Lately, I have been researching all sorts of ecom revenue sources and for me the most rewarding seems to be selling my own services by doing what I love. I would love to spend a lot of time learning more about dropshipping, Forex/HFX, Amazon, Depop, Ebay, etc., but as someone with a stress disorder, I do not think those are the best options for me personally, as I have little faith in the process and do not get very excited about it. I want to be able to make a fair amount by selling my audio production services. I am an 18 year old college student in downtown Atlanta who has a nice recording program, synthesizer, and soon a microphone. I believe that doing what I love will strongly benefit how much work I put into my business. I believe anyone with a strength capitalize off of their strengths if actually learn how to sell it. I do not expect to get a bunch of money right off the bat, but I want to hear ideas for what makes a TEEN'S business as professional as possible. I have considered Fiverr as a platform for purchasing a music service, although I am uncertain with what will equate to success.
My worry is over-saturation of the beat-making and audio production industry (especially on Fiverr). How can I separate myself from others doing the same thing and earn a profit? I am already planning on starting an instagram account and perhaps a website to help professionalize my business. I want to be able to confidently market and promote my product so I know I am showing that I have a true music theory education and advanced knowledge that will assist the customer in having a quality product/service. From a business perspective, what will help my validity and value be treasured by others to gain a reliable money flow?
Thank you all :)
submitted by Hello, dummies
It's your old pal, Fuzzy.
As I'm sure you've all noticed, a lot of the stuff that gets posted here is - to put it delicately - fucking ridiculous. More backwards-ass shit gets posted to
wallstreetbets than you'd see on a Westboro Baptist community message board. I mean, I had a look at the daily thread yesterday and..... yeesh. I know, I know.
We all make like the divine Laura Dern circa 1992 on the daily and stick our hands deep into this steaming heap of shit to find the nuggets of valuable and/or hilarious information within (thanks for reading, BTW). I agree. I love it just the way it is too. That's what makes WSB great.
What I'm getting at is that a lot of the stuff that gets posted here - notwithstanding it being funny or interesting - is just... wrong. Like, fucking your cousin wrong. And to be clear, I mean the fucking your *first* cousin kinda wrong, before my Southerners in the back get all het up (simmer down, Billy Ray - I know Mabel's twice removed on your grand-sister's side). Truly, I try to let it slide.
I do my bit to try and put you on the right path. Most of the time, I sleep easy no matter how badly I've seen someone explain what a bank liquidity crisis is. But out of all of those tens of thousands of misguided, autistic attempts at understanding the world of high finance, one thing gets so consistently - so *emphatically* - fucked up and misunderstood by you retards that last night I felt obligated at the end of a long work day to pull together this edition of
Finance with Fuzzy just for you. It's so serious I'm not even going to make a
u/pokimane gag. Have you guessed what it is yet? Here's a clue. It's in the title of the post.
That's right, friends. Today in the neighborhood we're going to talk all about
hedging in financial markets - spots, swaps, collars, forwards, CDS, synthetic CDOs, all that fun shit. Don't worry; I'm going to explain what all the scary words mean and how they impact your OTM RH positions along the way.
We're going to break it down like this. (1) "What's a hedge, Fuzzy?" (2) Common Hedging Strategies and (3) All About ISDAs and Credit Default Swaps.
Before we begin. For the nerds and JV traders in the back (and anyone else who needs to hear this up front) - I am simplifying these descriptions for the purposes of this post. I am also obviously not going to try and cover every exotic form of hedge under the sun or give a detailed summation of what caused the financial crisis. If you are interested in something specific ask a question, but don't try and impress me with your Investopedia skills or technical points I didn't cover; I will just be forced to flex my years of IRL experience on you in the comments and you'll look like a big dummy.
TL;DR? Fuck you. There is no TL;DR. You've come this far already. What's a few more paragraphs? Put down the Cheetos and try to concentrate for the next 5-7 minutes. You'll learn something, and I promise I'll be gentle.
Ready? Let's get started.
1. The Tao of Risk: Hedging as a Way of Life The simplest way to characterize what a hedge 'is' is to imagine every action having a binary outcome. One is bad, one is good. Red lines, green lines; uppie, downie. With me so far? Good. A 'hedge' is simply the employment of a strategy to mitigate the effect of your action having the
wrong binary outcome. You wanted X, but you got Z! Frowny face. A hedge strategy introduces a
third outcome. If you hedged against the
possibility of Z happening, then you can wind up with Y instead. Not as good as X, but not as bad as Z. The technical definition I like to give my idiot juniors is as follows:
Utilization of a defensive strategy to mitigate risk, at a fraction of the cost to capital of the risk itself.
