Valet Driver Turns $20K into $11Mil over 6 years After Wipe Out · Jack Kellogg
markets speculation and risk this is the Chat with Traders podcast hey there Traders we are on episode 249 and I'm Tessa co-host of chat with Traders it's so good to have you join us if you're new to this podcast thank you for being here warm welcome to you if you've been a long time listener thank you for continuing to tune in with us we've got a great episode for you starting out with juggling multiple jobs as a valet driver firefighter an entrepreneur Our Guest Jack Kellogg at 18 about six years ago dreamed of Financial Freedom got laser focused on saving money and learned everything he could about the stock market and eventually turned to penny stocks Jack's intense drive for Success pushed his mental and physical health to unhealthy levels as he managed hundreds of Trades and at times an illiquid unregulated Securities that often saw hundreds of percent increases quickly followed by spectacular collapses within just a few weeks today our host Ian Cox takes us through a multi-faceted discussion including Jack's Journey which was met with setbacks and struggles along with wisdom gained earlier than usual for someone So Young Jack's candid way of sharing is so refreshing that I can't help but feel so drawn to the deeply human side of this talented young Trader ladies and gentlemen we are so pleased to present Jack Kellogg Well Jack want to welcome you to chat with Traders hey thanks for having me on yeah it's a real honor I'd like to dive in a little bit about your early experience and any goals that you might have set how old were you when you set up your first brokerage account and what was the Catalyst for you to get into the field so coming out of high school I wasn't necessarily the best reader writer Etc I didn't like literature the only thing I really ever liked was simple math and video games um I didn't really know too much that I could do with that so I just kind of finished high school and new College wasn't really an option for me I got interested into firefighting because of the work schedule where you work 24 hours then you have 72 hours off and I always wanted to be an entrepreneur to gain freedom for myself and my family eventually and not have to show up to a job every single day over and over and not really have too much free time to work on anything else so I got started with firefighting and while I was learning that I was also doing ballet which was a great job I was able to make decent money for an 18 year old 17 16 year old and it was really cool because I was driving nice cars at a nice restaurant in Connecticut Max downtown in the capital of Hartford it was a great experience and it provided me a lot of inspiration with seeing the same clientele come in every Sunday Saturday Friday for a nice dinner with their family and it was really inspiring and motivational to see people with that kind of Freedom where they can come and dine every week with a nice meal with their family and not really affect them because they have freedom with money so I was very inspired to be an entrepreneur and have freedom and as I got started into the firefighting stuff I realized that I couldn't really make too much money doing that plus um some stuff that I saw it was uh kind of a turn off at the beginning so I shifted my focus and I tried opening a couple businesses one uh selling stuff at a mall kiosk also selling stuff at a flea market and those were pretty much failures but after a little bit of time I had some money saved up around ten thousand dollars from the valet job and my New Year's resolution in 2017 was hey I want to invest this money into some stocks because I knew a lot of people were making money through the stock market and I just frankly didn't have enough money to get the real estate yet or at least I thought so and after that I ran into a buddy at the gym it was probably January 3rd January 4th I was in the process of opening up a Robin Hood account and I ran into a friend my buddy named Lee we were childhood friends but he ended up going to a different High School to play a competitive hockey and we kind of lost we lost touch for a while and I saw a few years later and he was like hey I'm getting interested in penny stocks Etc I'm trading penny stocks you can see this they're crazy they move up hundreds of percent every day I asked them like hey how can I I learn about this this sounds interesting versus uh value investing which would seem I mean it would take multiple years if not decades to make to see hundreds of percent returns so he was like hey you can get started with Timothy Sykes investors Underground etc etc and I went home and I watched a few YouTube videos and I was pretty much immediately hooked I was still a little skeptical at the beginning but eventually I saw this one Supernova htgm later that month in January of 2017 went from about two to twenty dollars and I was like wow these really do happen as well as this time was just a few months after dry ships and the shipping the shipping sector so I was able to look at previous short-term history and see the crazy moves that it happened so after that I convinced my parents to split uh Timothy Sykes millionaire challenge Educational Service with me for the next year I basically just studied and uh slowly bled out my my a few thousand dollar account uh how how old were you uh at the time I was like 18 19 years old so your parents knew that you obviously had an interest in trading what was their attitude toward this uh my dad was very skeptical and always called it a scam because he doesn't know anyone that's paid money uh trading penny stocks it was very new to him so he's just trying to protect me and he's like this is you know you should just become an electrician work with your hands that's what he is an electrician make money that way because you have to be very careful and he's always very skeptical about everything whereas my mom was more supportive I could have told my mom I wanted to be anything and she would support me um in that way but my dad was uh very negative towards it so it was difficult but I had my mom support no matter what I did which I was thankful for your early goals if you have had them