What is it?

From among the many work-at-home options, one stands out: online securities trading.
While all other businesses require an army of well-wishers, buyers, customers, advisors, suppliers, creditors and employees to function, this one doesn’t.
They say “leave worries from the office at the office”.  Alas, for many home-based entrepreneurs, worries from their home office invaded their personal space and turned their family life into a mess.  They also say “leave worries from home at home” but alas, for many home-based entrepreneurs family problems invaded their businesses in the next room and incapacitated them to perform their work duties in full.

Telecommuting seemed to offer a solution.
It looked nice to stay home and have work supplied by the employer but this too falls short of what an individual can achieve, his true potential.  Like all other jobs, telecommuting has one major flaw: one can never be free and grow rich working for somebody else.
To go somewhere in life, one must dig up his own enterprise.

Is there a business that can be set up at home without the disadvantages of working from home?
Yes, it is: online securities trading.
It has all the plusses and none of the minuses. Sure it has problems of its own but compared to other lines of work, it really rises above the rest.  If having no boss, no warehouse inventory to look after, no customers to please, no fixed hours and no commuting to and back from office appeals to you, then online securities trading has the answer.

Here is what this profession entails:

• Day-trading: trading activity during the day only, meaning that no positions are held overnight.
  There are tens of thousands of people who have quit jobs or closed down their business to stay home in front of their computer and make money on intra-day price moves.  Some work only in the morning or only in the afternoon or all the day long, that is from 9:30 AM till 4:15 PM. Those who prefer currencies can, besides working during the day, also keep themselves busy in the evenings or throughout the night.  Currencies trade 24 hours a day from Sunday, 2 PM until Friday, 4 PM.  It’s up to everybody to select the time frame they wish.  So can you.
  How does making US$1,000 / day, or more, sound to you?  Let me assure you that incomes like this are achievable but ... not without effort.  One must sharpen his skills in order to reach that level.
   
• Swing trading.  This is a term for holding positions in the markets over a couple of days or weeks.
  A great number of those who swing trade also keep a job or another business going.  This is perfect as a period of transition to day-trading.
   
• Investing.  This is the most popular choice.
  Investors hold positions for months or years at a time.  With very few exceptions, their return on investment is less than that of the swingers’ or day-traders’.  Investors are everyday people who cling to their jobs or businesses and who simply cannot resist the magnet-like attraction of the financial markets.  Some of them care to learn the craft by themselves or with a tutor, some rely on their stockbroker for advice.

What can you do with this information?  Well, many, many things can be done.  Here is a list:

• You can trade securities under your own name or under the name of a company registered in your country or offshore.
• You can use your own money, or money from family and friends or customers, in which case a legal structure must be set up.
• You can hire others to trade for you.
• You can belong to an investment club.
• You can work at home or rent an office together with other traders.
• You can work alone or networked in cyberspace to a group of traders with similar interests across the globe.

You can travel all over the world and still trade your favorite securities or at least check the pulse of the market to see how your investments are doing, no matter where you are.
Online securities trading is the best portable profession there is.

As for institutional opportunities for traders, I purposefully leave them out from this article.

No matter what you will go for, you must know the tricks of the trade, the ins and outs and take the road that goes there.

Oh my, I almost forgot: you too can grow up to teach securities trading.  Few people become successful by themselves, most people need to be woken up and shown the way.  Discovering you have talent for teaching is always welcome.
There is no greater satisfaction than seeing your students succeed.

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Online securities trading has so many advantages that any one of them is enough to become a motivational factor in deciding to practice it.

For instance, it has a unique quality: it can be practiced in a simulated account for as long as it takes someone to build confidence up for live trading.  Except for simulated driving or piloting, businesses are entered into for real from the beginning without the possibility of their chances of success being tested live.  For this reason alone, many businesses end up turning into disappointments.
Trading can be ventured into at will, which is a great advantage, whereas taking a job or starting a business is a must with everybody.

Another plus to securities trading is that if a trader goes bust, it is only him who suffers.  In contrast, when a business goes belly up, so many other people, not only the owner, are adversely affected.  And because nobody gets dragged down when a private trader flops, chances of his finding somebody to lend him a hand in time of need are greater than others with businesses in distress.
Because of being able to get back on feet quickly after a failure, securities trading proves to be the king of professions.

