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Hey, this is Jason with TradingReviewers.com and today we have the pleasure of chatting with Nick, founder of BullTradeFinder, an online trading community that's hosted on Discord's chat servers. Hey, Nick, welcome.
How you doing, Jason?
I thought we'd get started by having you tell us a little bit about your background. What did you do before trading? And how did you originally become interested in the market?
So, I started trading five years ago and I got interested because of my neighbor, who actually is a financial advisor, he told me a little bit about the stock market and that's where it spiked my interest. So, I've been trading since then.
And can you tell us a little bit about your trading education, Nick. When you first started out were there any books or courses that helped you in the beginning? And was there anybody who inspired or mentored you along the way?
I usually focused on YouTube videos in the beginning. Definitely focused on my losses and winnings, went back and looked at why I lost. Things that turned wrong in that position. I looked at why I won in a position. I looked at the charts, the company even. Another thing that really helped me was one of my members in my room, when I first started, and we've been together for five years now and he's really helped me along the way. He's an older investor who's definitely shown me the way. Whether it be long term, whether it be short term and he's given me a lot of tips along the way that he's learned in his past.
Were there any books or courses that you studied to kind of get a handle on trading and to get you started?
I actually didn't use any books, but like I said, yeah, I've used some YouTube courses for charting and so on and so forth. Possibly screeners.
And a big part of your focus is options trading, right?
Correct. Options and pennies, fifty-fifty.
Has it always been that way or was there a point in time when you began to transition over from primarily stocks to more of a mixture?
Yeah, around two and half years ago I started transitioning to options where I definitely lost my hat. You know, I started to learn from those mistakes. I went into weekly contracts that didn't turn out well. I played too far to the money which definitely didn't turn out well and that's something I try to share with everyone now. I see a lot of these traders do that lately, especially the new traders. And I don't want them to go into the same mistakes I did.
It's all about buying three to four weeks out and near the money. So, you have time and you're not far out of the money. So, the position doesn't expire worthless.
Right. And trading of course is a lot of hard work. It takes a while to figure out. It's a fact that the majority who start down this path wash out. Was there a point early on in your career when you got extremely frustrated and started to really wonder if this trading thing was going to pan out?
Yeah, there's definitely points where I get to myself back on the horse. First of all, I definitely blew accounts and I started out losing. Luckily, I got into some good trades that definitely brought me some nice profits and I would still blow accounts from that level to lower levels and then keep rebuilding it and do the same thing. Keeping my head up was the biggest thing. And I definitely had times where I wanted to quit but it wasn't in me that I wanted to quit and I know I could get through this and learn from this, from these mistakes and push forward to become a better trader.
So, you would say that trading psychology played a big role in helping you to take that next step forward?
Definitely. Emotions is one of the biggest things in trading.
Was there anything in terms of mechanics that you noticed that perhaps tweaked or learned made a dramatic improvement and allowed you go to from a losing trader to a profitable trader?
Oh yeah, definitely putting mental stop losses, I don't like to use real stop loss orders, but mental stop losses, definitely the charts and reading charts better definitely helped with that. As well as profit taking at those levels. Learning charts definitely helped that.
And how long did it take for you to become consistently profitable?
I would say two to three years, and right now I'm on my fifth year.
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Do you recall the details of your biggest trade?
Yeah. My biggest trade was $UONE, which actually recently ran this past week or two. And I actually won on it, ran two to three years ago when it wasn't even this big, $2 to a $40 spike. I remember I was sitting in the parking lot right after work and I had around 12,000 to 15,000 shares at around, it was up maybe twenty, thirty cents that day and I got in and it shot right up to around definitely $2 to $3 more. And I was shaking because I'd never seen that much money before, especially in a trade, yeah.
That's awesome that you remember exactly where you were at, all the feelings, all the adrenaline. It never goes away.
Yeah. When you make a trade that big you got to remember something.
Leaves a mark on you. What about your worst trade? That also leaves a mark. Not as pleasant to talk about but obviously we learn a lot from our losses. What about your worst trade and what lessons did you learn from that loss?
Worst trade was probably three to four weeks when I actually recently moved into my new apartment. It was in a biotech stock that I was shorting. I was moving furniture into my apartment and I looked back and I was down like $10,000 to $11,000. It went up like $3 to $4, I think that day it was up 400%. So, that was definitely one of my worst trades.
Lesson from that is, don't ever look away.
For sure. How many hours a day do you work on average and what is your typical day look like?
Yeah. So, I work around three or four hours on average. I wake up in the morning, I check Market Chameleon, which is actually a new service that I subscribe to and I live by that thing. Especially for pre-market and after market. I don't check it throughout the day. But pre-market and after market I definitely made a lot of money from just this service helping me for sure.