were they tied to any specific material desires that you wanted to acquire like for example a house or a fancy car um honestly no I wasn't really too the thing that motivated me the most and inspired me most was the freedom where you you could do whatever you want so you don't I didn't really have like one oh I want to buy a Ferrari or I want to buy this house here it was kind of just I know I can buy those things but I have to focus on gaining the freedom and growing my account I know those things are very far away and if I'm able to just focus on growth and gain consistency that's what I really want I want to be able to prove to myself that I can do this what were the elements of trading that really grabbed you like what what makes trading fascinating for you probably the most interesting thing to me was you you could do it in a dark room on the computer and what like you could just kind of do it without having to tell anyone that you're doing it and you could just work hard without having to deal with co-workers and other people that would get in your way so I knew it was really me versus myself first in a lot of other area areas and occupations in life you you have people around you of course you have people on the internet that you talk to while you're trading but you can kind of pick and choose you can block people you can say hey I don't want to talk to this person you can mute stuff so it's very easy to kind of pick where you want to fit in versus in a lot of other areas you're almost like hey you have to do this you have to do that Etc did you find the early experience of trading uh lonely I mean you had your friend Lee um did you have a support network of other fellow Traders um no I just had my buddy Lee and he was really great for showing me the basics but around like three months of me learning he kind of uh went to e-commerce business and uh Drop Shipping and stuff like that so he kind of stopped trading and then it got a bit lonely um and eventually I I went to uh Tim Sykes conference in 2017 this was September and I talked with a bunch of Traders and I was able to develop relationships with them and create this network and actually one of the guys who I met down there he put me in a group chat and then I met this other guy who lived in Michigan uh his name's Dom and I ended up moving moving into an apartment with dom later in 2018 through towards the end of 2019 so it was lonely in the beginning but I eventually found a few friends that really helped me so in your view um do you think it's important to have a support network it was important to you at the beginning I didn't really want too many people kind of clouding my my view my viewpoint like I wanted a fresh mind of of what I think but eventually after I learned about it I realized that hey I need a network and a support group to learn and grow with it's very difficult to do it on your own right yeah that's a good point some argue that getting quick and easy profits early on is one of the worst things that can happen to a beginner Trader what's your viewpoint on this yeah I agree fortunately for me I didn't make any money for the first 20 months really I had a couple green months within there but I would always end up just giving it back the next uh the next month if not more than what I'd made so it was constantly I learned the lesson of how easy it is to lose money over and over and over again where I'd string together a bunch of small wins and then I just take a huge loss and I'd lose everything because I was stubborn and I didn't realize that it's more about having big Winners and smaller smaller losers versus trying to win consistently and and having maybe that one big loss here and there yeah so for me I I learned how to lose and a lot of my my friends a lot of my friends who started in in 2020 and 2021 when we had the insane bull market you know they're going through a very rough patch right now where they're consistently losing and they're super frustrated and they have a lot more money to lose so it's a lot more dangerous just than losing a little bit of money especially if you take on expenses and you and you have um payments and all that stuff versus even a couple of my friends started this year um and I said hey it's a great time to start even though you don't think it is but you're learning a process that's going to yield your results over the long term as long as you stay disciplined and you learned it you're not in this game just for a quick Buck if you want to really make money you you have to trade a process for a decade before you got into trading uh did your family or friends uh consider you to be a risk taker you know perhaps expressed through any of your hobbies or interests I was never really into gambling or playing poker at all or any casino type games and I didn't really like um doing stunts or any dangerous sports um so I would say not really were any of them a little surprised when they heard that you were getting into trading penny stocks really people's just first thought was they were more focused on just like the scam aspect they thought that I was just getting scammed um like my uncle printed me out uh this newspaper that I still have actually and he was like uh why penny stocks are scams you shouldn't trade these Etc and I think people were just more worried that I was going to lose all my money and I didn't really know what I was doing Etc yeah well that's a good segue for us to uh transition to the topic of the issues with penny stocks can let's define penny stocks are penny stocks any stock that's trading below a dollar on any exchange for me I would classify penny stocks in like a couple different categories right I would say that all OTC over-the-counter stocks are penny stocks um except for uh larger ones like um grayscale and that type of stuff but if you're trading stuff that's you know sub penny stocks trips stocks anything from 10 cents or less a dollar or less even five dollars or less ten dollars or less whatever it is as long as it has a small market cap I would consider it a penny stock on the OTC market and a penny stock on small cap on NASDAQ stocks I don't consider anything under five or ten dollars usually anything under a dollar is really really a penny