I earned some of my money from a few lucky trades.
In general, I’m not a day trader. The vast majority of all trades I’ve done are covered calls, which is just me making money off the stuff I’m already planning on holding for a while.
Nevertheless, it was incredibly tempting to think I could do this full-time.
Ironically, I could trade full time if I did the much more conservative covered call strategy.
But a couple big successes, especially the unexpected kind, can give you overinflated expectations.
Real Stuff > Trading
This past December, I was looking at my charts and securities, and just had a quiet, clear sense that I needed to pull my focus away from that and back into software development.
I wasn’t down 50% in a day or anything. In fact, the recent stock market dip came a few weeks later. But it was a signal to my spirit that I needed to actually be building something.
Side note: I need to do a whole post on listening to my gut. My gut told me to sell Bitcoin at 63—which I did—and to buy back when it dropped back down. I actually listened, which was a huge (good) lesson for me.
It reminds me of a16z’s clarion call It’s Time to Build. The best minds that come out of university each year are clamoring to join wealth institutions trying to save 1/64th of a second off a trading algorithm’s execution time to generate half a billion in wealth. Instead of scraping off pennies of value in a zero-sum trading market, what if we shifted (or realized) the incentives for creating new verticals altogether?
I can’t make anyone else want something, but I can realize that in a year’s time, I would rather have earned XX amount of wealth from creating a business than from a few more lucky trades.
“Wealth obtained from nothing dwindles, But one who gathers by labor increases it.”
In plain English—easy come, easy go.
Create wealth to keep wealth.
