Nobody ever dreams being a penny stock trader. When I was 13, my parents gave me $12,415 for my Bar Mitzvah, which sat in a savings account. I was a great tennis player in my teenage years and practiced every day for nearly 10 years. I went to college basically for that as well. However, at age 18 I was injured and I had surgery on both my arms which prevented me from playing anymore. All this was happening in 1999 when the stock market was going just ballistic. I took the $12,415 and in my senior year of high school, made over $100,000. Freshman year of college I made about $710,000 in profits. I’m from middle class so this was a lot of money. I was just blown away and I decided to only focused on penny stocks.

With regular stocks you have CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, a million websites; everybody covers them. It’s very efficiently priced. For example, if Google reports earnings, you’ll know within seconds because 3,000 people are reading the same press release and 30 people have already commented on it.

With Penny Stocks, it’s very inefficient. The news doesn’t get out very quickly. For example, Liquid Metal (LQMT), is just one of the Penny Stocks that I follow because they now have a deal with Apple. This occurred back several months ago but nobody picked up the press release if there even was one. It could have been an SEC filing because companies have legal filings.

For two days no one noticed and then all the press started coming in. It’s very delayed so you had two days to buy the stock, which I did. I bought it at 55 cents, a day later to 80 cents a share when people are just recognizing it, and then when the press hits it, it was up to $1.70.

You could triple your money within roughly three days. Whereas with Google, even if you’re dead on with guessing where earnings are, you might make 5% on your money. I’m not good at math but if you can triple your money in a few days, that’s fantastic. Then it’s a question of finding the right pattern in trying to see when that kind of extreme volatility will hit.

I started looking for stocks that were moving and penny stocks, stocks that are traded below $5 a share, are very volatile. On the other hand regular stocks like Google barely move. It might move 33 points a day but that’s only about a 5% move. The value of the company is moving up or down 2% or 3% per day.

With penny stocks, they issue one press release and once they get enough momentum, the value of the company can double or triple in a day. I love that volatility.

I trade Penny Stocks because there is no competition. There’s very little competition with Penny Stocks. That’s what it comes down to. I’m training with people who are investing in these things and they are looking at them like lotto tickets. They don’t Google. They don’t research. They are not meticulous so those are the people who I’m taking money from. It’s low hanging fruit but it’s not scalable. It’s only a few million maximum per year instead of other stuff.

My first four stocks were Supercuts, Viacom, Boston Celtics, and Business Objects. These are real companies worth billions and they just wouldn’t move. I had a small account at first and was checking the stocks everyday.

On my first trade I made like $6,000. My account increased by 50%. If you’re an investor or a trader and you can increase your account by 50% over the course of a year, that’s fantastic. However, I did it in about a day and then 10 times my money in the first year. I’m just using these scams, for lack of a better word, and these volatile companies, and betting on them going up or down. You can go both ways.

Different industries and different sectors perform better at different times. When oil is high you may see these promotional mailers about a ‘national oil crisis’ where a company has just found a billion worth of oil and crude. When gold is high, they may say they just found a giant lot in Colombia. With biotech, if there’s a salmonella poisoning somewhere in America, they will use that. It pretty much depends on world events and just the trend, but all of it is bullshit, every single thing.

That’s the beautiful thing, if you see something being promoted about this amazing oil find, it’s bullshit. If you see an amazing gold find, it’s bullshit. There are a lot of people who are very scientific. They show maps. They buy oil fields for like $20,000 that are next to the oil fields worth a billion and they say, “Look, we’re right next to the billion dollar oil field that is owned by X’s son. This one could be also.” They play and they prey on the ignorance of suckers. There are new suckers born every day.

Biotech is very hot. It’s very difficult though with biotech because you can dress up medicine and say this is amazing and only the FDA can really comment and smack it and say, “You know what, this actually killed all the mice in the study.” I try not to do biotech because it’s very unpredictable. Every now and then, some of these companies that are promoted actually make it.

The technology, the oil, the gold, that’s all BS, but biotech, every now and then, they hit a home run and you’re betting against the stock at $2 and it goes to like $20. That happens once out of 100 times but it’s still happening versus the other one.

If you look at, probably I have 6,000 blog posts, probably about 1,000 of them are exposes. Out of those 1,000, 998 of them have failed. The only two that haven’t failed are in the process of failing. I’m not wrong. It’s not a debate whether it’s a scam or not. It’s just a question of when it’s going to get busted.

Remember I turned the $12,415 into $1.65 million pretax within four years during my senior year of high school and college. Then I started a hedge fund my senior year of college where I basically had $1 million post tax and then I raised $1 million from friends and family.

I became the #1 ranked short leader out of roughly 2,000 total hedge funds by Barclay for three years. But I never really made a lot of money. I tried investing and I invested in a friends father’s company. It was the first print at home ticketing company. They won the contract with Six Flags. If you still go to Six Flags, you still use this ticketing from a company called Cygnus. They later went bankrupt but still kept all their contracts. It’s actually a pretty sleek move that happens sometimes with good technologies. You can’t relate good companies to good technology. I was right about print at home ticketing but I was wrong about this company.