stock but that's what I would say I see so some stocks that you're saying that are trading below ten dollars or five dollars they could be classified as a penny stock because their market capitalization is quite low yeah I mean sometimes there's no difference between a stock that's below a dollar with a low market cap they could just have more shares uh in the float so it's lower price for something that they did a reverse split it was trading at 30 cents but they did a uh 20 to 1 reverse split and it's trading at six bucks now it's the same company in the same stock it's just higher priced oh I see I see what about bid ask spreads are they a material issue for most um over-the-counter penny stocks yeah it's definitely an issue especially with a liquid ones that nobody's watching you could see a 30 40 50 spread maybe even 100 spread but those aren't really the stocks that I'm looking at I'm looking at for the most active stocks um trading the most liquidity trading the most dollar volume because that's where you're able to enter a position without taking huge risks because of the spread got it I noticed on the on the website otcmarkets.com that there were over 2 200 stocks that were listed showing a price of zero and my question is are stocks ever delisted from the uh over-the-counter exchange like it's done in the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange yeah so actually just um late last year in September the OTC Margaret came out with a new rule where if you're not current and pink whatever if you're dark and defunct or you have this the caveat empty door or whatever you actually they won't allow you to trade those anymore so we lost a large majority maybe like 25 of the stocks that I had traded the previous two years just became non-tradable anymore could you could you define a little bit uh Caveat Emptor you're saying if they get labeled as that that's a a Latin word from my understanding is buyer beware uh yes how does a penny stock get that put on them so at first on OTC markets you'll see them flag for stock promotion where it's basically just a shell company for someone to manipulate it instead of spending five million dollars on a product or on an actual business it's just a shell company and they're giving five million dollars to a stock promoter and they're like hey you know pump this stock up um where they'll kind of create this manipulated Market where there's really nothing except buyers and sellers and they're going to try to wash sale and have a lot of Trades go through and have people's eyes go on it was like Hey the Stock's going up in value every single day and they're trying to lure people in to buy the stock and eventually they'll they're gonna sell you know their tens of millions of shares from 0.001 average that the Insiders have and they're going to try to sell this at two five ten dollars and just try to sell as many any shares as they can and you'll see some of these stocks crash like 95 percent in one day and if this after the stock usually crashes the the OTC markets looks into it um some not you don't really see them get the CE during the run-up it's happened sometimes but usually after the the stock crashes it this the CE gets put on so they can't really you know pump it back again or try to go for round two um and they just they don't let people and brokerages buy the stock anymore I see so they do get an opportunity it sounds like to do one pump and get some money out of it but uh then they're under investigation possibly after that and then they may not get a second chance is that accurate yeah for the most part I see do penny stocks on the over-the-counter exchange ever evolve and move to the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange yeah it happens sometimes there's this company this ticker lwlg that moved from OTC to NASDAQ and there's been a few more um there's this one that actually went from OTC to NASDAQ and it was the single biggest Runner of the entire year it was axtg or atxg what uh what was the ticker event yeah yeah atxg it it opened at like 10 bucks and what happened was the people that had the shares from the OTC they weren't allowed to sell right away and everyone just started shorting it because we started seeing a lot of those stocks that ipo'd fade this year especially Chinese scammy ones OTC whatever it's scammy and everyone ended up shorting it and it actually went from like 10 bucks to it printed 2 000 at 2000 um in after hours and uh I heard some horror stories that uh people were shorting in the tens 20s 30s 40s and covering at a thousand or higher and blowing up their accounts um so you do see just absolutely wild moves um in the OTC and and sometimes if they do make it to the NASDAQ they can even become more scammier wow wow uh I'd like to transition into the perceptions of penny stocks you know some people have images of shady immoral characters scamming people into buying near nearly worthless companies while pocketing outrageously large commissions like what we've seen in the movies Wolf of Wall Street and Boiler Room other than your friend initially you know introducing you to penny stocks uh what characteristics of penny stocks got you attracted on the over-the-counter exchange uh you know and say instead of the seemingly safer regulated stocks on the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ I would say that the main reason I I mean I wasn't against trading NASDAQ at the beginning but I just noticed that I had an act for OTC off the bat I was able to read the stocks a lot more clear and since they're not electronically Market makered it's actually um hand market makers so you send an order to uh a route whatever CDL night and they're going to manually put your order into the OTC stock so you're able to have more time to to use the level two and the time and sales tape and it just creates cleaner patterns and and cleaner action to read um and I was just like okay I think that this Dip's gonna hold or I think if it breaks this level it's going to go up and I noticed that I was just right more times than that on otc's versus NASDAQ there's a lot uh it's electronic theme Market make there's more Algos and it was it was harder to read so otcs were just more clean I see so