Who We Are

We are two traders, brothers, working together in the markets every day. We started our quest in the markets several years back while working full time jobs and pursuing degrees in finance. We have had an equity account for four years first with TD Ameritrade, and upgraded to Interactive Brokers in March 2007. The early years of exposure to the financial markets consisted mostly of the investing mentality trying to buy and hold equities long enough to make a good profit. We soon figured out that this style of market participation was too inactive for us. We sought more involvement, more excitement, and more knowledge.

How We Got Started

While still in college we took a more involved approach by actively managing a fake portfolio of $1 million beginning in January 2003. We were still mostly of the investing mindset, but we had weekly meetings with a friend to evaluate our holdings and do research on companies. We made weekly changes to the portfolio to take profits, losses, and to manage exposure to specific sectors. For the year that we managed the portfolio, we were very successful in beating the market averages by a wide margin. This experience really got us more and more interested in the financial markets and convinced us that we wanted to pursue trading as a career.

How We Got Here

In January 2007, after we had both graduated with our bachelor’s degree in Finance, we decided to quit our day jobs and focus all our efforts on making a living through trading. While we were somewhat naïve, we knew that it was not going to be easy to make a living trading with the limited capital that we had available. We knew that there would be many, many hours of screen time, reading, studying and frustration to get to where we needed to be. We knew before we started that we would most likely lose money for a while until we became accustomed to the market movements and found a way to profit from these short term trends. We even came up with a good round number of losses that we would likely have to sustain before we “figured it all out”. That round number was $10,000. When we decided to start blogging, we couldn’t think of a better way to summarize our almost year long journey in trading than 10kthrownaway.