I eventually lost a third of my money in this company. Losing a third of your company as a hedge fund basically kills all of your credibility. So over four years of my hedge fund, I was up 20% per year before this investment. Afterwards, I finished up 2% per year, which isn’t that good.

Luckily, on the fourth year of my hedge fund, I got into Trader Monthly magazine’s “Top 30 Under 30′. Most traders are weird and introverted. I had the big mouth, so they put me on CNBC. I was nervous to be on CNBC so I took five tequila shots before I went on. That made me rather fun and luckily, while I was on CNBC, the producer of this TV show called ‘Wall Street Warriors’ was looking for basically a reality show for Wall Street professionals. Since most Wall Street professionals are very weird and they don’t talk about the money that they make, in the CNBC interview, Bill Griffith asked me like how much money have you lost in a day? I was like, “One day, I lost $180,000 but the next day, I made $220,000 true story.”

The other guy was like, “I lost a lot, not that much” and wouldn’t talk about it. So my big mouth got me on this TV show. I ended up going from one episode to starring in five of the series episodes which is now in 20+ countries. I’m actually working right now with two different TV producers on potential shows.

That helped me decide to close my hedge fund because I started getting 20, 30, 50, 100 emails a day from people saying, “Hey I saw you on TV. I want to learn how to trade. I want to turn a few thousand into a few million too.”

I lost $180,000 before. There was this company Taylor Devices (TAYD). It’s still in business. The stock went from $1 to $6 back in 2004 in a day roughly because the Asian Tsunami, and this company makes earthquake absorption equipments so everyone was speculating on message boards that this company was negotiating with Asian governments to put their earthquake absorption equipments on all these buildings. This was total bullshit because the company was near bankruptcy and I exposed it. I talked about it but the stock kept going.

I shorted 100,000 shares at roughly $6. The next day, the stock was at $8 and I cut my losses. It was good because it went up to $9 the next day, but I stuck with it and then the stock crashed from $9 to $6 and I made back $220,000. It was the worst $40,000 I’ve ever made. Then it went down to $2. I was too early in the pump and dump pattern on that one but conceptually, I was right. Most of the time, you’ll find that I’m right. It’s just a matter of timing and that’s why it’s not an exact science. It’s more of an art.

At that point, I was already a millionaire. I’ve been a millionaire since age 22. So I’ve been a millionaire for a decade. That’s nice but at the time I was barely a millionaire and when you lose 10% of your net worth in a day or 15%, it makes you conservative. So now, I’m much more conservative.

Those were my crazy days. Now, I make about $30,000 in a day but I don’t bet that big anymore because now I’m focused on teaching.

The good news is that for trading, you need money to make more money. I’m making money but I’m also paying a ton of taxes so I’m keeping the money in the account. It was very good for me that I wasn’t able to spend a lot. My biggest splurge when I made my first $100,000 in one weekend was taking my entire college dorm out to dinner. It was only like $800 because no one could afford alcohol. We’re all freshmen. I was at the right place at the right time.

When I made my second million, I splurged a little more. I actually just got into watches and had a Rolex. I’m passionate as you can tell so during one of my speeches at my conference in Vegas, I was like, “Do you think I give a shit about this?” I chucked my Rolex across the room. It just went in the wall and it exploded. I just got a Lambo. I got this $5 million mansion. After a decade of being a millionaire, I’m finally enjoying the toys and basically the spoils of what I’ve been working so hard for. But in the beginning, I couldn’t spend because I was using it to trade. Now, I make money trading. I still make roughly $300,000 a year trading but I make roughly $3 million a year from teaching so my business has shifted, which I think is much better.

Covestor was a website that basically taps into your brokerage account and verifies all your trades. As a teacher who is trying to say, “Look at my strategy, look at me,” it’s a very good tool to validate yourself if you’re good. After two years, there were 60,000 traders who signed up. I was number 1 because I went back to $12,000 to show that I could do it again in 2007, and that $12,000 had grown into $200,000. Just the fact that I could go from $12,000 to $200,000 in roughly three years again, showing every trade where students could follow it in real time, see videos, and see the blog posts; that made me number 1 and that gave me crucial, crucial validity and credibility. At one point I was like, “Look at my ranking. Don’t take my word for it. Look at Covestor. Compare me to everybody else.”

It’s just about transparency. That’s why my business succeeds. Covestor was the first stop but I’m all over Facebook, Twitter everywhere showing free picks, showing premium picks, and most of the time, I hit.

I’ve never seen an autotrader millionaire, I’ll tell you that. A lot of people have claimed to have made millions but I have never met anybody who has made millions off autotrading somebody elses strategy. I’m a big believer that it’s also not just about the money. It’s also the self sufficiency. I want my students to learn. I have over a dozen students who have made over $100,000 with my strategy but they are all self sufficient. After what they have learned in a year or two, they don’t need me. I’m just their training wheels. I think that’s infinitely more valuable than if they just autotraded and have made $100,000. They still would have no idea what to do. Now they can go off on their own.

