About

My stock market trading journey started around 1998, a couple of years before the internet bubble. I bought William O’Neil’s book “How to Make Money in Stock Market” at that time and spent tons of hours studying it before live trading. The materials and Investor’s Business daily were extremely affirmative to lead me to believe that system was the only winning strategy for individual investors.

At the time of the rising Internet bubble, almost anyone chasing hot stocks can make quick money. IBD principles require fundamentally growing stock to form a base in price and purchasing after a valid breakout. So the performance of this strategy lacked other hot stock chasing strategies by wild margin. As a new market player, I gradually deviated from IBD rules and sought after the technical analysis methods. After the bubble popped, I lost so much money and had to close a couple of trading accounts.

My quest for stock trading continued afterwards. Around 2005, I took the training course provided by Investools. That was a couple of years later than the super trade Karen did. Since then, I have spent countless hours on option study and trading.  When I was a student of Investools (which later acquired TOS), we had various student groups. It's my observation that 95% of the students in the groups would disappear within 1 year. This is not meant to discourage anyone. The Investools program did help create graduates like Karen and a few other traders who make millions a year. Unfortunately, I am not one of them:-(  

I did get a lot of option trading knowledge which helped me writing my post and continuing my independent trading. Within Investools, I had the chance to understand various kinds of investment/trading strategies. Now I understand people should choose a suitable strategy based on their personality to have better chances of success.

At the moment, I have more money than I can handle in trading. So I put majority of them in mutual funds of different kinds for long term investment. I only trade a small portion of available fund for option income or intermediate term trades. I keep telling and reminding myself to be patient to last long enough to learn necessary skills and experiences before committing significant amount of money.  I need to prove to myself that I can generate major income at that time.

I had much better luck in my current profession. As a software manager at a high tech company, I'm comfortable to consider myself as a front line personal money manager who takes care of a small amount of investment only, at the moment. If my performance is good and consistent for a year, I would promote myself to a director, who gets to control more investment funds. If that is successful, I will promote myself to be a CEO who will control all of my investment funds. At that time, I hope I will become a full time individual investor/trader.

Overall, I’m a long time market student. I’d like to trade and invest for financial freedom, but still not there yet. So readers should consider my posts as the opinions from a fellow market student. I created this blog to track down my own investment and trading process and to share many of my studies of the market, after getting inspired by many other great trader blogs. I’d like to invite traders using similar strategies to provide feed-backs as well and welcome any comments related to the topics in the blog. Please feel free to email me at smoothprofitoptions AT hotmail DOT com.

[Update on Jan. 18, 2014]
Due to broad interests on the Super trader Karen's strategy, I created a Yahoo group: http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/supertraderkarenstudy/info. I encourage you to join this Super Trade Karen Study Group if you are interested in this strategy.

Disclaimer

This blog is intended for personal trade analysis only. It should not be used as trade recommendations. I am not a registered financial adviser, and cannot guarantee the correctness of the contents of the blog. By reading this blog, you automatically agree that I am not responsible for any of your trading losses as there is no explicit recommendation made for you to follow in the blog. You are trading at your own risk if you use any analysis posted here for live trades.