The Man Who Buys CrashesQ: But were you capitalized enough to basically not have to draw
income off your trading for a while?
A: No, not really. I was fortunate enough to do very well. I’ll give
you the actual figures. I had money tied up in other things, but the
starting capital I had in December 31, 2002, was$172,000. And I
was very blessed, because of very good appreciation. I was able to
pay all my expenses and multiply the stakes.
Q: That’s impressive.
A: Thank you. There are a lot of horror stories out there; but I
was able to succeed. Like my original traditional IRA. I had a very
small one, it was like$18,000 as of October 2002, and since then its
grown to$200,000. So I was able to do an 11 bagger on that, and,
by having it in an IRA, I don’t have to go through the tremendous
pain of all the accounting [laughter].
Q : I can imagine the reconciliation of your trades must be
tremendous. It’s probably 3,000 to 4,000 trades per year, maybe
more, right?
A: Yes, actually more. I think I average something like 7,000 to
8,000 trades a year. And now that I’m doing options, it’s even more
complicated. I might have on one trade with four or five different
options on certain stock. So I think my trade numbers are actually
going to go up.
Q: When you started trading and you went into trading full time,
did you write a business plan for yourself? And then did you set
daily, weekly, monthly earning targets, or was it much more fluid
than that?
A: I did write a business plan but made several changes. For
example, I had an automated system in 2002 to 2003, but the results