Adrian, if you are so successful, why do you teach trading? Why don’t you just trade for a living? Because isn’t that what everyone wants to do? Do you know how many times I’ve been asked this question? Why do you teach? Teach trading? If you’re so good, you must be crap. You must be a scammer. Well, lemme tell you, there’s a really bloody good reason why I teach trading. In fact, there’s three good reasons. I’ve been trading now for well over 20 years, and for most of that time I’ve been profitable and systematic. It took me three years to discover systematic trading. And then since then I’ve been profitable and consistent. I’ve had ups and downs of course, and draw downs, but my account has always been growing. And in 2012, I got to the point where my trading account made more money than my day job.

And for me, that was always the goal. When my trading account makes more money than my day job, my capital is built sufficiently high. I can quit the corporate world and trade for a living trade full time. That was the goal, and that was amazing that year as well. I had the worst year in my job. It was ultra stressful, super long hours, six, seven days a week, 12, 14 hours a day. It was ridiculous. I think I probably aged five years in that one year because of the stress of my work. And so I was very ready to give it away and to trade for a living. So I did. In September of that year, I resigned. I went home to trade and that was great. I had finally achieved that dream and I started trading. I didn’t start trading, continued trading. I had more time to research and look at new strategies and so on.

That was great for several months. But gradually I realised I was getting more and more lonely and more and more isolated. You see, I didn’t have any traders in my world, in my community. I had learned to trade by reading books like you see back there. And I did a few courses and so on, but I didn’t have any trading buddies. I didn’t have a community. There were a few people at work or my old job who kind of traded, but really they were more gamblers than traded. No one was systematic like I was. And after a few months, I really started to get lonely and bored. And then frankly, I got a bit depressed because I was so isolated. And I’m an introvert, but I do like to have someone to talk to and to bounce ideas off. And to be quite frank, I was driving my wife bonkers because she was off on her career doing her thing and I was being needy at home. And it was awful. It was a hard time. And so eventually I kind started reaching out to people and people were asking me, well, how did you get here? How did you make money? How did you get to the point where you could quit your job and trade for a living? And so I started meeting people and telling them about it and sharing and started doing a bit of coaching. But at that time, I was just doing it for me to have some social contact. And what I realised was that when people were asking Out of interest and they weren’t really investing in themselves to learn, they weren’t taking it seriously. And so I would get on the bus and go for an hour ride into the city to have a 30 minute coffee with someone to talk to ’em about trading, to show them how they could improve or how they could make it work for them. But then they didn’t show up. They had a last minute meeting or something like that. And for me, that was gutting. It was just a huge waste of time. It was frustrating because I really wanted to share what I had, what I knew, and people weren’t taking it seriously. And after several months of this and helping a few people here and there, but getting basically frustrated a lot of the time, I decided to take it seriously and to start actually teaching because I wanted a community of traders around me.

And I realised the only way I was going to get a solid community of profitable, consistent traders around me was if I taught them how to do it. And the only way I could teach traders on mass how to do it was to turn it into a business because people teaching people for free here and there just wasn’t going to cut it because people weren’t taking it seriously. So I launched Enlightened Stock Trading, and I built a course which explained step by step the way I had managed to grow my account, become successful, build systems and all of those things. Eventually that course turned into the trader success system, trader success system, which is what I teach today. And I started teaching and started growing my training community. And today I sit in meetings sharing with my mentoring students, and we have question answer time, and we have debates and discussion, and we share system ideas, and I present something and they give me input and they present something and I give them input.

And I think, man, if I’d only had this 20 years ago when I started, trading would’ve been so much easier to have that community around me that gave the support, that understood the challenges that could give guidance and the input and even just moral support when it was tough. That community is priceless. And I started teaching to build that community for myself and in the process to help a whole bunch of other people become successful as well. And so my mission now really is to transform people’s financial lives and do that through trading because it’s something that we can all do once we learn the right skills. Now, you can’t just go out there and start trading and hope to win, you won’t. It’s a tough game. But if you have the right skills and you learn how to do it and you get systems that are good and you build confidence in those systems, you can win in this game.

That’s what I share. And I really, really enjoy doing that because not only does it give me the community, it gives me the people to talk to about my trading, it gives a sense of contribution. It makes it meaningful because just sitting at home, trading my own money, making money for myself, it feels kind of selfish to be honest. So I much rather share that. And then of course there’s diversification like well, you always want to diversify, right? I mean, do you just want to have your job and your salary or do you want to have some trading income And wealth building and do you just want trading or do you want to have some property and do you just want trading and property or do you want to have some business?

So I actually like diversification. I want more streams of income and wealth generation rather than less. And teaching trading is a business, and that’s also another stream of diversification and wealth building for me as well. So there’s lots of reasons why I teach trading, and none of them has anything to do with what most people assume, which is, oh, you can’t trade, so therefore you teach. That’s bullshit. Most people who really trade well, like to share their knowledge. It was a bloody long, hard journey to get here. And people ask questions and people are interested and it’s actually, it’s very satisfying to be able to share insights that help along the way and can maybe shorten your journey.

Because one of the things I know, it took me three years to get profitable, three years to discover systematic trading. But here’s what I can do now, because I’ve been through that journey, I’ve helped lots of people. I can take someone who had no experience in the market and in three months get them systematic, get them consistent, show them how to protect their wealth risk management, and show them how to manage a portfolio of strategies and really start to grow their trading account in three months. If I could have done that in three months today, I would be many millions of dollars more wealthy because that extra time, that three years that I didn’t have to compound because I was still trying to figure it out and my account was losing money that is incredibly expensive, 10, 15, 20 years down the track. So shortening the learning curve is something I’m super, super passionate about.

So when I can take a trader and shorten their learning curve from years to months, I mean, that’s game changing and so satisfying. And I kind of did the math. I know I can make good money and build wealth and whatever for myself in trading, but how much more impact could I have on the world if I helped a thousand people or 10,000 people or 20,000 people learn to trade properly and they could all then achieve the same thing? I mean, to me, that’s kind of legacy that makes it worthwhile. I took the time to learn these skills, but if I just kept them here for me and just use them in my account, feels like a waste. And also, it doesn’t give me any diversification, doesn’t give me any community. There’s so many reasons to teach trading, and it’s not just about making money.

Yeah, it makes money. The business makes money. That’s important. The business has to make money to fulfil the mission. If I’m going to help 20,000 traders become profitable, that business has to be profitable, otherwise I’m going to go bankrupt to trying to fund all of that. So we made it into a profitable business and it’s great, but diversification, community support, shortening people’s learning curves, having more impact on the world, all really powerful reasons why I do what I do. And if you would like the sound of any of those things, if you want to shorten your learning curve and ultimately become much more successful, long-term, stick around. Stay with Enlightened Stock Trading and let us help you get there and hope to share the journey with you. My name’s Adrian Reid. This is Enlightened Stock Trading. See you in the next video. Bye for now.