Not To Brag, But I Just Made My First Ever Stock Trade

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A lot of people don’t realize that Sheryl Crow’s seminal hit “The First Cut Is The Deepest” was actually originally supposed to be called “The First Trade Is The Hardest.” And frankly, she was absolutely right.

See, I’ve been working with my Raging Bull mentor Taylor. He keeps telling me how easy it is despite my hesitations. I’m a naturally anxious person, especially when it comes to money. I see all these graphs and percentages, and my brain defaults to me going bankrupt because I took a shot on a stock that I knew nothing about.

Last week, he sent me a bunch of videos that he created. Whether it was explaining what the screens on E*TRADE meant or how I should go about changing my thinking regarding trading at large, it wasn’t your grandma’s trading manual (you know, if your grandma traded stocks).

I’ll be honest — it was overwhelming at first. You look at the screen and it’s just a shitton of graphs and numbers that don’t mean anything without some research. Without Taylor’s help and his strapping British accent, I probably would’ve cashed out altogether. But instead, I didn’t. I made a damn trade.

I’m not going to bore you with what I bought. To be completely transparent, I solely did it for two reasons:

1. I wanted to get some skin in the game.

Taylor said it was easy, but I didn’t really believe him. I legitimately thought he was telling me how simple it was just because he’d been doing it for much (much!) longer than I had been. But when I searched the stock symbol, checked out the price, and decided how much I was willing to spend on my first trade, it took me all of two or three clicks before I had some skin the game.

And yeah, he was right. I was actually surprised that I didn’t have to do more.

2. I wanted to see firsthand what it felt like to experience the ups and downs of the market.

One of the first things Taylor told me was that I couldn’t just expect to make money with every trade I made. If that were the case, everyone would be doing it. He also told me that it would take some time before I saw legitimate profits. And, again, he was absolutely correct.

I shouldn’t be ripping the curtain completely down right now, but I have to because I don’t want to act like I’m Gordon Gekko (yet). My portfolio is down 6.84%. While yeah, that’s not a HUGE amount, I didn’t think I’d go down before going up.

And why am I down? Well, because I shot from the hip. I got too excited and went in without applying the rules, knowledge, and help that Taylor has been willingly giving me. It’s kind of like when you’re texting with a girl and you know you shouldn’t double-text her because you’ll look desperate. But then you double-text her before hating yourself for doing so. That’s how my first trade went. I went against what Taylor told me and now I’m out some money.

But screw it. Maybe I needed a loss to understand what a win feels like. Here’s how I’m going to rebound:

— I’m going to re-watch the videos Taylor sent me with a more watchful eye. His voice is hella soothing.

— I’m going to meet with Taylor via phone (he keeps ignoring my FaceTimes) and start getting more active in his daily chatroom on Raging Bull.

— I’m going to look at this minuscule loss as learning experience rather than me just being out a little bit of dough. He’s proven his method works, so I’m going to assume that as long as I stick with it, I’ll come out ahead.

Let’s get this money. .

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