From Penny Stocks to Crypto: The Extraordinary Journey of Cheds

There were days and weeks during this pot stock mania where you just could not miss and everyone was a genius no matter what they played. One trade even ended up making me a quarter million dollars. The following year, I started trading cryptocurrencies for the first time. What I discovered was that technical analysis was incredibly effective and these charts were an instant hit with my followers on Twitter. However, not long after that, my life was thrown completely upside down when I was diagnosed with stage three lymphoma. My name is Cheds and this is my crypto story. It was pure insanity. Every time I hit that refresh button, my account went up another 10 or $20,000. Half of my stuff was up 50%, the other stuff was up 100%. Who knew trading was this easy? This was early 2014, right in the middle of the Marijuana Penny Stock Madness When I was growing up, I always wanted to become a stock trader. It seemed like a really cool idea to buy low and sell high. I figured this was a great way for me to buy my own private island. However, by the time I got to college, I was headed down a different path. Rather than studying finance or business, I did something that fit my personality a lot better and I studied psychology. After college, it was time to get some real world experience. My personality made me a really good fit for the sales and marketing industry. Those years that followed taught me a lot about operations, marketing, sales and management. Eventually, I worked my way all the way up to the top. Even with my passion and skill in the sales industry, I still kept my eye on stocks, hoping to eventually figure out how to trade. In the middle of my sales career, I bought my first stock trading book. The COVID was awesome. Big green dollar signs everywhere, arrows pointing up and I was immediately hooked. When I started reading it though, it was really confusing. I had no idea what any of it meant. There would be no shortcut to becoming a professional stock trader. Trading continued to be my favorite hobby until I discovered poker. The action, complexity and human elements of the game were really compelling to me. I dove in headfirst and practiced every day. Reading the poker book was pretty easy for me and it came naturally. As the stress of my day job kept eating away at me, I leaned more on my hobbies. At some point, one of my friends introduced me to penny stocks and I was hooked. This was right about the time that the US Began legalizing marijuana. There were days and weeks where you just could not miss and everybody was a genius, you know. Back then, one of my biggest winners even ran up to a quarter million dollars. However, by the summer of that year, action really started to slow down. That's when I started getting serious about Japanese Candlestick theory. I found it compelling that the psychology of the market could be represented in something like a candle, body and wick. Even though I was on the path to getting good at technical analysis, I still did most of my trading based on things outside of the chart. The news, these narratives were everything to me. I fully believed that I was on the forefront of a pot stock revolution and that pretty much guided all my actions at that time. The big thing I didn't realize was that these news stories were generated by the debt holders of the penny stock companies. These quote unquote toxic lenders needed an excited retail environment to sell their shares. It turned out that I was a sucker in a well orchestrated hustle. Unfortunately, I didn't learn that lesson before. My trading account pretty much got blown up. As the prices went down, I kept adding to my trades instead of getting out like I was supposed to do. Worst of all, I just sat by as one of my largest holdings got delisted. Completely gone. I was desperate to quit my day job and these setbacks just didn't help. After a little bit of time, I started to come to terms with what had happened and a fire was lit inside of me. I vowed to never put myself in a position where I was that helpless ever again. To survive, I would become a well rounded trader. The skills that I learned from psychology and playing poker just weren't enough. I was going to have to get really good at technical analysis. Every time I learned a new trading skill, I would share that wisdom with my followers online. You know, they say to master any subject, you must be able to teach it to other people. Through hard work, I gained the reputation of a chart master and a newbie helper. And to make my job as an educator easier, I launched a blog and I put all sorts of information about trading and educational stuff on there. Now when my followers asked me questions, I could just refer them to the blog and that saved me a lot of time. Even though I was getting better as a teacher, as an educator, the market got the best of me. I took another massive loss after buying the news one too many times. Not only did I lose my money, but I had no more confidence. I had to step away one more time from trading. After a few months away though, I was able to clear my head and decide that I was ready to give it another shot. The biggest lesson I learned from that experience was not to trade on things outside of the chart I was going to trade just based on the price action. So in order to sharpen my focus, I decided to lean into technical analysis even further. And I studied Steve Nissen's Japanese candlestick charting techniques book. I read that whole book about as quick as I had ever read anything before. And as soon as I made this adjustment in strategy, the results improved. After many really difficult years of trying to learn how to trade, I was finally able to quit my day job and I was finally living out my childhood dream of becoming a full time trader. The year after that, that's when I discovered crypto. My first encounter was with my friend and he showed me his phone and when I looked at it, I saw ethereum and bitcoin and litecoin. And I thought, why does he have precious metals on his phone? My brain didn't know how to make sense of what I was looking at. I really wanted to know could I use technical analysis and something like bitcoin, litecoin, Ethereum? So to figure that out, I just started watching them and studying the price action and sending out charts to my audience on Twitter. And what I learned was that technical analysis really worked. It was incredibly effective. And the charts that I sent out were an instant hit. My followers, my audience, was so much more enthusiastic than I had ever anticipated. As a result, my social media account became crypto focused and began to grow rapidly. Not long after that, my life was thrown completely upside down and I was diagnosed with with cancer. Stage 3 lymphoma. In order to avoid thinking about my cancer all the time, I just leaned completely into crypto and my new identity as a cryptocurrency trader. Instead of focusing on the fact that I was sick and vulnerable, I wanted to focus on being a top notch technical analyst. A few weeks after that treatment began, I. I became sick with some type of a flu like virus. Since my immune system was really weak from the chemotherapy treatment, I had to be admitted to the hospital. I was emotionally desperate and pretty much at rock bottom. So in order to take my mind off that situation, I just had to focus on something and it was crypto. And I decided to write a beginner's guide to cryptocurrency trading for my learning blog. At this point, I had been receiving so many repeat questions that it just made sense for me to come up with that blog as a solution. With this new guide, anytime I had a question, I could easily point my followers in the right direction. This project really helped to keep me sane during a really terrible time in my life. The chemo and radiation treatments went well and I was firmly on the path to recovery and thankful to be alive. Later, I was invited to become a founding analyst at Bitcoin Live with a wonderful world class team. I committed to improving my technique even further. By taking that course and passing the test, I learned what I needed to know about professional technical analysis using that knowledge. The following year I published Trading Wisdom. That book was an unbelievable success, so stay tuned and thank you for listening to my crypto story.