This book is about meditation. Not the clear your mind, think zero thoughts kind of meditation. But a sit alone quietly with your thoughts style that the author call Ziva meditation.

Most of the book is explaining the range of benefits you could get from a regular meditation practice. The primary benefit being the one mentioned in the title, you become more productive with less mental stress.

I am not going to list out everything the author claims could be improved. But the list is rather long. The most interesting claim to me was that meditation improves the communication between the two halves of the brain. This would unlock creativity and some more clever problem solving. I need more of that in my life.

Another portion of the book is spent explaining why most people give up on meditation. They believe it is trying to completely empty your mind of thoughts. Most people get frustrated by their inability to empty their minds and give up, feeling like failures.

The author takes the position that the mind thinks automatically, like the heart pumps. The style of meditation she proposes is about letting your mind go to all the thoughts that are cluttering it up so that you can process them and clear them out. Most of us are walking around with unprocessed past trauma or stress that is affecting us in a variety of ways.

The basics of the meditation are this:

• Do some sort of routine to get you into the present moment. The author has a sensory exercise for this.
• Sit quietly with your eyes closed just letting your mind think, but occasionally bringing it back to a focus with a mantra word. This is done for 15 minutes.
• End your meditation with gratitude and a positive vision of the future.
• Repeat this whole thing twice a day

I picked up this book back in 2019 and liked the the meditation practice so much it has become a daily habit.

One of the warnings given in the book is that you might feel some strong emotions. Some people may even feel like quitting their job or crying at the very least. These responses are from confronting the past emotions that haven’t been dealt with. The author asks you to promise not to end any relationships or quit any jobs for the first two weeks.

While I did not have this strong of a response, I definitely had some old memories dredge up that were emotional in nature and that surprised me a bit. My personal recommendation is to add some journaling after your meditation, especially early on, to help process whatever emotions you dig up from your past.

Needless to say, your mileage with a meditation practice may vary. However if you do not already have a practice that works for you, try this one. Everyone could use a little clearer mind for decision making and less stress for living a kinder life.

Keep getting wiser, stronger, and better.

You can find more about the author, Emily Fletcher, at her website Ziva Meditation.

First a few caveats. It seems industry standard to say that I am not a financial advisor and this is not financial advice. I am not recommending you buy or sell any stock. This is for information and education purposes only. There, that is out of the way. We can begin.

Up until last year I really did not care much about what was happening in the stock market. I had some vague ideas and theories about proper long term investing strategies from various books I had read. I did a little research for retirement investment, but the day to day ups and downs of the prices of publicly traded companies did not get my attention.

About three years ago my interest was sparked a little in day trading after watching an interview Tom Bilyeu did with Tim Sykes. Tim had a lot of energy and apparent conviction about what he was teaching and doing. After some investigation, it required too much up front capital and more risk than I was comfortable with at the time.

Then the perfect storm happened.

At the end of 2019 a bunch of brokers started moving to a low or no commission stock trading. This allowed small trades to test theories and learn without getting killed on commission. When I had looked a couple years prior the cheapest trades where something like $5 per trade.

Then the pandemic hit the market, sending tons of stocks tumbling as people panic sold. This looked like a perfect opportunity to pick up some solid companies at a discount and ride the rebound.

Third, I received a small bonus that gave me a little extra money I was ok risking to learn trading with.

Before making my first trade, I did several weeks of education. There are tons of free resources available between blogs, streamers and youtube videos. Granted they all need to be evaluated cautiously as some of the “gurus” out there are just trying to get a group of followers to pump up stocks.

A couple years prior I had bought and read The Complete Penny Stock Course which is basically one of Tim Sykes student’s notes on his high dollar training courses. It is probably the best budget guide to some basic trading strategies. I read it again.

Until you do something, you don’t really know what it’s like. If you are thinking about getting into trading at all, you should definitely educate yourself about the major pitfalls and some basic strategy. But there is no substitute for actually making some trades.

You should not trade with any money you are not willing to lose. Day trading is very risky and their are tons of professionals out there with big money who are ready to take money away from new traders stepping into the ring.

The market is like a wild animal. Like any wild animal, when you hop on its back it will do its best to throw you off.

Needless to say my first few trades where absolute embarrassments. I bought high and sold low. Thankfully I took miniscule positions risking only $2-4 per trade. But even small amounts of money like this can make you feel emotional about the stock turning against you.

Part of the reason to do these first few trades is to make you aware of the emotional rollercoaster that trading can put you on. Anger, elation, hope, despair, the full gamut of emotion may hit you. Regardless, your emotions will affect your trading. Greed is the big killer. It will make you get in too big and stick around too long in a loser.

Before every trade you should make a plan. You should answer some basic questions. How much money are you risking? Why is the stock moving? Where will you take profits? What is your edge?

If you don’t have an edge, you probably shouldn’t be in the trade. Very few traders are right much more than half the time, which means your winners need to be bigger than your losers.

Trading is an Infinite Game. The point is to be able to play for as long as possible. In order to play for as long as possible you have to protect your capital using risk management. There are several risk management strategies to help you figure out how much you should risk. A popular one is the Kelly Criterion.

In this way trading is like Poker or any other gambling game where people can make a living over time using an edge and good risk management.

