re waiting to trigger and then they, no one ever trigger and you’re like, Oh man, what did I do today?

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Gives me a little bit of additional purpose. And I always encourage people in their trading to come up with side hustles because trading doesn’t

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have to be just, you know, the only thing that you do you can come up with. I think if I wasn’t doing share pointer, I would probably be doing carpentry.

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I think I’d be making tables or something like a little workshop or something that that I could do that with.

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I’ve been watching these different videos on YouTube. It’s like woodwork is mesmerizing just watching these people at work.

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Like I think that’s what I would be doing if I wasn’t doing Share Planner. Any case, if you enjoyed this podcast episode, I would encourage you to like and subscribe.

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If you’re listening to me on YouTube, and if you’re listening to me on Spotify or, or Apple or whatever podcast platform you’re listening to me on, make sure to leave me a five star review.

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Those do help me out a lot. Make sure to check out Swing trade in the-stockmarket.com.

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And if you want a podcast episode done on you or on your question, shoot me, shoot me your e-mail. Shoot, shoot me your question.

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I’m the only person I’ll read it, but let me know what’s what’s driving you crazy about your trading right now.

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What are you struggling with the most?

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And I’ll make a podcast episode out of it. Thank you guys, God bless.

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Thanks for listening to my podcast, Swing Trading the Stock Market.

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All the best to you and I look forward to trading with you soon.