did you consider the chart patterns to be more reliable yes exactly I see is there a lack would you say that there's not many institutional players or program trading in these type of stocks yeah I would say compared to to NASDAQ and enlisted stocks probably you know almost almost none um because they just can't play the kind of market caps and liquidity that OTC offers but with a small account you're able to grow you're able to grow your money a lot quicker or small amount versus uh and I was it was easier for me to read so that's why I chose it okay now turning to liquidity last week on a strong day for the NASDAQ and the S P 500 uh with both up over two two percent on the day I noticed that out of the top 200 advancers on the entire OTC markets.com site only one had reached the one million dollar total volume level and the average trade was less than a thousand dollars is this common during the years you've been trading penny stocks no so in early 2021 and late 2022 we were seeing um trillions of dollars in the OTC market and it was really after that um Rule and Regulation and the SEC cracked down on it we've seen a lot less players in liquidity uh in OTC but you have stocks like gtii or mmtlp which just ran hundreds of percent with pretty decent liquidity over the last month and those were some of the best Runners we've seen this year so it seems like it's kind of coming back a little bit and due to seasonality my biggest um OTC months are always in February I don't know what it is but that's when there seems to be the most liquidity in otc's December and January as well and then the rest of the year I mean otcs are really dead unless there's a a massive Catalyst um we've seen some good weed runs some good Bitcoin runs um throughout the year sometimes and that causes some of the related otcs to get some volume but other than that it's very season seasonal I see so the current bear Market in the major exchanges uh does that heavily influence the liquidity issues it does yeah the problem is right now is why we were seeing such a good OTC market is because speculation stocks were making highs over highs over highs in 2020 and early 2021 and then once uh Kathy Woods fun tapped when Bitcoin topped when all these speculation plays topped we just saw otc's die off because nobody wants to buy any more speculation because we're we started entering a bear market and if if stocks like apple and Tesla and Amazon and um these bigger cap stocks large cap stocks if they're not even going to hold their these uh BS penny stocks have zero chance got it so are you seeing widening bid ask spreads uh during this bear Market yeah to like to tell you the truth um I've still made some money on otcs this year maybe like 100 200 Grand but compared to what I made on them the last couple years like it's nothing and I've been focusing more now on like um like uh tqq sqq stuff with more liquidity and during the bear Market there's a lot more volatility in the indexes so that's kind of what I've been shifting into trade this year and I'm not strictly like an OTC Trader it is what I did for if there's an OTC to trade like I'll prefer that because I know that's what I'm best at but if there's no otcs I'm not going to sit there and enforce OTC trades I'm going to use other strategies that I've developed over the years but I'm always just not as confident in those setups because they're just not um what I've mastered you're dealing with a lot more competition over there first otcs you you almost um have such an advantage compared to uh stuff that's trading billions and billions of dollars I see so are you concentrating more of your trading say on NASDAQ or is there another exchange that you choose when the OTC exchanges dead yeah so I I definitely concentrate more on my training on NASDAQ when the otcs are dead but I'll still try to look for um scammy type moves to trade because they make the most sense to me like uh for example Molin Automotive is a little scammy electric vehicle company that ran from 30 cents to 60 cents this week made a couple decent trades on it and I will always prefer to trade stuff like that I don't like trading bio tax or or stuff where there's um you have to understand more with the fundamentals I I like just trading stuff that's doing massive volume and it's just a straight scam because the price action makes way more sense to me got it well let's actually get into your process have you ever been a discretionary Trader or did you develop a process early on what do you mean by that well when you first got into trading stocks were you uh purely discretionary or did you have certain things that you looked for like a certain checklist for you to get into a trade yeah so I really just looked for simple patterns like the patterns that really have made me the most money over the last five years is just buying buying breakouts in a strong Market um SO waiting for a stock to spike waiting for it to pull back and then waiting to buy a breakout I like doing it on scams um because the price action is usually the most clean and and then shorting stocks that get way too overextended and when they're if you know if a Stock's up three to five days in a row it's going up every single day I'm looking for that first day where it kind of just falls off a cliff uh to short and then I also like um uh Panic dip buying like if there's a huge crash uh making sure that you have to be careful with that because um Panic dip buying and I took some pretty um nasty losses there because I sometimes I just don't understand where the selling pressures come from and I didn't do enough due diligence but um if it's a natural type selling pressure due to stock losses and not um some massive dilution there's usually a good uh bounce and I've really just used those three patterns over the last five years to I just traded those and uh continued to scale them up as if I'm making money I'm using more size if I'm losing I'm using smaller size and I'm just letting the the market and momentum decide how much I'm gonna size into so that's a very simple explanation of what my process is okay so are you looking for say a certain amount of volume above average or breaking uh key technical resistance levels yeah so the number one