Congratulations. You just finished Hedging 101. "But Fuzzy, that's easy! I just sold a naked call against my 95% OTM put! I'm adequately hedged!". Spoiler alert: you're not (although good work on executing a collar, which I describe below). What I'm talking about here is what would be referred to as a 'perfect hedge'; a binary outcome where downside is totally mitigated by a risk management strategy. That's not how it works IRL. Pay attention; this is the tricky part.
You can't take a single position and conclude that you're adequately hedged because risks are fluid, not static. So you need to constantly adjust your position in order to maximize the value of the hedge and insure your position. You also need to consider exposure to more than one category of risk. There are micro (specific exposure) risks, and macro (trend exposure) risks, and both need to factor into the hedge calculus.
That's why, in the real world, the value of hedging depends entirely on the design of the hedging strategy itself. Here, when we say "value" of the hedge, we're not talking about cash money - we're talking about the intrinsic value of the hedge relative to the the risk profile of your underlying exposure. To achieve this, people hedge
dynamically. In
wallstreetbets terms, this means that as the value of your position changes, you need to change your hedges too. The idea is to efficiently and continuously distribute and rebalance risk across different states and periods, taking value from states in which the marginal cost of the hedge is low and putting it back into states where marginal cost of the hedge is high, until the shadow value of your underlying exposure is equalized across your positions. The punchline, I guess, is that one static position is a hedge in the same way that the finger paintings you make for your wife's boyfriend are art - it's technically correct, but you're only playing yourself by believing it.
Anyway. Obviously doing this as a small potatoes trader is hard but it's worth taking into account. Enough basic shit. So how does this work in markets?
2. A Hedging Taxonomy The best place to start here is a practical question. What does a business need to hedge against? Think about the specific risk that an individual business faces. These are legion, so I'm just going to list a few of the key ones that apply to most corporates. (1) You have commodity risk for the shit you buy or the shit you use. (2) You have currency risk for the money you borrow. (3) You have rate risk on the debt you carry. (4) You have offtake risk for the shit you sell. Complicated, right? To help address the many and varied ways that shit can go wrong in a sophisticated market, smart operators like yours truly have devised a whole bundle of different instruments which can help you manage the risk. I might write about some of the more complicated ones in a later post if people are interested (CDO/CLOs, strip/stack hedges and bond swaps with option toggles come to mind) but let's stick to the basics for now.
(i) Swaps
A swap is one of the most common forms of hedge instrument, and they're used by pretty much everyone that can afford them. The language is complicated but the concept isn't, so pay attention and you'll be fine. This is the most important part of this section so it'll be the longest one.
Swaps are derivative contracts with two counterparties (before you ask, you can't trade 'em on an exchange - they're OTC instruments only). They're used to exchange one cash flow for another cash flow of equal expected value; doing this allows you to take speculative positions on certain financial prices or to alter the cash flows of existing assets or liabilities within a business. "Wait, Fuzz; slow down! What do you mean sets of cash flows?". Fear not, little autist. Ol' Fuzz has you covered.
The cash flows I'm talking about are referred to in swap-land as 'legs'. One leg is fixed - a set payment that's the same every time it gets paid - and the other is variable - it fluctuates (typically indexed off the price of the underlying risk that you are speculating on / protecting against). You set it up at the start so that they're notionally equal and the two legs net off; so at open, the swap is a zero NPV instrument. Here's where the fun starts. If the price that you based the variable leg of the swap on changes, the value of the swap will shift; the party on the wrong side of the move ponies up via the variable payment. It's a zero sum game.
I'll give you an example using the most vanilla swap around; an interest rate trade. Here's how it works. You borrow money from a bank, and they charge you a rate of interest. You lock the rate up front, because you're smart like that. But then -
quelle surprise! - the rate gets
better after you borrow. Now you're bagholding to the tune of, I don't know, 5 bps. Doesn't sound like much but on a billion dollar loan that's a lot of money (a classic example of the kind of 'small, deep hole' that's terrible for profits). Now, if you had a swap contract on the rate before you entered the trade, you're set; if the rate goes down, you get a payment under the swap. If it goes up, whatever payment you're making to the bank is netted off by the fact that you're borrowing at a sub-market rate. Win-win! Or, at least, Lose Less / Lose Less. That's the name of the game in hedging.
