Adrian Reid narrates his path from starting trading about 20 years ago through several years of losses, an intensive self-study period (including three months unpaid off work) that produced his first profitable systematic trading system, a transition to full-time trading (by 2012 he was earning more trading 20–30 minutes/day than his prior corporate job), and founding Enlightened Stock Trading to teach systematic traders and build a community.
Questions this video answers
About 20 years ('20 odd years')
Around three years of losses before implementing his first profitable trading system
Three months off work unpaid
Trading 20–30 minutes per day produced more income than his previous day job (by 2012)
He said he was making 'a few hundred thousand a year' and working 12–14 hours a day, six to seven days a week
Chapters
It probably starts way before enlightened stock trading. I started trading 20 odd years ago and it took me a long while to figure it out. Three years of a lot of work. I was working full time when I first started trading. I spent four hours a night kind of studying the markets, trying to figure out what trades I was going to place the next day. And after three years of losing money, I was sort of at the point of do I throw it all in and, and go buy a property instead, which made me nauseous. I hate property, I much prefer the markets. Or do I go all in and actually figure this out? And I decided to go all in. And over the next couple of months I read a few hundred books on trading and I spent even more time. I took three months off work, I just threw myself into this. I took the three months off work unpaid to understand what I was doing, develop some rules that worked and so on. So, so after that I was profitable. And you can tell that the moment that I got profitable was the moment I implemented my first trading system. And we're going to talk about trading systems later on today. But you can see in my equity curve my account was going down, down, down, down. And I implemented and all of a sudden started making money from there. Fast forward a whole bunch of years and in 2012 I made more money trading 20 or 30 minutes a day because that's all I do than I did in my day job. And I had a pretty good day job. I was making a few hundred thousand a year and working 12 to 14 hours a day, six to seven hour days a week and it was awful in my day job. But trading was just like, just following the process and you know, as I explained my process, which I'll do later, it was, it'll become clear why that is. And because I made so much money trading and work was so stressful, it became a pretty easy job decision to quit. So I left the corporate world focused on full time trading. Decided I'm going to be a full time trader. Took me about six months and I realized I was bored out of my brain and lonely because all my friends were at work, my wife was still at work and I had no one to talk to. I didn't know any traders. So it's me and a laptop and that's it. And I had all these people trying to like ask me how did you do it? How did you make like how do you make money trading? And can you show me? And so I started going into the city I lived in the suburbs, going into the city to meet people, just to talk about trading. And that was great. I gave me a little bit of social contact, but when someone was just wanting to chat about trading, it wasn't really enough. Like, they never did what I said they should do. I didn't have a structure. And pretty soon I realized what I wanted was people who did it like me, People who traded systematically, who took it seriously, who understood the concepts, who could test their rules and. And actually know that they were profitable. And in order to find those people, I decided I had to teach them. So I started enlighten stock trading, started teaching traders, and since then, basically, I've been trading constantly, obviously. But I spend a lot of my day teaching and sharing with students and helping others get to the point where they've got freedom to make choices in their life. And that's why I do enlightened stock trading, because I was bored and lonely, and I love talking about trading, and I didn't know any traders. Now I know a whole lot of traders.
