ColeTrades.com

Who am I?
I graduated high school and began working as a cashier in a Hess gas station located in central New York. I later moved far, far from home and got a job working as a cashier in a Phillips 66 gas station located in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Shortly after getting promoted to manager, I married my long-time boyfriend and I left my career in the fuel and c-store industry. At the time, I was the one making more money. However, my husband had the college education and we moved to Arkansas so he could follow his career in graphic design. For a time I worked at a couple different jobs I didn’t enjoy and eventually was hired to handle collections for JB Hunt, a national trucking company. (As you can see, from my stellar career of working for gas stations and a trucking company, I’m not a super genius, just an everyday hard working gal.)

My husband on the other hand was not satisfied working for other people, and launched a successful graphic design firm, ColeCom. Not long after he started the firm, I quit my collections job to join him in the business and take over the accounting. That was thirteen years ago. Later, in 2005, we were forced to downsize our firm from a staff of nine, back to just the two of us. It was a painful experience and we vowed to never go through that again. At that point, we converted most of our downtown office space to a contemporary art gallery. (My husband is a passionate artist as well as a designer, photographer, and illustrator) Shortly after the economy headed south we found ourselves once again going through another painful downsizing.

These two painful events convinced me that I no longer wanted to be a slave to the market and the economy. These events are what drive me now to harness the market’s natural movement and become a successful trader. I have chosen to revoke the market’s authority over my life. Through training, and practice, our family will not go backwards in business ever again.

How did I become a trader?
In February of 2008, my husband went to a Peter and Tamara Lowe event where he had seen a demonstration of the Investools program for investing in the market. He immediately knew that I could learn with their tools and signed us up for the two day intro class. We went together and I loved every minute of it. I was so excited to dig in. We had opted to go ahead and purchase the education package to learn about options trading. Now this is where people started telling me they didn’t understand. While everyone seems to understand buying stock on the market and holding it for long periods of time, few people grasp the leveraging aspects of the options market. If they have ever even heard of it before, they just believe it is extremely risky and you need to be a Wall Street genius to do it. However, it is the risk/reward ratio that I find so appealing. Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with buying and holding stock. The buy and hold method of investing can and often does work. However, it generally takes much longer to see significant returns and requires far more capital to get started than I had access to initially.

So there you have it. It all started at a Get Motivated event, then I took some Investools training courses, and now I use several tools to study the market, research my trades, and format my strategies. Now that you know the story of how I became a trader, subscribe to my blog and you can join me on my journey. My hope is that you will find it an inspiring, educational, and probably a bit humorous.