Anybody can learn this. Professionals have a head start.
I did not come to trading from finance.
I came to it from a chiropractic practice — twenty years of it, diplomate status in both neurology and nutrition, north of 15,000 patients through the door. I also served as an enlisted and then as an officer in the Army Reserves. Nothing on that list looks like Wall Street.
That turned out to be an advantage.
And I know how to expand the professional advantage you and I share into trading profits.
In 2008 I sold the practice and started my first investing company, managing my own accounts. I have traded professionally ever since.
What I found is that running a practice and running a trading business are closer relatives than anyone told me. Both live or die on the same things: a repeatable process, honest numbers, and the discipline to follow your own rules on the days you don’t feel like it.
Why professionals have the advantage
If you have built a career in anything demanding — medicine, law, engineering, the trades, the service — you already own most of what trading asks for. You know how to study something properly. You know how to work a system when the system is boring. You have made hard calls without complete information, and lived with them.
That is the job. The charts are the easy part.
What almost nobody teaches professionals is the business end: how to structure it, what the IRS expects, which numbers to track, and how to keep a bad week from turning into a bad year. That gap is what I write about.
How I can help
- The blog — more than a hundred posts on structure, taxes, expenses, mindset, and the parts of the business that don’t show up in trading books.
- The book — The Business of Trading, 2nd Edition, the how-to manual for setting up your own trading company.
- The forms — the trackers, templates and routines I run my own business on. One is free; the rest come with the book.
Where this is going
I am working toward something more direct: training built specifically for professionals who want to run their money the way they run their practice. If that sounds like you, subscribe below and you will hear about it first.
If you are a professional staring at your accounts and thinking there has to be a better way to do this — there is, and you are closer to it than you think. Come read something. Ask me a question. Nobody here is going to talk down to you.
Steve