I won't go on too long about this, but I started trading before college. Took about ~$70k in inheritance money when my dad passed and threw it into a primitive signal following service. After 2 weeks I was up a good ~$10k. So naturally I quadrupled the leverage so I could be able to make my first billion that year. It followed that the strategy that I was following hit a significant drawdown period which when quadrupled left me with precisely $37k.
It was at that point that I realised that I was going to have to put the work in in order to make real returns. There was no fucking way that I could ever let another person be responsible for my future. I began following some eliott wave services and traded highly leveraged against their recommendations and turned what was left of my money into about one and a quarter million over the course of two months. Through a was a fucking god and never thought about putting any of that away because it would slow me down. I wanted a $4MM house and various sports cars and I needed all that NOW. Unfortunately, my confidence didn't last. I lost all but around $10k of it by the end of that summer due to my greed. I found myself with such little capital and had a $6k/month apartment lease to pay. Naturally, I took out as many credit cards as I could and lived off of them. Even paid rent on credit.
I ended up going to college to get my BA in civil engineering, something I had been set on since I was very young. All through college I learned to code MT4 indicators and spent a ton of time trying just about everything. I collaborated with a bunch of guys on a website called fores-tsd.com on their premium level forums we came up with some ingenius shit. Unfortunately none of it worked since it all failed to grasp the essence of how the market operates.
I spent 2 years getting further and further into various types of debt. It was one of the worst periods of my life. Having known that I had lost over $1MM due to greed and stupidity made me borderline suicidal.
Towards the end of college I began to realise what the market was all about. I didn't have all the answers, but I had enough to start multiplying my little bit of capital. I slowly but surely forced myself out of debt and began really pulling in money. I took a job as a civil engineer, but walked out after 6 weeks on the clock. It was stupid and premature. I still struggled. One thing I am really good at is that I can see patterns in the market. I have somewhat of an uncanny ability to reverse engineer these patterns. I came up with dozens of them over this period. I would spend a huge amount of time manually backtesting them observing returns in the range of 25-50%/week. And each and every time that I would move to live trade them in full size they would just inexplicably stop working. I still can't explain why to this day that I had such ridiculously bad luck. I now realise that markets aren't consistent. Something that works for many weeks or even months in a row might just stop working someday. I needed something better.
After a lot of soul searching it came to me. I needed a strategy that would provide a feedback loop in which if it stopped working I would know before seeing a massive drawdown. Needless to say I put my knowledge together and still trade in that manner to this day. But I still make modifications to this day. I even made a change to my strategy this very week.
So jumping forward almost 8 years from the start to the present. I trade for myself in MA under an LLC. I live fairly modestly for my income (spent less than 2% of my income last year on living expenses). I've been working over the past year to get the required certifications in order to take on investors and form a CTA hedge fund which I'll be launching by Q4 2015-Q1 2016. Unfortunately it will be at that point where I'll be leaving you guys to put more time into it.
So let me know if you guys have any questions whatsoever about any of this. Thanks.