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Let’s touch upon learning costs and duration.
For investing and swing trading, a reasonable amount of time to grasp the schools of thought and settle for a trading methodology is 6 – 12 months.  For day-trading it may be the same, but I do not recommend getting your feet wet in online securities trading by jumping into day-trading.
I insist my students begin with investing or swing trading first and consider day-trading later on after the excitement and amateurism made room to knowledge and positive performance.  The time it takes to learn is shorter than post college studies and the time to become profitable is by all means less than what it takes somebody to pass junior employee status or the first years of a startup business.
By the time a University graduate hunting for a job knocks at same doors where others knock, a trader has already crafted a style of his own and makes money.  A private trader will not be made to wait at the door, nor will he be hired or fired.

As for the cost of learning how to trade it is far less than University fees.  No doubt about it.

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It is important to know that money in many but not all securities can be made when prices go either up or down.
It is not the scope of this article to explain how declining markets generate gains, but you need to keep in mind that the opportunity indeed exists.  This is a powerful advantage trading has over other occupations where only the buy-low-sell-high rule governs.  As you can see, opportunities to make a profit in all the other professions are reduced when compared to securities trading where profit opportunities exist not only on the upside but also on the downside.
For instance, when a retailer complains that customers for items he once bought low and now sells high are scarce or when he has to spend time looking for new gadgets he can buy low to sell high, the trader has more back-to-back profit opportunities than he can handle right there in his computer at his home office.  Such abundance makes securities trading attractive and time saving, the Rolls Royce of entrepreneurship.

Another big advantage of securities trading over other occupations is its huge corrective power.
When my trade happens to turn against me, I can immediately exit and wait for a new opportunity 10 or 20 minutes away.  Then I shall attempt to correct myself.
Compare this with somebody who got fired.  How many days, weeks or months will it take until he finds a new job?  Same for the business owner: when sales are poor and costs are hardly met, how long does it take until he gets back on track?  How can these two correct themselves and exit a bad situation before it gets worse for them?

My trading software has profit management features and even allows me to set up loss limits.  Suppose my losses today hit $600.  The software prevents me from placing new trades for the balance of the day.
Of course I can unlock the feature but, to enforce discipline, I walk away and return tomorrow.  How about the job seeker, can he afford to stop looking for a job and start again tomorrow?  And the business owner, can he recuperate a loss the following day?  Does what they do offer them the possibility of correcting their situation as fast as trading offers?  I don’t think so.

This is why money will always go where money is and not to Ted Smith who, after a debilitating loss with his manufacturing business, is totally bewildered and has trouble coming back in shape.

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Online securities trading can also be learnt and practiced at an old age.
This is a big plus.
I guess you know lots of retired persons who, poor minded as they are, do nothing all day long, shadows of former selves.  They meet on Monday evenings to play Bridge and kill time for the remainder of the week.  We all start life as suckers from the mother’s breast but we don’t have to grow old sucking from pension money when two hours of trading in the morning can bring in as much money as one gets in one week.
Old age is such a marvelous time for creativity but so very few people use it as such …
It is disappointing, even disgusting, to see aged persons let their mind power seep away, oblivious to the fact that their last chance in life to exceed themselves and rise above mediocrity fades out day by day.
Online securities trading is the most rewarding mind game and for someone to be able to provide for himself and live in elegance to the last day of his life is a truly remarkable victory against aging a retired person could win.

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I chose day-trading not for its income potential but for the freedom it offers: I am able to make my own time and don’t have to answer to anybody.
Was it easy?  Sure not, but when I see others struggling with their businesses after twenty years like they did from day one with no hope in sight, when I hear them refusing to switch and grow up or when I hear them blaming their problems on the “bad economy” as a cheap excuse, I am happy I jumped ship and swam to new horizons.  In my opinion, it doesn’t boil down to somebody always having to push his business as much as it boils down to somebody choosing a business where he can push himself to newer and newer limits.  It is counterproductive to struggle doing what cannot be done, but doing the most of what can be done is not.
Everybody depends on everybody and everybody has to fight obstacles from everybody, but in online securities trading there is only one person to depend on and one obstacle to overcome: you.

You cannot control everybody, but you can control yourself.  Stepping on the road to success for the first time is possible only after one stepped on the road to ruin for the last time.  What is ruin?  If you don’t build, you ruin.
Ideas like these are the empowering force behind novice and expert traders alike.

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Almost every time I meet new people in St. Lucia and introduce myself as a day-trader, they tell me dealing with stocks it’s like gambling.
I invariably ask them if they ever played the markets themselves and when they say “no”, I ask them how can they know what something is if they never tried it.  After getting hit by logic, the discussion turns jovial but this story shows how quick folks are to make use of their presumptions instead of knowledge.
The tendency among people is not to know but rather to think they know.
If you are one of them, rest assured you are gambling more if not participating in the markets than if you do: your future.