There are
many different kinds of swaps, some of which are pretty exotic; but they're all different variations on the same theme. If your business has exposure to something which fluctuates in price, you trade swaps to hedge against the fluctuation. The valuation of swaps is also super interesting but I guarantee you that 99% of you won't understand it so I'm not going to try and explain it here although I encourage you to google it if you're interested.
Because they're OTC, none of them are filed publicly. Someeeeeetimes you see an ISDA (dsicussed below) but the confirms themselves (the individual swaps) are not filed. You can usually read about the hedging strategy in a 10-K, though. For what it's worth, most modern credit agreements ban speculative hedging. Top tip: This is occasionally something worth checking in credit agreements when you invest in businesses that are debt issuers - being able to do this increases the risk profile significantly and is particularly important in times of economic volatility (ctrl+f "non-speculative" in the credit agreement to be sure).
(ii) Forwards
A forward is a contract made today for the future delivery of an asset at a pre-agreed price. That's it. "But Fuzzy! That sounds just like a futures contract!". I know. Confusing, right? Just like a futures trade, forwards are generally used in commodity or forex land to protect against price fluctuations. The differences between forwards and futures are small but significant. I'm not going to go into
super boring detail because I don't think many of you are commodities traders but it is still an important thing to understand even if you're just an RH jockey, so stick with me.
Just like swaps, forwards are OTC contracts - they're not publicly traded. This is distinct from futures, which are traded on exchanges (see
The Ballad Of Big Dick Vick for some more color on this). In a forward, no money changes hands until the maturity date of the contract when delivery and receipt are carried out; price and quantity are locked in from day 1. As you now know having read about BDV, futures are marked to market daily, and normally people close them out with synthetic settlement using an inverse position. They're also liquid, and that makes them easier to unwind or close out in case shit goes sideways.
People use forwards when they absolutely have to get rid of the thing they made (or take delivery of the thing they need). If you're a miner, or a farmer, you use this shit to make sure that at the end of the production cycle, you can get rid of the shit you made (and you won't get fucked by someone taking cash settlement over delivery). If you're a buyer, you use them to guarantee that you'll get whatever the shit is that you'll need at a price agreed in advance. Because they're OTC, you can also exactly tailor them to the requirements of your particular circumstances.
These contracts are incredibly byzantine (and there are even crazier synthetic forwards you can see in money markets for the true degenerate fund managers). In my experience, only Texan oilfield magnates, commodities traders, and the weirdo forex crowd fuck with them. I (i) do not own a 10 gallon hat or a novelty size belt buckle (ii) do not wake up in the middle of the night freaking out about the price of pork fat and (iii) love greenbacks too much to care about other countries' monopoly money, so I don't fuck with them.
(iii) Collars
No, not the kind your wife is encouraging you to wear try out to 'spice things up' in the bedroom during quarantine. Collars are actually the hedging strategy
most applicable to WSB. Collars deal with options! Hooray!
To execute a basic collar (also called a wrapper by tea-drinking Brits and people from the Antipodes), you buy an out of the money put while simultaneously writing a covered call on the same equity. The put protects your position against price drops and writing the call produces income that offsets the put premium. Doing this limits your tendies (you can only profit up to the strike price of the call) but also writes down your risk. If you screen large volume trades with a VOL/OI of more than 3 or 4x (and they're not bullshit biotech stocks), you can sometimes see these being constructed in real time as hedge funds protect themselves on their shorts.
(3) All About ISDAs, CDS and Synthetic CDOs You may have heard about the mythical
ISDA. Much like an indenture (discussed in my post on $F), it's a magic legal machine that lets you build swaps via trade confirms with a willing counterparty. They are
very complicated legal documents and you need to be a true expert to fuck with them. Fortunately, I am, so I do. They're made of two parts; a Master (which is a form agreement that's always the same) and a Schedule (which amends the Master to include your specific terms). They are also the engine behind just about every major credit crunch of the last 10+ years.
First - a brief explainer. An ISDA is a not in and of itself a hedge - it's an umbrella contract that governs the terms of your swaps, which you use to construct your hedge position. You can trade commodities, forex, rates, whatever, all under the same ISDA.