thing for me is volume because the more volume is the less risk you have because there's you're not going to get into a situation where if you buy or you short it just opens up huge the spread opens up and you end up taking you know three five times where you're planning to risk and uh the slippage can be really detrimental out of liquid stocks and for me the the best trades that I do are stocks that have the most volume so I can size in and I can get out if it's not working and then I'm looking for volume as my number one indicator and my number two indicator is I'm looking at technical levels I'm looking at the history of the stock to see has the stock performed um clean in the in the history or has it been super choppy and annoying how did the daily candles look right I don't want to trade stocks that are super Wiki I want to see a nice full body candle meaning it it opens near the low of the day and it closes near the high of the day I don't want to be trading stuff that spikes huge and then comes all the way back in or vice versa has a huge drop and then comes all the way back because those are where I'll take my biggest losses because uh if something drops 50 and then bounces 300 percent I'll usually um short it into the bounce and then get blown out or if something if I'm long something and the bottom just or the it just starts selling off super bad I'll end up also taking a big loss there so I'm looking for nice clean daily candles okay have you experienced any large losses due to liquidity drying up yeah um I have uh two of my biggest losses one came from mm nff which was an OTC Runner uh in February of 2021 it spiked from 30 cents to like a dollar Thirty over three to five days I ended up shorting it at the open at like a buck 20 and I covered it at 90 cents and it was a good trade maybe I made like 50 Grand on it and then I started um buying uh the dip and started buying 90 70 whatever maybe had like an 80 average and I I noticed I just had way too much size for the volume that the stock was trading I I had like two million shares or something and the stock bounced a little bit and I was up a little but I just couldn't execute my sell order because there wasn't enough volume or enough Bitters and I ended up just kind of sitting in it all day waiting to I was slowly selling it slowly selling it and then at one point it just was 2 p.m and it wasn't bouncing and it was at like 50 cents so I was like it was at 60 cents so I was like I just got to get out of this and I sold my position and the stock was at 60 cents but I didn't even execute my majority of my shares to 50 cents um I ended up losing like over 300 000 on that trade and then another trade um I was shorting this uh Chinese um stock that ran from ten dollars to I started shorting it at 200 bucks and it had really bad liquidity where the spread was 10 15 maybe it could open up to 20 bucks on the spread and the day before they tricked me because the spread was really tight and it was trading a lot more liquidity and the price action was clean and then the next day um they just dried up the liquidity because it was a scam and I started shorting it and they had control of the the float and I ended up shorting out like 200 and I covered at 250 for it wasn't a huge loss I maybe lost like a hundred thousand dollars shortly a couple thousand shares it was more than I wanted to risk though I wanted to risk like 210 220 lose like 20 30 40 Grand whatever um and try to make 100 Grand if I went to a buck 50 because it was super extended and then um it went up and it started going parabolic to 400 bucks and I started shorting again because it was just getting so ridiculous and uh ended up maybe losing another 50k on it just chopping myself up because it never dropped and liquidity got even worse and then the next day um it was trading at like 700 so I was like I have to try this again the Stock's up from 20 bucks to 700 um started shorting and I I decreased my position size so I could deal with the liquidatiness and I ended up uh losing another 100 points on it totaling my losses to like two 250 to 300K and then I tried it one more time the stock went super complete Supernova to 2 500 per share and I was short at the top of the stock I had a a small position short for like 2400 and my broker said hey like you can't swing this overnight it's way too risky and I ended up covering in the spread at that point was like three four hundred bucks and I ended up uh losing maybe like another 100K on it so my total loss is on it was like 400 000 and then the next day it gapped down um like a thousand points or something and started trading and it slowly faded off and now the Stock's at like 20 bucks or something uh but it just the look The liquidity um just dried up and made it impossible to trade and it just went way further than I expected but uh my number one mistake there was I should have just hung up the cleats on it after proved not to be a good Trader after the day um that they proved for it to be a good Trader wow what a story uh so why did the broker um not allow you to hold it overnight were you in a margin call situation no um they they were just lending out fake shares right so in my um I'm not going to name the broker but in my um humble opinion uh it was naked shorts so um they weren't allowing people to um hold it overnight because they didn't really have shares they were just lending shares out um out of thin air so they don't have um the locate to let people hold this overnight oh wow uh so as a result of this uh experience did you set a rule for yourself um so that in future trades you would have a maximum uh position size say percentage uh as a percentage of dollar total dollar volume yeah I would say that for now now I've really learned my lesson where the last year I I was aware of a liquidity a liquid stocks but I've never experienced a scam go to 2500 bucks and at the time it was like top 10 New York Stock Exchange stock on the market and the market cap I think was like 500 billion dollars and the company has zero Revenue it's a complete um scam I just never really expected that to to ever happen and it was just a good learning experience that I I really learned how people actually blew up because before I