I had a slightly different college experience: skipping classes in favor of trading penny stocks every day, I turned $12,415 in Bar Mitzvah gift money into $2 million and started a hedge fund during my senior year. I also created a scholarship for talented/passionate people open not only to current Tulane students, but also Tulane faculty and alumni…an economic bailout ahead of its time. My hedge
fund went on to become the #1 ranked short bias fund by Barclay for 3 years and I was named to Trader Monthly’s ‘Top 30 Under 30′ in 2006, but my trading strategy was never very scalable (meaning it’s much easier for me to make $10,000 than it is $10 million) and my fund lost 35% when I tried long-term investing instead of trading. Infinitely wiser but embarrassed and depressed, a TV producer asked me to make an appearance in his upcoming documentary “Wall Street Warriors”…I had lost my confidence and credibility so I said sure and ended up starring in 5 of the 6 episodes of the hit first season, which you can watch on Hulu, now having aired in 20+ countries and followed by 2 more seasons (Wall Street Warriors Season 3 was filmed but has not aired). The show’s popularity inspired hundreds of daily emails from fans wanting to know more about me and my trading strategy, but as a hedge fund manager, I was not allowed to answer any of them. So I said “screw you!” to the restricted hedge fund industry, wrote openly about my experiences in my best-selling autobiography “An American Hedge Fund” and started a publishing company to create brutally honest & educational financial newsletters and instructional DVD packages. I’ve been featured by every major business and financial media outlet, but I am infinitely prouder of having returned to my $12,415 Bar Mitzvah gift money roots, intent on repeating my feat of turning that into $2 million, this time detailing every step of the way on this website.
6,000 blog posts and 4+ years into this challenge, my Thinkorswim trading account has surged to $211,420, a gain of more than 1,500%, already providing you with a rough blueprint of how to turn $12k into $100k in 2 years and making me the #1 ranked trader out of 60,000+ traders on Covestor, a website which verifies trades and performance…and nearly 1/5 of the top traders are subscribers of my 4 newsletters and PennyStocking DVD students! I’ve also enjoyed my money, traveling to over 70 countries and meeting and chatting with many of the world’s most interesting and successful people like President Obama, Richard Branson, Donald Trump, Steve Cohen of SAC Capital, James Simons of Renaissance Technologies, Michael Steinhardt, George Soros, Mark Cuban, Tom Cruise, Nouriel Roubini, Wayne Gretzky, Ken Griffey Jr. Battling against those in finance who misinform and lie, I’ve made enemies with soulless penny stock promoters, certain CNBC commentators, penny stock promoters who pretend to be FOX News commentators and wholly imbecilic people like Trader Monthly editor-in-thief Randall Lane who used his press connections to publicly berate me and accuse me of losing $ due to the TV show (ignoring the advance copy of the book I sent him in which I explain what went wrong) (don’t worry, he eventually got what was coming to him). Even basketball star Shaquille O’Neal sent me a cease & desist letter after I blasted him for taking shares of a penny stock pump & dump (see my comprehensive reply to the big man’s legal threats…never heard back from him and the stock has dropped 99% as I predicted it would)
I now have 2,000+ students in over 60 countries and as you can read in this blog post, some of my trading challenge students are trained killers so I better do a good job teaching them! :)
The good news is that in less than 4 years as a teacher, subscribers of my 4 newsletters have now profited over $7 million as of May 2013.