Let me explain. Remember when we talked about swaps? Right. So. You can trade swaps on just about anything. In the late 90s and early 2000s, people had the smart idea of using other people's debt and or credit ratings as the variable leg of swap documentation. These are called
credit default swaps. I was actually starting out at a bank during this time and, I gotta tell you, the only thing I can compare people's enthusiasm for this shit to was that moment in your early teens when you discover jerking off. Except, unlike your bathroom bound shame sessions to Mom's Sears catalogue, every single person you know felt that way too; and they're all doing it at once. It was a fiscal circlejerk of epic proportions, and the financial crisis was the inevitable bukkake finish. WSB autism is absolutely no comparison for the enthusiasm people had during this time for lighting each other's money on fire.
Here's how it works. You pick a company. Any company. Maybe even your own! And then you write a swap. In the swap, you define "Credit Event" with respect to that company's debt as the variable leg . And you write in... whatever you want. A ratings downgrade, default under the docs, failure to meet a leverage ratio or FCCR for a certain testing period... whatever. Now, this started out as a hedge position, just like we discussed above. The purest of intentions, of course. But then people realized - if bad shit happens,
you make money. And banks... don't like calling in loans or forcing bankruptcies. Can you smell what the moral hazard is cooking?
Enter synthetic CDOs. CDOs are basically pools of asset backed securities that invest in debt (loans or bonds). They've been around for a minute but they got famous in the 2000s because a shitload of them containing subprime mortgage debt went belly up in 2008. This got a lot of publicity because a lot of sad looking rednecks got foreclosed on and were interviewed on CNBC. "OH!", the people cried. "Look at those big bad bankers buying up subprime loans! They caused this!". Wrong answer, America. The debt wasn't the problem. What a lot of people don't realize is that the real meat of the problem was not in regular way CDOs investing in bundles of shit mortgage debts in
synthetic CDOs investing in CDS predicated on that debt. They're
synthetic because they don't have a stake in the actual underlying debt; just the instruments riding on the coattails. The reason these are so popular (and remain so) is that smart structured attorneys and bankers like your faithful correspondent realized that an even
more profitable and efficient way of building high yield products with limited downside was investing in instruments that profit from failure of debt
and in instruments that rely on that debt and then hedging
that exposure with other CDS instruments in paired trades, and on and on up the chain. The problem with doing this was that everyone wound up exposed to everybody else's books as a result, and when one went tits up, everybody did. Hence, recession, Basel III, etc. Thanks, Obama.
Heavy investment in CDS can also have a warping effect on the price of debt (something else that happened during the pre-financial crisis years and is starting to happen again now). This happens in three different ways. (1) Investors who previously were long on the debt hedge their position by
selling CDS protection on the underlying, putting downward pressure on the debt price. (2) Investors who previously shorted the debt switch to
buying CDS protection because the relatively illiquid debt (partic. when its a bond) trades at a discount below par compared to the CDS. The resulting reduction in short selling puts upward pressure on the bond price. (3) The delta in price and actual value of the debt tempts some investors to become NBTs (neg basis traders) who long the debt and purchase CDS protection. If traders can't take leverage, nothing happens to the price of the debt. If basis traders
can take leverage (which is nearly always the case because they're holding a hedged position), they can push up or depress the debt price, goosing swap premiums etc. Anyway. Enough technical details.
I could keep going. This is a fascinating topic that is very poorly understood and explained, mainly because the people that caused it all still work on the street and use the same tactics today (it's also
terribly taught at business schools because none of the teachers were actually around to see how this played out live). But it relates to the topic of today's lesson, so I thought I'd include it here.
Work depending, I'll be back next week with a covenant breakdown. Most upvoted ticker gets the post.
*
EDIT 1\* In a total blowout, $PLAY won. So it's D&B time next week. Post will drop Monday at market open.
