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.