And looking for possible penny stocks that are running at that time, and what news. Throughout the day I'll be in chat alerting ideas, sending out charts, possible ideas to look at. As well as after market being doing the same thing for news. So, it's around three to four hours a day, depending on the day as well. So, if the market isn't doing well and I'm not in anything, I won't really check it that much. I'll try to stay cash, focus on being smart with your money, it's all about quality over quantity.
You're not here to trade for fun, event though it is, it could be for fun. But you know, everyone is here to trade for money. So, you don't want to be wasting day trades or even wasting money on trades that you shouldn't even be taking.
And you're in New York, on Eastern time. What time of the day do you typically wake up and get things started in the morning?
At this point, I'd like to talk a little bit more about Bull Trade Finder which is your online trading community. For those listeners who aren't familiar with BTF, can you tell us a little bit about the community?
So, we're a trading community and what we do here is we focus on trying to help beginners, intermediate traders, advanced traders, you know try to step up their game. The reason I started this room five years ago was one, to learn. I started the first day that I started trading. It was to learn. To share ideas, try to see what to look for in my own eyes and obviously to make money together.
So, what we do in this room is, I send my own plays, if people want to look at them, even follow them they could. I send the entry and exit alerts. It's focused on penny's, options and shorting. So, all three of those things. I do a nightly watch list focused on the broader markets, so Apple, Facebook. We do live trading sessions where they can see my screen. So, it's live screen share as well as hear my voice and just typical voice sessions where we can go over trades and current markets as well.
We also have a resource room for learning, such as videos or learning documents. That's basically what we do.
What type of trader would you say the community is ideal for? Is it more geared towards beginners or is it equally attractive to traders of all experience levels?
So, yeah, it's a mixed bag. We have beginners, we have intermediate, we have advanced. I do get a lot of beginners in the room. We get a lot of questions, a lot of learning out there. And that's where the main focus is. But there's a lot of diversity in there and you know, everyone helps out. Even the beginners are starting to help out. It's great to see that not even just me, but even in this room, everyone's helping each other out. I believe it's good for everyone.
Would you say the majority of the members are signing up, in your opinion, to follow trade alerts or would you say that they're signing up because they actually want to learn how to trade and become self-sufficient?
There's definitely traders who just want to sign up for alerts. But you know, even with that, they always ask me, why are you in this? Can you send me charts? You know, show me why it looks good? Can you send me the due diligence, possible news, upcoming stuff like that. I would say it's really fifty-fifty. Now, some really do just want alerts, which you know, it's my own plays. If they really wanted to look into them and see if they wanted to possibly buy into them, they could. But I like to focus a lot on the learning.
I get a lot of private messages where they ask for private sessions which we do. One on one sessions, which I believe is great. They can ask their questions, learn a lot in you know, twenty or thirty-minute time slots. We don't want to take up all that time, we also don't want to do larger times slots. The reason for that is, if you're in high school, or even college, once you're in class for over, even twenty minutes, one, you're not going to digest the information that well. And two, you don't want to be any longer than that. You know, it's fifty-fifty. I do believe everyone is here to learn and become their own trader, and a better trader. But yeah, it's fifty-fifty.
How often are you doing those private calls with other members?
It all depends. It's usually when people private message me, but I mean we went through a lot of them over the past month. So, it's kind of dying down now. But you know if anyone ever private messages me we could work it together and set up times. We like to do also, if people want to do two to three people, to come together, even get more questions from them that they couldn't even think of themselves.
We could do that too, and we have done that. It actually works out better than the one on ones. In my opinion. Because right after someone will ask a question, they'll say thank you, stuff like that. They were looking for that same question but didn't think of it at the time.
Well, we're almost out of time for today Nick, but there's one more thing I wanted to ask you. What can you tell us about your future plans for the Bull Trade Finder community?
Definitely to disperse our learning room into two individual learning rooms. One being videos, one being documents. Because I think that would be better for some people, especially ones who want to just read documents and ones who want to get into some videos.
But there's a lot to really go through and there's a lot to add. We're at the beginning stages. As I said, many times before to my members, real estate investing is something I want to add to my room as well. I'm an avid real estate investor. So, I want to add that to the room because I actually get a lot of questions when I talk about it in the room, currently.
And I know there's a lot of investors, a lot of stock traders that get into the real estate world right after that or even are in it right now, that want to know more, learn more or possibly get a nice income that comes in monthly. So, stuff like that is really good to me and that I really want to add to the room. But if you asked me two to three months down the road, there's definitely more ideas that would come to mind.
Interesting. In regards to your real estate portfolio, are you primarily focused on residential or commercial?
Currently, residential...
Okay. Well, that does it for our interview today with Nick, founder of the Bull Trade Finder community. If you'd like to check out Nick's community, just visit bulltradefinder.net and be sure to use the coupon code TR20 for a special discount when signing up.
Nick, thanks a lot for coming on and taking the time to tell us a little bit more about yourself and also the BTF community. We're excited to track your progress and the development of your community going forward. So, that's it for today everyone. Until next time, happy trading.