In August 2021 I wanted to be rich so I could buy a massive plot of farmland upon which to build an impenetrable castle. Then I could grow a variety of crops and create an empire like Genghis Khan. At that time I believed the solution was to gain money. I thought of money as just a number obeying quantitative laws, like the score of a video game. Trading was the cheat code. Have enough moolah, and you’d reach nirvana.

Prior to that month, I had little interest in money. After all, it shouldn’t be your primary concern, and what matters is your character. As long as there were clear-cut, precise ways to measure my worth—IQ, tests, contest awards—I didn’t care about money; I knew my abilities. But ever since college began, numerical worth started fading. Back in high school we could clearly mark ourselves by test scores and competitions, like how every football player received an OVR in Madden. Now, such metrics disappeared, replaced by varied endeavors—startups, research, clubs—which could not be standardized to a score.

That’s when I reached into the recesses of my noggin and pulled out the green piggy bank. The one true metric to gauge value. Money.

Immediately I ordered all my brain cells to work on one thing only: wealth accumulation. And what better way to do so than by trading on the stock market? Couldn’t be that hard; just watch the graphs. On August 7, 2021, the Adamian Trading Empire commenced. It was 42 days of furiously combing through trading textbooks, monitoring the stocks, writing scripts to estimate the pattern—you know, those technical analysis charts—and predict the next movements.

On September 17, 2021, I surrendered. I had net lost $1400, and with it, my confidence that I could ever have enough money to build that castle realm. When I won big—like with SPRT when it ran from $9 to $60—I was ecstatic; when I collapsed—like with HLBZ—I felt dejected. Yet to this day I believe the trading period offered me many excellent habits; though it’s said there’s no moral victories in football, there can be in trading. I even celebrate August 27 as “Stock Rocket Day”.

The Adamian Trading Empire may not have brought me financial success, but it did establish a solid set of principles upon which to continue fighting for my ascension. Indeed, these principles do not merely pertain to trading—they are broadly applicable. (As for the philosophical side of my expeditions, it took a bit longer to recover from the shock and reorient myself. Yes, of course I found that money wasn’t everything, nor the only thing, and that man’s intangible qualities is our true striving so that we may achieve money, a mere effect. But that’s a topic for another article. I love military history so I’m going to be strategic in this one!)

Here’s what I gleaned.

#1 Wake up early to sense the currents. Stock trading begins at 9:30, meaning I get up at 7:00 to see how pre-market trading was performing. I look through stocks and choose a sector to target, note down a few potential movers based on the previous week or so, and browse through market sentiment indicators. The process only lasts 90 minutes; perhaps I could wake up at 8 instead, but the hour in between is critical. I give myself ample time to breathe it all in, to harmonize with the analysis I just wrote, so that I am not unnerved if the market doesn’t open as I anticipated. I carried the early-rise habit to MIT, and I started waking up even earlier, pushing 6:45 on occasions, before breakfast even began. I would conquer the world as it lay asleep. The psychological superiority was intoxicating and life has never felt so spectacular.

#2 Disregard unjustified emotional sentiments, no matter how popular. Internet stock discussion boards love sending “To the moon” messages with billions of blue blistering rocket emojis¹, but it’s all meaningless if not backed up by reason. Of course people want to see stocks go up, and thus manifest that desire in their messages! Stocktwits was the worst offender, with virtually no negative sentiment, the good times garnering a “I told you so! Keep buying!” and the bad times eliciting a “We’re at the dip, keep buying and this thing will go parabolic!”. Such morale-boosting (if you can call it that) chatter is meaningless. No matter how many people “believe” the stock will go up (because they want it to), the stock does not answer to its shareholders. One might even say the stock has a mind of its own.

#3 Be patient enough to ride out downturns. Fundamentally trading is unpredictable. In the early stages I found myself dumping a stock if it went down by even a little amount, as I could not stand losing money. A few minutes later, that stock would shoot up and I had completely missed it. Once, a stock I bought early at $12 decreased to $9, causing me to drop it. Earlier that morning I concluded the stock was an excellent choice, prone to decline in the early hours but likely to rally in the afternoon. At 16:00, closing time, that stock was at $21.

My point is not that holding onto a stock longer will always help you, or that the above example is the quintessential stock. But I do know that being impatient and making decisions on a whim is far worse; one might as well not trade at all. Though patience does not ensure better results, if one is confident, one will wait out the downturn, and it will be better than the alternative. Otherwise, was one truly confident to begin with²?