Howdy folks, I've been lurking for a few days. So far this seems like a great forum. A little about me and trading in my late teens me and my father tried to trade commodities with no success. I gave up on that, in the early 2000's I tried to trade forex, but made every mistake in the book, over leveraging, over trading, seeking the holy grail. A lot of my problem us that I really want to work from home, I'm not materialistic and I don't need to be "rich". In 2012 me and my family took a huge financial blow and by 2015 we were in a homeless shelter. I got us out in 2016. At one point I was supporting 8 people make 15 bucks an hour. Rent ate half my pay. Anyhow, fast forward to know. The family is doing much better financially and I have decided to learn a new trade, namely medical billing and coding, that way I can provide for my family from home. After I made that decision it freed up a LOT of mental space in my head. I don't need to risk more than one or two % on any trade, I don't need to stress about when I'll be profitable, I won't have to worry that I can't pay rent. So, I'm starting over the way I should have started 20 years ago. I'm getting Forex tester, and going to start back testing a strategy. Namely the buy sell line strat that 60minuteman posted over on Forex Factory. I know what I want to do, I want to swing trade on the 1 and 4 hour charts. I'm going to take screen shots of my winners and losers and try to build up a library of trades to review. If I can find a method that nets me a positive expectancy I will graduate to micro lots, if I'm profitable I will slowly raise my position sizes, never exceeding 2% of my account. Any and all advice is welcome, especially any advice about swing trading or psychology. Thanks for reading. Royce.
submitted by I've been contemplating which lifestyle I should direct my efforts to achieve. Technically, I have 1 year left before I'm no longer a teen, and feel like I have these 3 future timelines laid ahead of me. Please advise me solely considering the lifestyle to be pursued and not the feasibility of it.
Average - I wouldn't mind just working part-time jobs at like 7/11, just enough to get myself through everyday. A life where my level of contention is low enough for me to remain thrifty and still make some savings (am not really a materialistic person). A bachelor for life. And basically impacting no one's life.
Millionaire - work enough through trading forex, stocks and the like coupled with some online businesses, to gain financial freedom and simply carry on with my hobbies and have a family simply to have the means to enjoy life fully. Impact a small amount of people.
Billionaire - an extension of the millionaire's life, but to use the income gaimed as a capital to start a tech company, or agricultural etc. Probably staying single in the long term. But, i get to impact millions of lives deeply. Quite possibly for the better.
Yes, I am attributing wealth claimed to lives impacted. To me, that is the significance of accumulation of money. But I remain unsure as to which path to venture on. Please share your insights fellow netizens.
P. S. am new here
Edit: spelling
submitted by Honestly I think the problem they are having (no offense) is one that many others are as well; that is a bunch of moon kiddies saw BTC reach its ATH and the hype surrounding it circa Q4 2017 and thought to themselves that this is a "get rich quick scheme" and that it's "not so hard" and they'd make a killing only to realize its not half as easy as it looks...
As a seasoned swing-trader who's been doing this full time since q3 2015; i can tell you that your chance to win the lottery passed in 2009, and thanks to the newbies I like to call "Mainstream FUDDERS", my chance to gain returns over 1,000% are LONG gone... IMHO 2016-2017 was the gold rush/golden age of crypto and we will never EVER see returns like that in the fiscal calender for the market EVER again.
last few years crypto market has been comparable to the band Nirvana circa 1989; they were touring worldwide but only had Bleach (which was a great album but still underground and they were still living off ramen & red bull (or in Kurt's case; amphetamines & heroin) while sleeping in their tour bus.
the shows were awesome. the ambience was great. the crowds were filled with die-hard underground punk rock fans and we weren't "normal" or "mainstream" but we loved it and embraced it. then smells like teen spirit and nevermind was released in 1991 and I would have to say Q4 2017 is sort of Bitcoin's "Nevermind" in the sense that it was never the same again and never will be the same again.... everybody is into it, everybody thinks they know it, yet 90% of them are pretentious & insecure losers who are trying to act like the wolf of wall st. cause they got lucky and got a decent return on one trade from mommy & daddy's allowance.
it makes me cringe when people who didn't even know the difference between a coin or a token or that blockchain and btc are not mutually exclusive try to lecture me about crypto or post their bullshit "TA" confusing everyone as well as constantly FUD/FOMOing and thus making conducting TA for the real traders who know what they're doing much more difficult to make accurate projections.
regardless, while the golden age has passed; crypto is still growing (just passed visa in processed transactions of 3 trillion this week) with no signs of slowing down despite the fact that we've been bearish for pretty much 3 quarters straight now (all of 2018 basically) yet i've still managed to net returns & earn profit in a game where the house always wins (atleast now)
i'm no whale by any means. i'm not a lambo moon kiddie either (not to be confused with a whale) as lambo kiddies are just idiots who stumbled upon BTC circa 2009 and happened to get lucky and hodl for 5 years then goes around touting youtube vids of their "btc lambo" and their "btc mansion" acting like they know anything about brokering whatsoever. I have however, made a modest living off forex trading crypto & have been blessed to be able to buy a house & car and feed my family. Do not mistaken me for a lambo moon kiddie; I got involved much too late for that... so unlike those bastards I had to earn every penny I got swing-trading using strategies & formulas I had known and learned from stocks and just ran with it from there to develop my own formula.