A few people told me they had played the markets and lost their entire pension money, something that left them with a bitter taste and almost penniless.
I asked them for how long they studied the markets before they opened a trading account.  Their answer is always the same: none.  Mind you, no study books, no classes, no paper trading, no mentor, no guidance from a real trader, nothing.  How can such people win?  What were they thinking?
In the markets, just like in life, there is a constant battle between those who know and those who know better.  There is no room for those who do not know, know little or think they know.
The market is the great humiliator, the great healer of hallucinations.
I know tens of people who learnt the craft, started with US$5,000, left their dull jobs and crappy businesses and now trade for a comfortable living.
I also know an engineer who lost US$400,000 and never played again.  He thought that the markets owed him money like society owed him a salary.  He complains to everybody how he lost.  Such people spread confusion and propagate misinformation when in fact what shows is how stupid they were by refusing to learn before acting in the markets in the first place.

The markets wake sleepwalkers to a painful reality and teach lunatics the hard lesson of reality being different than they want it to be.  When dealing with the markets, one cannot lie, delay, act irresponsibly and hope to get away with it, let others do his work, sweep errors under the carpet, etc.  Mere attempts to do such things, let alone doing them, will be costly.

One of the main reasons folks of so many backgrounds feel attracted to online securities trading is the high degree of freedom it offers.
It is the ultimate freedom.
To work from home and for yourself as opposed for others, away from the daily noise, to be able to isolate yourself from events and people you have nothing in common with is a unique experience, a truly different journey inwards.  Being able to choose the friends you really want to talk to and to speak up your mind without fear of repercussion will make you look at life with new eyes.
Only after you succeeded in supporting yourself from trading will you come to realize how special this profession really is.
Human mind is directly conditioned by what people do for a living.  If you are an employee, then you think and act as an employee and if you are an employer, then you think and act like one. How about being independent and think and act accordingly?  Imagine the umbilical cord that connects everybody to false relationships and unpleasant, forced situations being cut off for good ...

You owe it to yourself to improve your existence, and you will.
After all, reading this article means you already search for ways of breaking loose from your shell.

No matter how it’s done, full-time, part-time or on occasion,, online securities trading has plenty to offer to everybody.  It is totally different than anything else anybody tried before.
Last but not least, it’s on the increase worldwide.  As I write this, October 2006, the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed up to an all-time high.  Guess why!

And one more thing.  Many speculators who went into securities trading unprepared and got burnt, and who cared to learn from their mistakes in the meantime, are coming back in droves … There is nothing they’d rather be doing than sitting in front of the computer at home in pajamas and trade for a living.
The difference being that while traders have absolutely nothing to envy others for, others simply can’t help envying them.

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I cannot guarantee you high earnings for the same reasons first-grade teachers don’t guarantee top salaries and top honors in life to school children even if the child is the best in classroom.  You have to make things work for yourself and with securities trading coming on top of the game is possible sooner and faster than with other professions.

What I can guarantee you though is that online securities trading was, is and will be the cream of the crop of human endeavors for work-at-home and small business choices.

It’s an art, the money art.

What I also guarantee you is that if you don’t work on improving your condition, you may soon find yourself trapped and in fact, acting against your best interests, without even knowing it.
Show me a better career than this one, you tell me about it.  If there is any, I am willing to forget everything I know and follow your advice to the letter, plus I shall pay your tuition fee to learn from you.

In their quest for sensationalism and to have topics that appeal to the general public, newspapers, radio and TV publicize horror stories about day-traders who lost lots of money but let me remind you that success stories of those who make a living at it, day in and day out, are not heard of …
Truth be told, traders avoid bragging about their income and shun publicity altogether.  Theirs is a world of secrecy, high confidentiality and privileged information so, how can you find somebody to talk you into this profession and guide your first steps?

To help inquisitive minds find out what securities trading is all about one day sooner, I have put up five technical analysis courses for learning and profiting from the financial markets.

What I want you know about myself is this: I could easily have chosen to describe online securities trading as a fast moneymaker.
“Buy yourself a new house, a Porsche or latest yacht!” could have been the title of this article and excitement could have been its message.  But I chose not to, even if that might be case.
Teaching students who respond to this kind of hyped-up advertising is something from which I want to stay away.  I refuse to work with people who don’t understand that only sacrifice and sincere effort lead to success and that good things take time.  I shall get fewer students but they will be the serious ones, and we will be better off this way.
If this article didn’t make you get up and run to learn, then sorry, I won’t be able to help.
Who will? …

Let me bring this article to an end with a joke.  Yes, I promote self-employment but my dream job is that of a lighthouse keeper.
“Why?”, you may ask.
“Well,” I reply “it enables me when I see crooks and jackasses coming to turn off the light on them.”

John Craciun

October 2006

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