One of my top students has made $600,000. I haven’t created a millionaire yet but he has made $600,000. He didn’t even come to my conference because he is off playing golf. That‘s fine. It’s kind of disrespectful but I’m disrespectful so I appreciate that.

Profit.ly is my version of Covestor. When Covester started getting into autotrading instead of just focusing on tracking as many different bloggers and traders as possible, I was like, I still want to track. So we created Profit.ly. Obviously it’s biased because it’s my website but you could see all my trades. I upload them and the beautiful thing is that instead of just tapping into one of my accounts like Covester did, you see all of my trades across all my accounts. We integrated my newsletter, my chatroom, and everybody else’s chatrooms so now there are 21,000 members in just a over two years. We’re competing against to see who is best and it’s not based on percentage.

It’s based on money because I was number one on Covestor because I turned $12,000 into $200,000. That’s great but I’m not number one in Profit.ly because I only make $200,000-$300,000 a year. There are some traders in there who make $1 million, $2 million a year. It’s based on dollars, which I think is more valuable. When was the last time you paid rent with your 10% earnings? You pay rent with $10,000 not percentages.

We changed that. We integrated it with the newsletters and the chatrooms, and now we basically have this crowd sourcing newsletter movement where out of 20,000+ traders, we pick the best. I think we have 15 newsletters now of the best traders and they also teach. You can see their trades. They have their own chatroom. They do video lessons. Some of them do webinars.

For example one trader has made $1.5 million over the past two years so now if you go to Profit.ly/iu, and you can get into his chatroom. He does webinars and video lessons, and you can learn. It’s not just my strategy. It’s others, and next year, who knows, we’ll have 100 top traders so we’re just growing. I’m not a one-man operation and that’s why a lot of my Profit.ly employees are down here in Florida.

That’s a good question. I actually had my third loss in a row in the past week. I lost roughly $8,000 but this was after me going two months without a loss and making roughly $25,000. If you look at the last two months of my trades, I’m still up roughly $20,000 or $18,000. I don’t know the exact number but I’m still solidly up. But pretend I didn’t have any gains and I just had three losses in a row. How do I recuperate? How do I recover? I’ve had losses before. I’ve had $180,000 losses. So $8,000 in losses doesn’t really matter. My number one rule in all my DVDs, video lessons, blog posts: cut losses quickly.

I lost $ 1,000 today. Did I want to take it? No. I hate losing $1,000 but the stock wasn’t going in the direction that I wanted. I’m betting against the scam and it keeps going higher. I don’t know how long or how much higher it can go. The $7,000 that I lost last week, I was one day off from busting the scam and dropped 50% the day after I took my $7,000 in losses. It would have been about a $30,000 profit. I was on the right track so for anybody who experiences losses, make sure that you are on the right track. There are a lot of close calls in life where you’re so close. You’re like, “Oh just one more day” if this had happened.” But you can start to see a trend over a few weeks, over a few months if you’re on the right track and you’re close, sometimes, you’re going to nail it. You can’t get discouraged.

Every single loss that I take encourages me. Not only because I do a video lesson which helps my students but because when you do something wrong, now you know what not to do. You’ve learned. If I can go back in time, I would have held that scam one more day and made $30,000, but I can’t go back in time. All I can do is learn from it and teach from it. When you’re on the right path, that’s fine. If you keep having losses endlessly for five years, okay, maybe you shouldn’t do that. Maybe you should get on something that’s more successful. But I would encourage people to try everything. Try different strategies, try different industries. I didn’t know that I would make a lot of money getting into teaching. I was running a hedge fund. I was depressed because of my friend’s father’s company which had lost 30%. I was still a millionaire but barely and my credibility was shot.

The TV show reinvigorated me because people started emailing me and I said, “You know what, let me adapt my business motto.” I’m still going to trade. I’m still going to do the exact same thing I’ve always done but because I know that there’s demand, let me try and sell this, which I have, and guess what, I’m making 10 times as much than in trading. That’s just the start. I think I can do better. Maybe when we do an interview in two years, I’ll be making 100 times, when I have software and more. I’m not just a one-man show. There are other newsletters and other gurus. Try everything.

People are very afraid to lose. People are very afraid to fail. I’ve failed rather spectacularly. If you Google “Party’s Over for Hedge Fund King” that was a New York Post article when I got in a fight with that magazine editor and I didn’t know how to deal with the press. He thought that I was losing my money because the success of the TV show had gone to my head. He failed to read the complementary book that I had sent him so he didn’t even know my hedge fund was failing before my TV show even aired. I just put on a happy face for the TV show because I knew that it wasn’t my core trading strategy that made me lose. It was veering away from it.

I’m a very good trader. I’m a very shitty investor. This is what I’ve learned.