I took half of the money I had for trading and bought a handful of companies whose stock had been beaten down and that had been around a while and where likely to recover. I got lucky and picked up most of them near their lows in March. My goal was to see if I could take the other half of the money and out perform the recovery of the other stocks.

This is the point as I write that I realize this is going to be a very long post. Not only because it is describing an entire year, but also because trading is just super complicated.

So I need to pause and talk about the 2 basic kinds of accounts you can have. The default account is a Margin account. This account lets you buy and sell stocks to your hearts content with your buying power. Except you can only make 3 round trip trades (a buy and a sell on the same ticker counts as a round trip) every 5 days if you have less than $25K in your account. This is known as the Pattern Day Trader rule, or PDT for short. When you are trying to just test a bunch of small trades to learn patterns and strategy, this can be very limiting.

The kind of account I went with is a Cash account. With a Cash account, as soon as you buy a stock that buying power is tied up until the purchase “clears” which takes a day or so. So if you bought $100 worth of Ford on Monday and then sold it immediately for no gain or loss, that $100 would not be available to your account again until Wednesday typically (barring any holiday interruptions).

One of the other limitations of a Cash account is you cannot short sell. You can only bet on stocks to go up, not down. But you have the ability to make as many day trades as your buying power will allow. So I chose to set my account to Cash to give me more small trades for learning.

Some people spread their money across multiple brokers in order to get access to margin trading and short selling but still have more than 3 trades per 5 days.

When you are starting out building any new skill, finding a mentor or at least someone who is just ahead of you to learn from can be very helpful. There are absolutely oodles of communities to join with hot picks and stock bros posting in chat. There are also some expensive paid learning programs.

I found a small streamer on Twitch name TradingForKeeps. He was on most mornings and seemed to be trying to trade a similar strategy as me, so I stuck around and chatted back and forth with him. Definitely recommend checking out his stream, blog, and podcast.

I also would catch the Pre Market Prep around 8:30 Eastern with Tim Bohen on Youtube to get some news and ideas.

One of the best friends of any day trader is a stock scanner. A good scanner will let you create a list that filters out most of the stocks you would not have any interest in. For me, I was looking for low priced stocks with a lot of volume. Then I would manually filter that list down based on things the scanner wasn’t able to look for.

I had lots of ups and downs. It was a hot market in 2020 and people who knew what they were doing were cashing in. But I was just learning and making all the beginner mistakes. I cut winners early and let losers run. But because of good risk management, at the end of December I was only down about $50 total.

Then, just after the first of the year, I found a trade with a really good edge. I saw a passing comment from someone I was following on Twitter about a stock that I had seen on my scanner many times. This stock moved around a lot but just never really seemed to be going anywhere.

This leads me to mention another important tool for traders, SEC filings. These are public documents that companies traded on the listed exchanges (NASDAQ, NYSE, etc) have to file for press releases, stock offerings, and other events affecting the stock holders. This is a whole topic in itself and I recommend learning a good bit about it as part of your trading education.

This particular company had a filing that it needed to get its stock price up to $1.00 by a certain date in order to stay listed on the NASDAQ. When I saw this and checked the company’s current price, it was around $0.30. Now I have a clean risk to reward, and I have an edge.

I took about 1/3 of my buying power and tied it up in the stock. Because of my information edge I was able to ride out a bunch of choppy ups and downs and nearly 3x my money on the trade.

There was the risk that the company never got its price up and got delisted down to the OTC exchange or even went out of business. But it was calculated and I was prepared to lose a portion of the money I had on the trade as part of the risk.

It wasn’t long after this that the Gamestop and Robinhood fiasco happened. A simplified summary is that a group of traders who frequent a subreddit called wallstreetbets figured out that Gamestop (GME) and a few other stocks were being heavily shorted. So they conspired together to buy up the supply and squeeze the shorts out by pushing the price up.

This happens all the time in the markets, usually done by the rich guys, but I am not sure it has ever happened before like it did to the GME shorts. The price exploded and so did a hedge funds accounts. The Robinhood trading app that let people trade simply from their phones plus some stimulus checks from the government helped make this possible. This got everyone talking about the markets.

Some sketchy stuff happened with lots of brokers stopping people from buying the “meme stocks” to apparently try to let the hedge funds that were short get out without taking too catastrophic of a loss. One more thing to be wary about when trading. If its free, like any other service out there, you are probably the product.

I was busy working on moving during this time and missed the madness. However even at the time of this writing the meme stocks are making another run.

That is another lesson about the stock market that I learned. Stocks that have run once, are more likely to have another run in the future.

There is probably more to write and tell but that is as good a dump I can get out right now on a sleep deprived brain.

In summary, I made a ton of small low risk trades to learn the basics and get some grips on my emotions. Using good risk management I was able to protect my account while I learned. From all the learning and practice I was able to find a few trades with an edge so that I have currently made money for 3 out of the last 4 months. I hope to be able to continue and scale this skill eventually to gain some financial freedom.

If you want to learn more about trading, I would recommend that book I listed above as a good place to start. Tim Sykes also has a free sort of autobiography of how he got started called “An American Hedge Fund” that you can get from his website.

Until next time, keep getting wiser, stronger, and better.