this is my biggest concern; the bubble may or may not burst is the argument we had back in the day (2-3 years ago; which is "back in the day" considering crypto market moves like dog years) and now i'm not worried at all that btc will collapse because it's become mainstream. however i am worried that the FUDDERS (no offense again) like yourself will end destroying the community like Nirvana in 1994 when Kurt blew his brains out.
with that being said; there's nothing wrong with wanting to get involved in crypto or being new to crypto; just be modest, humble, don't post TA & HODL don't bother trading cause you don't know what you're doing and don't EVER try to lecture or disparage a seasoned broker if he's giving you advise/TA, you should be appreciative of it and be willing to learn not thinking you know more than him or trying to outwit him.
we see this all the time on cryptotwitter, the FUDDERS that joined up post Q4 '17 who have a massive following posting "TA" that gets tens of thousands of views due to their massive following (that they only have because they're earned it in some other capacity, whether blogging on youtube or w.e) and the man with 400 followers gets 20 likes on TA that's 100% accurate. hidden gems I like to call them. those are the people you want to follow. not the ones who have a shitload of followers, but the ones who are accurate. it's hard to find them; but the needle in the haystack is made of gold so it's worth looking for.
on that note; best of luck to you, and sorry if I offended anyone, but the truth hurts.
Peace & Love
- A random guy.
submitted by AskReddit How can I stop obsessing over success ?
u/tgpop Hey guys, long story short, i'm a 23 year old male, and have had a whole host of anxiety issues (OCD, general anxiety, some mild depression thrown in there too for good measure).
I've been to therapy, am on meds (beta blockers to treat the physical symptoms of anxiety; some prozac to control the cognitive side of things) and yet, most of the time, I have a chronic state of tension and stress, and I believe it's due to early teen experiences.
I'll not go into too much detail, because If I do people will only pick apart what I'm saying. Basically when I was 14 I got very,very unhealthily addicted to stock trading/forex trading. Spent thousands of hours refining a method, and at one point when I was 18 was offered some money to trade. I turned that opportunity down because I felt way out of my depth and was burned out from forex and stock trading (for anyone involved in the markets, i'm sure you get what I mean, even as a swing trader it is impossible to fully switch off).
I guess ever since I give that opportunity up, I have always hated myself and the sense of regret is overwhelming. Every time I try and dabble back into the markets, I end up doing ok and all of a sudden (like now) , I just get absorbed totally by it again, and it's constantly on my mind.
So what have I done, aside from trading in the meantime? After I quit trading at 18,I actually had to take a year off before heading to university to build some confidence in myself.
Of course, I don't deny that brain chemistry plays a role here as well. Starting that year out at 18 I was suicidal and seriously burned out. I had stress-induced hair loss, insomnia etc. I was diagnosed with OCD and general anxiety at the time. No matter what self help book or therapist I went to said, I couldn't shake the anxiety or stress. What amazed me was that during that year out, I actually took a job in a busy subway store. And I freakin' loved it. worked 100+ hour weeks for months on end, became the stores youngest manager, learned the ins and outs of the fast food business. Didn't even care that it was minimum wage, it was just so satisfying to be an ace at something, no matter how 'petty' a subway store may seem.
I then went to university, focused on getting good grades, and told myself not to look at trading ever again. I came out with the top marks in my university year three years in a row, and landed a training contract with a big 4 accounting firm after not screwing up on a summer internship.
That's basically where I am now. I'm really enjoying accounting. But , still ongoing, is this pressure to succeed at business, trading,investing or something along those lines. I just can't shake this off, and whilst I know I do enjoy accounting, I really can't help lose this sense of self hatred and materialism.
I'm certain that my brain chemistry plays a massive role. And logically speaking, I would objectively say someone with my personality is probably suited to a stable, rewarding career with constant stimulation and challenging tasks. Despite that, it's just something I can't switch off, I literally cannot stop thinking about markets, trading, stocks, investing. Worse still, any time I do 'get back in' to it, I am completely in the zone, infatuated with the whole experience of trading.
