Adrian Reid left his corporate job in 2012 and started trading alone, but felt isolated. He began coaching students for free, then moved to paid courses once they had skin in the game. Enlightened Stock Trading grew into a community of systematic traders with real trading outcomes.
September 2012
The reason I started enlightened stock trading is because when I left my job in 2012, in September 2012, I walked out of the corporate world forever. And I got home and I continued my trading and I thought I'd made it and life was great. And then six months later, I was bored, lonely and depressed. And the reason was I didn't know any traders. I didn't have anyone to talk to. All my friends still had full time jobs. Most of my friends were investment bankers and strategy consultants who worked like 500 hours a day and I didn't see them very often. And I was at home with a laptop and didn't have anyone to interact with. And that's a real problem because you start to, you believe your own hubris and you, you make mistakes and you get complacent and the growth slows down and lots of problems happen. And I started EST because I wanted to work with traders, I wanted to be around traders. I wanted to have a group around me that did systematic trading like I did so that we could support each other and grow together. And that's basically where enlightened stock trading was born. Because I needed you people in my life. And I say that with all seriousness because it was dire. I was, I was not happy and I was struggling. And so I started teaching and I took a couple of students on pro bono, just kind of coaching here and there. And that didn't work very well because they didn't have skin in the game and they didn't really take it serious. So I started teaching for real as a course and coaching people in exchange for, with financial exchange. And then they took it seriously and I started getting outcomes and people started actually trading, they started making actual money. And we had real conversations and they challenged me and asked questions and I had to think about it. And all of a sudden my brain was stimulated and I felt like I had the right group. And it just gets better and better every year. It gets better because we get better at teaching, we get better at understanding our craft, we get more diversified, we get people from more countries, from more backgrounds, and it's just working really nicely. And so I'm just, I'm loving what we're doing, loving the community. It's just such a good community. Trading for its own sake is, that's great. I can make some money, it's all good. But I much rather help other people because there's so much more leverage in helping a group of dozens of people succeed and grow and learn. Much more leverage in that than just sitting by myself on the laptop, doing my own thing.
It.