would hear stories of like hey this guy's blowing up on on this and I'm like I mean like why and now like I understand like wow like this really could happen if if I just shorted at 200 bucks and I held um 2 000 shares I would be down like four million at the top and I would blown up my um shorting account so it really opened my eyes to what could really happen and now if I'm going to trade a liquid stocks like I'll position myself with a hundred thousand dollars um in the stock like if you start pushing like a three four five hundred thousand dollar position that's when it gets really scary because all it takes is 100 to lose uh multiple uh six figures and for me like I'm I can take uh 30 50 70k losses they still hurt but that's like the the most I'm willing to lose on something that's super extended and the liquid and sometimes like they end up working and I can make a few hundred thousand uh if they start to to sell off but for me it's just all about the position size I really don't want to size in more than like a hundred fifty thousand dollars into it uh-huh yeah I would encourage all our listeners to go check out uh the chart on HKD it is uh quite uh shocking to see the movement that it made do you use leverage um no I I mean I will use leverage I have different trading accounts so like if I'm day trading something I will never use leverage but I've started trading uh like bigger cap stocks like um I've made a couple of uh Investments it's this bear market and I do use leverage on on that trading account but I'm never using more than like 1.2 1.3 leverage um because I know those stocks aren't going to make a 50 move down against me without me having time to react to to cut because it'll prove itself over the Long Haul like hey this is breaking support levels I gotta get out the Market's looking bad et cetera versus um day trading I will never and ever use leverage because how crazy the moves can happen and how unpredictable the moves can happen and uh that's the only way I'm using leverage and I'm not really even using leverage because I have my account spread out so it's not like I'm um betting like my entire net worth plus some if that makes sense so what are what conditions do you need to hold penny stocks for multiple days or weeks versus say just day trading them I would say that I need like seasonality huge volume seeing people make money so one of my biggest indicators I had a bunch of thousand percent winners back in December of 20 uh 2020 into February of 2021 because I kept seeing all these Joe schmoes making um thousands of percent and I'm like I'm like how how are these people making money and I was like at some point you just have to realize like people who don't know a lot and people who are just buying into uh scams and they're going up like a lot of people would be like hey these guys are idiots they don't deserve to be making money I'm gonna short this stuff but sometimes like people like that are they're smart for a very narrow um window right but the problem is people never sell and it comes back in and they think it's going to be the next apple but if you just take advantage of that huge move up and you're not you don't fall in love with the company um you can make money so I started seeing a lot of people make money and I started seeing OTC stocks just running like crazy so I started buying stocks that were in hot sectors electric vehicle electric vehicles Bitcoins weeds um just low price stocks trading huge volume with a big story Etc and I bought a lot of those and I probably made 10 to 20 um 500 to a thousand percent winners and some of them I sold way too early and they I could have made like uh like I was buying some stocks at like .006.003.009 one cent three cents and these stocks were going 10 cents 20. um the the biggest winner in all of OTC which had a phenomenal liquidity was tsnp now they merged the company um and now it's hmbl and it went from 0.002 to um over two bucks they also
did it will show that the high is like seven or eight now because once they merged they also did a reverse split or whatever and the price went higher but yeah one of my friends had bought uh 50 million shares of it at .001 and yeah he put about five thousand dollars into it at nothing and at the top it would have been worth like uh 10 million dollars for 100 million dollars um and he put like five grand into it but it would have been impossible to sell all those shares up there of course because it was still trading good in volume maybe like 20 30 million shares a day but um yeah that that's the possibility if you if uh something crazy happens and you get into a crazy market like that and we saw a lot of those just go from dubs and trips to 50 cents a dollar so when I was trading back at two cents though oh wow oh God uh so are you ever are you more emboldened to take on larger short positions in a penny stock or hold short positions longer because of the higher likelihood that whatever fake news uh or hype that caused these type of stocks to spike will reverse quickly um there's a couple problems with shorting and holding like the number one thing being there's a very expensive um short interest like if everybody knows that's a scam everybody's going to be shorting it and the interest will be 500 to a thousand percent to hold it overnight so that just recently happened with uh the ticker gtii it ran from what was it like 80 60 to 80 cents topped out like 9 or 10 cents uh last month and I was shorting it um seven eight and it ended up cracking all the way down to like two or three but I just couldn't justify myself holding 20 30 000 shares short and paying like five seven eight thousand dollars a night and uh overnight interest so I I had a good trade on it the day that it was volatile and it just ended up going sideways for about a week so you would have ended up um paying like 30 or 40 000 just to hold it short which would have ended up paying you money uh if you covered it at two from like 6 6. you would have made good money but for me the stress and um also the uncertainty hey what if this isn't right and it starts going back up um I'm taking a loss plus I'm taking a huge loss in an overnight interest so I I really don't like swinging um the penny stocks