By Ching Yuen, staff writer
Four months ago, Victory T. knew nothing about the stock market. However, ever since he has taken Mr. Lynch’s Honors Economics class, Victory is now the proud owner of a $7000 portfolio.
Like many other students, Victory took Honors Economics to get a GPA boost, but an assigned experiment on an investment simulator website, Investopedia.com, got Victory into learning more about long term and short term investments. After discovering the existence of the financial market at school, Victory asked his mother for a stock account to play around with. His mom started him off with a $300 account.
Although Honors Economics helped give Victory a general overview of the financial market, it was insufficient to his insatiable desire for more knowledge. Outside of class, Victory spent 3-4 hours a day learning on his own about the market. He watched videos learning about the technical tools such as trading indicators, the fibonacci ratio and numerous candlestick patterns.
Victory said: “The whole process of learning the technicals made me sacrifice all my free time. As soon as I completed my normal routine after arriving home, I would watch videos and read articles of the stock market.”
The initial exploration of the stock market led to Victory’s first successful trade. “I did a trade on Alibaba and turned it into $500 [on Robinhood]. I got excited and tried to replicate the success on Investopedia and test my strategy. I bought Tesla calls, and by some miracle, Tesla pumped up and I was first place in the Investopedia game,” Victory said.
After finding some success in day trading, Victory’s father put $500 into the Robinhood account, raising the total money in the account to $1000. With additional capital, Victory was able to make an extra $250 before winter break. However, Victory experienced his first huge loss during winter break, losing $400 after a bad trade.
“After that loss I spent January learning more about the market. I sacrificed time to study for calculus and AP classes. I hid my grades from my parents at the time because I was failing 3 of my classes. I was so worried about making money, I wasn’t worried about grades,” Victory said.
After taking January off and practicing trading with Investopedia, Victory got back into trading in February. It took him three weeks to make back the $400 loss, and after another two weeks, his account grew to $2000, and ballooned to $4500 by the end of the month.
Victory believes his success comes from learning from mentors online and controlling his emotions during a trade: “I was able to recognize my emotions in trading. My mentors share videos during the day and I would watch the trade live.” Victory adds, “I was taught about some chart patterns and traps that the market sets to get beginner traders.”
As high school graduation looms ever closer, Victory plans to trade and invest in the stock market after high school. “I see it as a career pathway. I already put so much time into learning things like fibonacci, trend lines, patterns. I know some setups that have a good risk to reward ratio,” Victory said. But at the end of the day, the goal for Victory isn’t just about making a lot of money. He said, “The freedom of trading gives me more time to spend with my family and friends during the day.”
