If anyone that followed this blog in the past is still out there, I just wanted to let you guys know that I am still alive. A lot has changed in my life over the past two years with the move and change in careers, but it has been a great experience. For those of you that don’t know, I am no longer a financial advisor. I left Ameriprise Financial at the end of December 2009 and I will probably never get back in the finance industry.

I worked as an advisor for a year and four months, and although it was a struggle to keep up with paces the whole time, there were moments of triumph and excitement. I met a lot of great people and made a few friends for life. I learned a great deal about working with people and forcing yourself out of your comfort zone to get clients. When you are on the front lines in the middle of the kind of recession and market sell off that we saw, you get to observe the many ways people deal with stress and loss of capital and confidence in the system. Some people, both young and old, are calm and collected, while others will go to cash even in their 401(k) and wait until the market comes back to get back in. It is a fascinating study in human emotions.

As an advisor I didn’t have a lot of time to trade like I had hoped, and the commissions were so high that I had to hit a home run - which I had a few of - to even justify the transaction. My best trades were outlined in my post from August 2009, but let’s focus on the bad ones for now. My worst trade, and regrettably, one that I am still holding on to, was to buy VXX at $52. It is now trading just above $21.50, which is close to a 60% loss. Talk about a bad trade. Although I am down over $6,000 on this trade, and that pretty much wipes out half of my big winners, it’s not the money that bothers me. The fact that I have made the rookie mistake of holding onto my losers is quite frustrating. Despite this glaring faux pas, I am still confident that I can continue to be a successful part-time trader.

My strategy right now is to continue learning from Stewie by way of The Art of Trading subscription service and keep making cake on his calls. Stewie has done a great job in his first year of offering this trading service and he has helped me make a lot of money. You can see my review of The Art of Trading on investimonials.com.

You want to know recent results? On Monday I took Stewie’s alert on X, NETL and PEI. I exited the first two a few minutes before Stewie’s sell alert and I closed PEI right before the close instead of keeping it as an ONH. Since I am working from home most of the time, I can trade and work in tandem. Those three trades maybe took an hour out of my workday, we’ll call it my lunch break, and I came out with $878. And you thought lawyers made a lot of money per hour. Yesterday was not as successful due to stupidity on my part. I took on too much size on one trade that was my own idea. I got long 1,000 of COL at $62.73 after looking at the 30-min chart below and seeing the coiling action. I set my stop at $62.40, which was too tight, because I had too much size and couldn’t put it at $62 where it should have been. I got stopped on the sell off and ended up losing $330 on that one. I then redeemed myself by taking Stewie’s long on IVN. Again, I did not choose to swing this one and sold about 15 minutes before the close for $321 gain which nearly erased my COL mistake earlier. Lessons learned: don’t take too large of size when you can’t stand the loss at a reasonable stop level and stick with taking the alerts and stop thinking you are qualified to pick setups.

It has been over a year since I gave my farewell address, stopped trading, moved to another state and started a new career. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, and there is no way I can update you on all of it (nor do you really want to hear all about my personal life). I guess the two main questions I want to answer are: How is the new career treating you? and Are either of you still trading, and if so how are we doing?

Career

I believe my last two posts were about my Series 7 and 66 exams. I did pass both exams as well as my state insurance license exam. I am now registered in seven states; AL, MS, TN, AK, TX, GA and TN and I am in the process of getting my FL license. I wanted to be able to blanke the entire southeast because I have contacts in all of those states. As with any career, there are aspects of it that I love and others that I hate. Over the past year, I have slowly learned so much about myself and the business, but there is much, much more to learn. As you might imagine it has been VERY hard to bring in new clients because of the state of the economy and the fact that people have been scared to death of any investments after the carnage that ensued last year and through the March low.

Over the past year I have worked very long hours and done quite a bit of traveling back and forth to MS and GA. Last week I put in over 70 hours in the office, and that doesn’t count some time spent at home doing research and analysis. The hours are starting to take a toll on me and I have started to back off some to try and maintain some amount of a work-life balance.

What I’ve found is that for the first two years you have to be a marketer first and an advisor second until you can grow your book of business. After you establish yourself and have a good source of recurring revenues, then you can dial back the marketing and increase your time in the office and time with clients. So far I have acquired 25 clients and have just under $2,000,000 in total assets under management. A pretty crappy year all around.

The last two months have been good and brought in more business than the preceding five months combined. I am very optimistic about my long-term prospects as a financial advisor, but getting clients and money in the door immediately has proven to be difficult. Enough about my career. If anyone has any specific questions about the life of a financial advisor, feel free to shoot me an email and I will be more than happy answer them.

Trading

From my farewell post back in May until about November I had quite trading cold turkey. As matter of fact, I wasn’t really even watching the market on a daily basis other than what I could force myself to listen to on CNBC. In November I finally got settled into the new city, apartment and work routine and I started to look at the market again. Since then I have been somewhat active with swing trading. I just signed up for Stewie’s daily Art of Trading service and have nothing but good things to say about it thus far (and expect nothing but good going forward). I see myself being much more active from here on out with Stewie’s recommendations, and swing trading my own ideas as well. I was talking to Tradeitup today about my recent success with trading and it has really brought back the rush of trading; something that I really miss. What has been working for you?; you might ask… well, below is my current holdings and a few trades that I have taken lately.

Current Holdings

I am also holding onto a Harrah’s Casino bond from 49 that matures in 2012. Speaking of bonds, take a look that this chart. This is a Ford Motor bond that I bought back in January and sold last week.

