Adrian ReidFounder of Enlightened Stock Trading

The Transition From The Corporate Life into Full Time Trading

2 Apr 2025 · 0 min

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Adrian Reid describes his decision to leave a moderately senior corporate finance-strategy role at a large Australian company to trade full time. Key factors were family responsibilities (wife and kids), having sufficient trading capital built up over years, and an earnings comparison where his trading income that year exceeded his corporate salary. He was working intensely ("between five and seven days a week") and felt stressed; once trading matched or exceeded his job earnings and he had enough capital to withstand a bad year, he decided to make the transition.

Questions this video answers

Between five and seven days a week.

He had a wife and kids.

In the final year he earned more money from trading than from the corporate job, and he had accumulated enough capital to withstand a bad year.

I want to ask about this transition from the corporate life into full time trading. How did you decide when was the right moment? What were you looking for?
It might be an answer that some people don't want to hear because at the end of the day to trade full time, wife, kids, family. I wasn't a single guy who was 18 living on a shoestring. So in order for me to leave the corporate world and trade full time, I needed a lot of capital. It was a pretty moderately senior job in financ strategy and the big Australian corporate. But to earn that money, like I was working.
Between five and seven days a week and it was just mental. I was stressed out of my mind, my quality of life was bad, my health was holding up, but I couldn't have done it for much longer. At the end of the year I looked at my basically earnings from the job and I looked at my earnings from trading and I'd made more money trading than I'd made in the corporate gig. So at that point for me it was easy, well, okay, I'm making a similar amount of money, I've got enough capital now, let's go, let's give it a crack. But the key to enable it was I had the capital. And I had the capital because I had been trading consistently for years at that point. So what was I looking for? I was looking for I had enough capital to be able to make the leap and not worry if I had a bad year.