When did you start trading?

I started trading when I was about 5 years old. No I wasn't trading stocks or currency's, I started trading baseball, football and basketball cards and continued trading and collecting up until my late teenage years when I started to trade cars and motorcycles. In my early twenties I decided to start to save by buying gold and mutual funds (earliest market participation) then on to real estate(only 2 houses) and here I am in Forex. I still have the funds and gold (doing very, very well) sold my real estate, and I still have all of my cards tucked away in my mothers attic. The cars and motorcycles only produced fun times, not so much profit as in lost brain cells but thats what being a teenager is all about. My first big score even though I didn't know it at the time came when I traded some no name I can't remember for a Joe Montana Rookie card, also in my prized card collection are (rookie cards) Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Troy Aikman, Jose Canseco, Ozzie Smith, Roger Clemens to name a few.(I haven't seen them in years) But it was at this time that I first got to know trading. Looking at each card almost with a microscope I inspected each card checking to make sure it was in perfect condition, making sure the corners are still tight with no smears or any imperfections. Was it a Bowmans, topps or upper deck? who was the player and what are his stats and what did my trusty beckett guide say about this card. This mentality has carried over into my trading career as I only pick quality stocks under the right conditions, and with forex I only trade a few pairs in which I have familiarity and wait for the right setup to enter a trade. I also learned my first mistakes in trading baseball cards by being biased or "married" to a certain player or team. I once trading a Barry Bonds rookie for a Kirk Gibson, or a Cal Ripken Jr for a Mike Socia. I didn't know it at the time but the price difference between these cards are huge but as luck would have it I came across these cards again and still have them. But it taught me every thing I need to know to be a successful trader today. And if I ever get into a rut I just remember those times when I was so picky that I almost got beat up by an older boy because I didn't think his card was in good enough condition to trade for my Wade Boggs.
So when did you start trading?

4 years ago I was introduced to trading in a seminar selling 4xeasy's system. I got interested and started devouring books on investing (read, not trading) because I was on the mentality that TRADING is GAMBLING. You'd know what I mean if you've read investment gurus books.

Soon after I realized that if you wanted to invest and grow your money, you have to have sufficient capital first. And as a teenager, money was a scarce resource. So I read up on trading, spent thousands on books and hours at the library and here I am.

Oh yea and for the record, I blew 4 accounts before. =)

Never heard of the 4X until about 5 years ago......Have never traded a stock,option, or anything else...I am a one trick pony...although my style of trading would fit any market, I like the liquidity and profits in Forex. I spent 27 years as a Real Estate Agent which taught me alot of the qualities required to be a good trader....It also taught me qualities I needed to lose, Like having the feeling I was in control and could shape circumstances to my advantage in any situation...I have the blown out accounts to prove you can't....LOL

started trading a few days after i got married in august 2006.
Sometimes tv commercials can change your life :-)

What? No one else traded baseball cards when they were kids? Come on.

I collected them from the mid 60's to the early 70's..out grew them and GAVE them to a kid down the street.....WHO KNEW??????????

in video games... (i don't think it counts),,,, just kill and use whatever i got to upgrade the equipment, and then in the end of millennium, (2000 something) online game is booming and the game currency now has real money value....
no profit , just to cover few playing cost...
forex maybe the first thing i try to gain profit... compared to every body, i still try to understand the value of money.

Ok, here is another one:

after my mother fled what was then called Czechoslovakia in 1968 when the Russians invaded, I grew up with a relative in Germany.

I remember in the mid 70's me and the other kids from the road we lived in invented this game around Christmas/New Year which involved trading fire-crackers by betting on the distance in ski-jumping.

We even created rules at some point that players had 3 seconds from when the jumper left the ramp to shout out the distance in metres...the top guys flying further than 100m, the bad ones just above 80m. One could bet as many crackers of the same category as one wanted as long as they were put in the middle before the jumper touched the ground and the distance was announced (or shown in the bottom right hand corner of the telly).

I am not sure whether those games (I was about 5 or 6 when we played) decided my future career path, but after I finished my school education I started my first job as a trainee on the euro-deposit and bond desk of an investment house in 1987 and never left the market since.

regards
daytrading

Feel like a heel to the other kid but I did, once, advise my son on a killer deal for his "Magic Card" collection.
btw. he {my son} has now had a "Demo" trading account for > 2 years which he has handled extremely well & is still looking forward to his 20th birthday this Feb.
Trading will probably not be his style but has a definate "Supplementary" side to it from his perspective.

talk about having the ultimate mentor the Trading Dad

Hey Mike... ... DS wasn't {isn't} that bad either...

Any News From the Front as to how it's going for you?

Patience...
boring
Patience...
boring
Patience...
boring
Success..................................

We all started somewhere.

hehe he certainly wasn't

Patience and Boring, pretty much sounds like trading summed up


Take care B

Mike


Oh yeah I traded baseball cards as a kid, then sold em all on ebay(partly where my initial stake came from )

I did the magic (tragic?) card thing, and wound up selling my deck for $335. Not exactly a fat grub stake, but when you're 13, you tend to over look such things. My main thing growing up was trading yard work and chores around. I didn't mind mowing the lawn so much, so I would trade that for other things such as gutter duty mixed with a hose down of the house. My dad was a daytrader in the stock markets back in 1986, "the glory days". There he made so much money in a month that he went to the jag dealership and threw down his AmEx for a Jaguar XJS, and it was a done deal. Ever since then, I've wanted to know how a man can do something like that. Of course now I work a former AmEx company (Ameriprise), so I can see how such things are done. That being said, I definitely count my new experience as a blessing since it now shows me the path to a lasting wealth instead of "this method will make you $XXX in X amount of time". As for 4x specifically, my mom watched an infomercial late one night and then dragged me into it. Ever since then, I've been pouring over any sort of 4x material as much as I can. Appendix: I've blown up four accounts in the search for skills.

LOL......I passed it on as well. Started trading Sepember 2006, tied the knot Feb 2007, blew one account mid 2007. Going steady ever since with Patience and MM in place.

Was lured by ads in the local newspaper.