What the Markets Have Taught Me

I share a lot of research through GB Capital, but I also want to share the experience behind it. The last six years have included some really good periods and some painful ones. I’ve built things up and lost a lot along the way. This is an honest look at both sides, including some things that aren’t easy for me to put in writing. Hopefully sharing what I’ve been through can help someone else, whether that means learning from a mistake I made or having someone they can relate to.

How I Got Here

When I started college at Clemson, I was a business management major and had no real idea what I wanted to do with my life. I didn’t grow up around investing. The only stock I knew anything about was stocking the shelves at Lowe’s the summer after high school. I understood working and saving. Trading, investing, compounding and owning businesses were things I knew almost nothing about.

Around January 2020, during my sophomore year, a statistics professor mentioned calls and puts. My first thought was basically, “Who am I calling, and where am I putting this stuff?” I had no clue what he was talking about, but something caught my attention. I went home and started researching. That turned into reading, podcasts, YouTube and pretty much anything else I could get my hands on, often for hours every night until I went to bed.

I opened a Robinhood account and started making little ten dollar trades while learning the basics. I changed my major to finance and took additional classes covering things like the time value of money. For the first time, I felt like I had found something I wanted to spend my life doing.

Then COVID happened. My introduction to the markets included watching them crash and rebound incredibly quickly. I was learning about stocks, options, value investing and crypto all at once. I had some successful trades and one really lucky trade that gave me enough capital to keep going. There was real effort going into learning, but there was also luck involved, and that matters when I look back on those early years.

After college, I worked in commercial banking and investment research while continuing to study and trade outside work. Those experiences helped me understand businesses, cash flow and how investment decisions get made. Through all of it, the interest in the markets never went away.

Losing What I Had Built

By 2022, I had built up what was a lot of money to me as someone in their early twenties. A large portion was in crypto I had accumulated over time. I had been holding it in my own wallet, but I decided to move it to FTX. When the exchange went bankrupt, I lost access to that money.

That decision to move it there was mine, and it’s one of the more expensive ones I’ve made. I had spent a lot of time thinking about what I owned and too little thinking about where I held it or what could happen if the exchange failed. I had put so much work into building something, and suddenly I was facing the prospect of having to rebuild.

What made it worse was what came after. I wanted the money back quickly, and I took bigger risks in futures and options trying to recover it. That made the damage worse. Losing access to the money was one event. What I did with what was left afterward was another, and I have to own those decisions too.

Looking back, one of the hardest things to recognize was that I was taking more risk while my confidence and judgment were already affected by the loss. I wanted to get back to where I had been, and that urgency influenced decisions I could have seen more clearly without it.

Starting Over

I went back to working, saving and trading, doing whatever I could to rebuild. I took moving jobs and found ways to put money back into the account. Slowly, through work and more disciplined trading, I built the base back up. It took patience, and it gave me a much greater appreciation for protecting capital I had worked hard to accumulate.

It also took years of studying different approaches before I settled into the style of trading I use now. CAN SLIM and the work of Mark Minervini, David Ryan and Nicolas Darvas were important influences, along with the work of TraderLion and Revere Asset Management. I became especially interested in leading stocks, the conditions that support their advances and the patterns they form before moving higher.

I love that part of the work. A company or theme catches my attention, and I start watching how the stock behaves. Is it holding up while the broader market struggles? Is relative strength improving? Has it spent enough time consolidating a previous move? Are the weekly and daily charts starting to line up? Following those developments gives me something specific to evaluate as an opportunity takes shape.

Over time, those same observations became central to how I read the market as a whole. When more stocks are building constructive bases and following through, that tells me something about the environment. When attractive setups keep failing, that tells me something too. Much of my market view comes from going through individual stocks and watching how those opportunities develop.

What I’ve Learned

Urgency has been one of the most costly things in my trading. The period after FTX is the clearest example. The more I wanted that money back, the less patient I became and the easier it got to justify risk I wouldn’t normally take. That experience is a big part of why I pay attention to whether a decision is being driven by the opportunity in front of me or something I want the trade to fix.

I’ve made just about every mistake in the book along the way. I’ve chased, traded too big, taken profits too early and let a previous outcome affect the next decision. Eventually, I had to take an honest look in the mirror. I was willing to spend hours learning about the markets, but I also needed to understand why I sometimes acted against things I already knew. Recognizing those tendencies helped me see where I needed clearer rules and stronger safeguards.

The difficult periods affected more than my account. They tested my confidence, affected my mental state and put strain on some of my relationships. Having people I could actually talk to mattered more than I understood when I started. When I tried to carry everything internally, it became harder to keep perspective. Being honest with people close to me helped, and it’s something I value a lot more now.

I’ve also become more careful about how I evaluate results. A profitable trade can reinforce a bad habit if I never ask how the money was made. A controlled loss can come from a reasonable decision that simply didn’t work. I want to understand both while still holding the overall process accountable for what it produces over time.

People talk about paying your market tuition. At this point, I feel like I’ve gotten my undergrad, master’s and PhD from Stock Market University. I would really appreciate being done paying for additional degrees.

Where I Am Now

Looking back, I also want to give myself credit for what went well. Working and saving helped me rebuild, but a substantial part of that capital came from trading profits. There was luck involved, especially early on, but there was also real skill developing through years of studying, identifying setups and making good trades. Those successes were real, just like the mistakes. What I’ve had to learn is how to protect that progress when I’m under pressure.

These experiences have changed me as a person. I’m more self-aware, more understanding of what other people might be going through and more conscious of how my decisions affect the people around me. I wish I had learned some of those lessons another way, but I can see how they’ve changed my perspective.

The strange thing is that I still absolutely love the markets. I love studying companies, finding setups and watching leadership develop. I love the research, the challenge and the psychology. There are probably easier paths I could have taken, and I’ve had plenty of reasons to question this one. The interest has never gone away.

The research I share through GB Capital comes from that ongoing work. I want readers to understand what I’m seeing, why it deserves attention and what would change my view. The experience behind that research has given me a much greater respect for uncertainty and for the discipline required to turn an idea into a sound decision.

This has been a steep learning curve, and it hasn’t been easy. There has also been meaningful progress, and I’m proud of the knowledge, skill and perspective I’ve developed. The curiosity that started with a confusing comment about calls and puts in a Clemson classroom is still there. I’m approaching it now with more experience, a clearer process and a much better understanding of myself. Hopefully sharing both the research and the lessons behind it can be useful to others along the way.