I am just really confused to be honest. My OCD makes it very difficult to make decisions or come to conclusion on issues like this. On one hand, I can't keep myself in check or obsessing about markets when I do dabble in them. On the other hand, no matter how rewarding some other pursuit it, I am always trying to 'fill a hole' in one area or another. Heading into accounting? cool, let's make partner in 15 years. At the gym? Right, lets get super ripped and start a successful fitness business. Like working at subway? save up all your money and start a franchise-business.
I would really appreciate any help here. I just feel like a sack of shit if i'm not achieving something 'great'. I can literally not relax. If i'm not doing something productive I am stressed and down. I do not want to end up twice divorced and a depressed alcoholic at 40.
submitted by Follow up from previous post
https://www.reddit.com/Forex/comments/5r0585/the_poster_boy_for_failure_sharing_a_motivational/?utm_content=comments&utm_medium=user&utm_source=reddit&utm_name=frontpage POST from Dopey on ForexFactory: Quoting Leonlorenzo I gather your In your 40's Dopey. Do you think you would have been able to work it all out when you were In your early 20's? Im considering that I need to grow up a little more, take some time out, put alot more effort In to conventional avenues to further myself.
That's a really tough question to answer. I'm 51 now and when I was in my 20's I would never even have considered doing this.
In your 20's you have more energy and time, yet less maturity and humility. Also, most people don't really know what they want when they're in their 20's, which is not a bad thing at all. It's important to have a wide variety of interests, how else can you know what you want until you've looked at many things?
Intellectually, trading is not very difficult, it just isn't. However, the proper application is extremely hard and anyone interested in it should know all the reasons why. I can tell you that the key for me was developing myself as a person. It almost sounds cliche but it's true (all cliches are based on a truth). I spend more time every day working on myself than I do in trading, yet my trading is better now than ever. I didn't believe it when I first read about it, as most don't. But there are many who try trading and don't succeed and it's not because they can't pass a test on support and resistance line drawing, or how to calculate a 2.75% position size on a $10,000 account. Plain and simple, they lose because they fuck up mentally.
Let me give you some advice on other people. I was 26 when I hitchhiked through Europe for the first time, from London down to the Greek Islands in back in one summer. It was an amazing time for me and I vowed to myself to spend the rest of my life seeing the world.
Everyone in my life, except my mother, told me to get serious and settle down, get a steady job, have a family and be average just like them. This includes two ex-wives. Some how I knew when I was still in my teens that you can't depend on others to map out your life for you and that what they pass off to you as advice that is supposedly in your best interest is the farthest thing from the truth.
As I've stated before, I've met plenty of people who have believed they knew better than me what I should or should not do with my life. As a rule, most are average people who live average lives. They are all still living average lives (which in itself is just fine because it's like street sweepers, if there isn't people who voluntarily do stuff like that, then I might end up being forced to do it, so I do appreciate average people and the role they play in the world).
Now it's 25 years later and I've spent the past 20 years travelling the world. I've been to just about every great and majestic place you've ever seen on tv or in a book. I've done so many things that most people think about their whole life and keep on saying, "I'll do that when I'm retired." I spend my summers (you gotta love teaching in universities...which I specifically chose to do because of the time off...you try going through grad school with that in mind...it's easy) in 3 or more countries. I've spent 13 months in the last 10 years hanging out in Thailand simply because I love the place.
I go home on occasion and I see everyone living their average lives and they don't really want to talk about what I do, where I've been, what I've seen and done to any degree. Mainly because it reminds them that a. they were wrong about me and b. that they're living terminally average, boring lives. So I don't go home much anymore. Meanwhile, I work with over 150 westerners who are just like me in that they chose to not be average and stay put because others told them that it's the best thing for them. So I've got plenty of company, including my third wife who loves our life. And what really burns all their asses is that my wife and I both teach here and our combined salary with all benefits is over 120k per year...and we work 8 months per year.
Sorry for the long reply, but the best advice I can give anyone in their 20's is to follow any dream you have. Understand why people give you the advice they do, it's mainly to serve their interests, not yours. My mother was the only person who truly wanted me to have what I wanted. She supported me 100% in everything I did, no matter what it was. I was lucky to have had her support and her love. After 18 years, I still miss her terribly. Surround yourself with others that are also following their dreams. Don't let anyone tell you what your limitations are or should be. Don't let anyone define you in any shape or form. It doesn't matter what you do with your life, as long as it's what you want to do.
It's your life, live it accordingly.
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