overnight that are scams I just like day trading them what I like capturing the day that they're gonna dump 20 to 50 percent and uh covering my shares that day and then maybe the next day I shorted again small size and try to capture another morning panic but I I don't like holding for more than a week or two personally yeah I'd like to move towards uh talking about the mindset in trading I'm curious to hear how do you emotionally detach yourself from the amount of money that you're winning or losing and keep her cool um I would say at the beginning it was really hard because a thousand bucks here a thousand bucks here 500 bucks there went a long way and it still does um that's still really good really good money but now I I have large enough accounts where I don't really even notice like my account go up or down like at the beginning I'd be like watching it slowly grow like 200k 300K 500k 700k whatever Etc and it keep going up but now if I'm trading and my account has like 2.2 million or 2.3 million it doesn't really like matter to me um as much anymore I don't really uh pay attention to it as much because I I've seen so many numbers flicker in my life so I guess you just kind of get numb to it did you consider trading to be a uh a sport yeah I would say it's it's definitely a sport um you're competing against everyone else and usually the people that put in more work like they're going to be more uh profitable and they're they're going to out trade you because they're they're working harder so the more work you put in it's the same with sports if you're in the gym shorting uh shooting free throws every single night you're gonna be able to make those free throws in the game for someone who just doesn't practice good point um what about personal care uh when you're striving toward your trading goals upon reflection did you think you were making major health or relationship sacrifices yeah I in in uh 2019 2018 when I was living um in Michigan I had no car uh I had like one or two friends and I would just sit in the office and just study and watch the market all day every day and the market was um not very good back then so it's just super depressing because I was working so hard and I was barely making any money and I really had a fight for every dollar that I was making plus I had bills to pay um because I had to pay rent and stuff like that groceries so it was super um depressing and that was when I was really sad and then um ended up moving back home and I had a car again and I had more friends and that was that was nice and I started getting um more happy and then the market turned on to um the market just started going crazy and I knew how hard I was working in 2019 so I used all that energy and I feel like this is what kind of separated me between a lot of other people um is that they didn't work as hard because they didn't grind as hard and put themselves through depression to learn the market in 2019 and 2018 2017 um and I just wanted it so bad that I was willing to do anything and tell anyone to leave me alone like I'm focused and I was so zoned in in so much tunnel vision I ended up getting super sick in 2020 and 2021 um 2020 uh got kovid traded through it and then towards the end of the year was my worst sickness I got um mono and strep throat at the same time and I was so beat up um but the market was so hot this was in December of 20 uh 20 and I just continued um to trade through it and ended up really just like putting myself into a habitual burnout where I I had no energy for like two or three years like I was so sluggish I was so irritable and but I knew like this is what had to be done to get where I wanted to be and now this year um I've made sure like hey if the Market's not good I'm not going to sit here and trade all day I'm gonna go I've been go traveling a ton this year I get um massages weekly I make sure to get outside and go for a walk every day and make sure to exercise this was nothing I was doing I was just sitting in front of the computer screens all day every day um the last couple years and I had to uh re-teach myself how to have fun because when people are having fun um the previous three years I wouldn't even allow myself to have fun because I just wanted to focus on trading and that's the only thing that mattered and uh now I I love having fun and I re-taught myself how to have fun and uh picked up I've probably picked up like 30 to 50 Hobbies this year and stuff that um I used to love when I was a kid and I just stopped liking them because I was so focused on trading so it's been a nice shift and this has been one of the better years of my life because now I have the freedom um to do what I want and I'm still making money in the market and I'm not a stressed out wow that's great that you're learning uh how to get some balance um between trading the markets and taking care of yourself uh have you developed since processes are important when trading the market have you explored developing processes for other areas of your life like you know diet exercise yeah I I definitely have um I would say like the main thing is I've really just been focused on like schedule driven this year so I I get up at a certain time I do certain stuff throughout the day I usually make a certain breakfast and I get outside at a certain time so if every day that I'm home and it's a regular work day I have a specific process I'm doing my Excel work on a specific time Etc and I think that's definitely have learned that type of discipline through um trading and but when I go on vacation I kind just I don't really follow a process I just do what I can to experience the most that I can what would you say to your fellow Trader regarding mindset and personal care any tips um I would say like the number one thing for me that I regret that I didn't do was I didn't stretch enough of my upper back and I developed a lot of knots and also I got a lot of sickness because I wasn't taking vitamin C and I wasn't seeing the Sun so my number uh my two top tips are to get outside every day and just make sure that if you are feeling stressed just to use a massage gun or to stretch um your upper back area a lot because you you really can develop nasty knots that that don't go away and