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That’s right, a 110% profit on a bond in six months. And, if you include the $475 coupon that I received in March, it’s more like 120%. That has to be my best trade ever. You can also see I made some money with USO. Not shown here is a $1,425 profit in FXI and a $2,550 profit in  UYM. I also have some other small winners and losers in my current holdings. All told, I have booked over $10,000 in profits since November; not bad.

Hopefully this will give HPT and others the update they needed, and maybe even spur me to continue posting occasionally going forward. It’s now midnight and I need to be at the office early tomorrow to get caught up before the weekend. HAPPY TRADING!!!

- Ainkurn

P.S. Tradeitup wanted me to give a brief update for him as well. He is still trading and doing well. He has had a good streak of consistent profits, but continued to be very conservative with profit targets and risk management. I’ll do my best to bully him into posting his trading ideas or recaps again.

As you may know, I stopped trading about two months ago to pursue a job as a Financial Adviser. As part of my pre-employment qualification process, I have to pass the Series 7, Series 66, and Life, Health, and Variable Annuity exams. Most of the last 6 weeks has been spent cramming my brain full of securities related garb in preparation for the 7. I have read two books totaling about 800 pages (one I basically read twice), handwritten about 150 pages of notes, highlighted about 100 pages of crap, and answered over 600 multiple choice questions. What does all of the work add up to; sitting for a 6hr 250 question exam.

Yesterday I studied from 7:00 AM till midnight and got up at 5:00 this morning to drive to Jackson, MS for my test. I was quite nervous because my practice exam results were pretty pathetic. My scores on the four practice test were 84, 75, 65, and 62. Not so great. My trip this morning was a bit edgy also, as I drove about 100 miles with one eye on the road and one eye on study materials. “Municipal bond interest is tax-free except when… WHO IS THIS FOOL PULLING OUT IN FRONT OF ME!” You get the picture.

Any way. The exam is a two part test of 130 questions each with a 1hr break for lunch. There are 10 “bonus” questions on the Series 7, which I find to be quite juvenile. It’s all computerized so you can easily mark questions for review and go back over them at the end. One other advantage (maybe disadvantage) is that you know your score immediately upon completion of the exam. I am accustomed to waiting a few days or weeks to get test results after 6 years of college (don’t laugh, I changed my major twice and switched colleges about 5 times). So I get through with the first half of the exam in about 1.5 hours, and I am feeling pretty confident. My hour lunch break was spent shoving down buffalo wings at Chili’s and contemplating ordering a Presidente Margarita to calm my nerves. I wonder if FINRA (NASD) has any rules about TWI (Testing While Intoxicated). The hour went by much too fast, leaving me only 5 minutes before signing back in for the final push toward certification.

When I got back, some bastard had taken my computer so I had to be re-deployed to another machine. Sorry about that Computer 9, I really wanted to finish what we started. Computer 15 is a loser! The room was cold, and the hum coming from the A/C unit did nothing to help my concentration. The second part of the test was more difficult. I came across several questions that totally confused me, and some that pertained to information that wasn’t in the two books I read. “Ennie-Meeny-Miny-Mo” came in real handy on a few occasions. As I got closer and closer to the last question, tension began to build to the point that I was reluctant to click the little “Exit” button signaling my completion of the exam. The worst part was waiting the 10-20 seconds it took to actually calculate my score. Boy did that ever seem like a lifetime! Did I mention if I fail the exam I have to wait another month before taking it again?

When my score was finally processed it was not what I was expecting. I was expecting to see my score prominently displayed on the screen in bold font and flashing colors. Not the case. When I finally found my score it was neatly tucked away in a small corner of a large report showing all the statistics from my exam. The first thing I see is “Pass”. A little relief. “Where is the damn score”? Ah, there it is “84%”. Nice! I skim over the report and see that the national pass percentage is currently 66% with the national average score coming in at 73%. I guess I am above average, or maybe I just studied 11% more than the average joe. Next up, Series 66. I will be back with the details on that one later.

-Ainkurn

Not the end of the world, but simply the end of my full-time trading career. I have been going at this for almost two years now with limited success. I know that I will never leave the markets altogether, but at this time I think it is wise to make a change. I have accepted a position with Ameriprise Financial in Birmingham, AL and I will be moving in the next month or two. This move is essential if I hope to build a career in finance.

The last two weeks of my time have been devoted to going through the motions of the hiring process, filling out paper work and studying for exams. I have to pass the Series 7 and Series 66 along with the AL State Insurance Licensing Exam. I don’t have to quit trading until after I pass the exams, but I will be studying non-stop and will not have time to trade.

I have enjoyed this blog and all the comments and e-mails I have gotten from readers. I will be posting here from time to time, and will eventually start a new blog about financial advising. TradeItUp will still be trading and posting like we have always done, so there will still be content here to read. Who knows, I might eventually get back to some kind of trading (most likely swing trading) in due time and shift the focus of this blog. I will keep everyone informed of my progress.

Good luck in trading,

-Ainkurn

P.S. A special thanks to Stewie for his mentoring, Denarii for his friendship and daily conversations, Dinosaur for my time in the VO and position as VO Host for the month of March, and to all my friends over at WallStreak.  Make some “cake” for me!

We did not post on Monday or Tuesday because we were out of town. We made a trip over the weekend to Daytona Beach. We did not return until late Monday night so there were no trades that day. We did have a few trades Tuesday which we will try to get posted up along with our trades from today. Hopefully we can get everything caught up tonight.