It’s tough to stay in a difficult situation, even if you’re certain times will be better. Patience is like persistence. When you don’t feel like writing an article, doing the problem set, or running the 2-minute drill again—though they are all correct or good in some way—you have to push through. Persistence is continuing to act towards an end result you know to be desirable; patience is the mindset that allows persistence to persist.

#4 Run with your decision and never hesitate. In uncertain scenarios, like trading, it’s quite easy to be paralyzed. Is RDHL going this way? Let me buy 45 shares, or should that be 30?…never mind, it’s going down, I’ll sell, but how much should I sell? I’ll say 15, but what if I could make more by visiting HLBZ? On the other hand…

Hesitation is not necessarily worse than decisiveness because the outcome could be worse. When I vacillate on a stock, I lose or gain a bit; if I bite the bullet and run with the stock, I could still lose a lot. Instead, hesitation is worse than decisiveness because hesitation cannot be analyzed, and thus nothing can be learned. After trading I will revisit my thoughts as scribbled in my journal and enact improvements. But when I see the crossing out of numbers and the random lines formed when I pressed the pen on the paper in indecision, I can’t make any sense of it, nor know what to do. Well, technically, hesitation does teach you one thing…not to hesitate!

On the other hand, if I went in a stock with a well-defined thought process, I can clearly understand what went wrong from my notes, and what principles I failed to apply. There is a defined path for improvement.

Hesitation also hurts because it always results in self-doubt and the “if only I had” trap, regardless of outcome. Suppose one hesitated in action. If the outcome is bad, then the response is “If only I had just done it, I would’ve won”, followed by disappointment. If the outcome is good, the response is still not good; instead, it’s “If only I had just done it!” and…disappointment. Such was the case with both ATER and BBIG, stocks that had several good runs in August, but also large declines. I knew that they would be very volatile, lying in the range of $5-$15—perfect for large-percentage gains—but I was so petrified of buying the tip and selling the dip that I bought and sold several times, not out of confidence, but of fear…and forgot all about the wash sale rules, leaving me with a bad deficit. It would have been better to buy and sell once, or establish definite rules for multiple rounds of trading.

After all, the hesitant person always says “If only I had been decisive!” On the contrary, I have never heard a decisive person say “If only I had been hesitant!”

#5 Stick by your principles. I sometimes fail when I strictly obey the 10 “stockommandments” I set for myself during trading. I might trade from 9:30-9:40, short a stock occasionally, or buy when the price is rocketing upwards. I also sometimes fail when I disregard my stockommandments and make decisions less tethered to principles. But, as with the previous point, it is the lack of learnable lessons which causes the latter situation to be less desirable.

Suppose the principles I traded by were worse than whimsical/emotional trading. It’s not that principles are not worth using; it’s that I picked the wrong principles! By fine-tuning my approach, I can yield better results.

In my last days of trading I faced SDC and CRVS. SDC was at $5.98 after its dip, but poised for a strong run. That morning I went in, with one of my principles “See the gain, sell the gain.” Once SDC hit my target of $6.30 (5%) I immediately sold. Meanwhile, CRVS started at $4.79, and while the price represented a decline from the previous day, I followed “Don’t trade before 10” and waited patiently. It dropped to $4.28, I bought 340 shares, and CRVS rose steadily to $4.54. Perfect—six percent. Sell all. Plus $315 for the day. And though SDC hit a high of $7.19 and CRVS $5.56 that day, I got what I needed, and I was satisfied because I followed my principles and held steady.

These are all distinct lessons I’ve learned through my trading period, but there is an overarching principle: consistency, leading to measurable improvement. The result and its analysis is important, but even more so is the ability to analyze the result. Without consistency, one cannot know how to improve, and that’s a bigger disadvantage than consistently losing—at least one can find out what to change and, within reasonable time, change the principles to be winning ones.

The Adamian Trading Empire may be history, but its principles are alive and well. On a philosophical note, I’ve realized that analysis can be quantitative or qualitative, and that even if there is no set standard for analyzing one’s “worth”, that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything worth analyzing. The trials and tribulations my trading brought me will be forever remembered. And I will be eternally thankful therefor. Still, a castle would’ve been nice. Maybe next time.

Footnotes

¹ Ah, you’re a Tintin fan too?

² Whether there’s a difference between intelligence and confidence to enact that intelligence is debatable, and I won’t get into it here. Maybe it would make for another article.