significantly decrease your life and happiness great advice my understanding is that your process and your discipline and strategies helped you turn just ten thousand dollars into over six million in just four years has your lifestyle changed throughout your trading successes um I I turned about I had 10 000 but then I kept working my valet job and um I ended up uh starting and my mom also um gave me my mutual fund too um supporting me and I ended up starting with like 20 to 30k kind of in between that range and uh I've turned that now into almost 11 million in profits but yeah after taxes I'm clear I'm obviously not I don't have 11 million um but that is how much I've made my career nice yeah nice I mean did you modify your lifestyle over that time period or um meaning like what have I done for myself yeah like I mean do some people imagine well you know as soon as I get my first million I'm gonna buy this or buy that or um you know take a nice long vacation to some fancy place uh did you modify your lifestyle much well when I hit my million dollar market was in November of 2020 and I I couldn't enjoy myself because the market was so crazy that I had to stay focused um and the next month I ended up making 800 000 almost doubling what I had already made um and I was just so focused and then the next month I made um like a million and a half in the next month like 2.5 or something and during that stretch like I I wasn't even realizing how much money I was making I was just trading because there were so many opportunities and I was just doing whatever I could um and at one point like I couldn't even keep up with my Excel work or like tracking how much I was making or losing and I was just trading um at one point I had like um 70 to 100 positions on overnight every single night and um I I couldn't even begin to think like hey I need to do I need to uh buy this or buy that but it was only after um I finished like that hot wave and then I could say hey the Market's slowing down I only made I tried really hard this month I only made 100 Grand compared to like my other few months and then I started saying like hey what can I do now with this with this cash so I ended up um one of the first things that I did was I withdrew 50 000 or 100 000 from the bank and I gave my my parents um 50 000 each uh on my 20 on my 23rd birthday uh which was about a year and a half ago and that was the first thing that I did and then the second thing that I did was uh the next month after that I bought a car uh nothing crazy I got a Nissan 370Z um fun little summer car and after that um I've bought a I bought a couple watches just I like them because they they hold value and also take some um some cash out of your account and giving you some physical value and uh other than that that was really it I bought my girlfriend um some nice presents throughout the years really the only other thing is um I spent a lot uh on travel and experiencing stuff through this year and and late last year um I've been to Italy Greece um I have a trip coming up soon I'm going to Norway Sweden and Denmark for a food tour uh going to be eating at the top five uh or five out of the 12 best restaurants in the world with um also the the I am eating at the top rated restaurant in the world and that's like an experience that I'm really excited about um other than that um yeah just taking uh learning uh photography and stuff like that great yeah that sounds like a fun uh Adventure you're gonna go on uh yeah uh yeah that video that I saw of you going to the bank on your 23rd birthday that was really impressive I mean withdrawing in all that money and cash and then you know giving it to your mom and dad is thanks for being good-loving parents to you I you know I can't forget the Expressions on your parents faces it was uh very moving ah thank you man yeah so in closing what would you say to traders who are losing money um first off like this year has been very difficult and I would say that the last couple years like it was relatively easy to make money um as long as you had some type of process it didn't even have to be that disciplined because um everything was just there's so much volatility and volume and now it's very difficult and this type of year is the best to learn and because it's really going to teach you your discipline and it's going to teach you a process and if you don't follow that process and discipline you're going to lose money consistently but if you are disciplined um you'll be able to make small consistent money and just know that eventually um a hot wave will come back around and that's when you scale up and that's really going to be the Difference Maker in your account and if you are prepared and you have been working on your process this entire year you're going to be able to do great things so just have some patience and continue to work every day even if it's demotivating I know how it feels I I worked every single day for months and years without really turning a profit but all it takes is uh one month really to grow your account um a hundred two hundred percent and then from there if you keep compounding it you'll be surprised by how exponential it could potentially go if you have the right process and you have the right Market lineup yeah great advice Jack he was uh thanks for coming on chat with Traders it was great having you on the show yeah thanks for having me it was really a pleasure uh to speak with you again yeah how can our listeners get in touch with you uh I have my Twitter's jackaroo underscore trades my Instagram is just my first and last name Jack Kellogg uh Kellogg's k-e-l-l-o-g-g a lot of people just put one G um has two G's other than that I some of my uh trades are posted on kinfo um and profitly a couple of uh third-party verification softwares that I use and that's about it great thanks for sharing Jack thank you you reached the end of this episode of chat with Traders but rest assured there are more episodes loaded with real Market insight and zero hype on the way soon so to stay updated with each great new release subscribe to the podcast and iTunes and we'd love it if you'd leave a rating and review we'll catch you next time on chat with Traders [Music] foreign [Music]
2022-12-10 13:55
