This year marks my tenth year as a professional investor, and now I feel qualified to talk about this topic: Do you want to be a professional investor?
Let me answer a question first, is it okay to be a professional investor?
My answer is: There is no better job in this world!
This is an industry that can stand up and make money . In terms of professional dignity, no industry can compare with professional investment.
You don't have to look at anyone's face, you don't have to please anyone, and you don't even have to deal with anyone. Even if you want to find clients, as long as your trading skills are good enough, you don’t even need to look at the faces of the clients, it’s the clients who are begging you.
This is the most freelance job in the world. If there is a market, you can watch the market and make transactions. If there is no market, you can do whatever you want. As far as I am concerned, I have to take 2-3 months of vacation every year conservatively. In fact, I can take 4-6 months of vacation a year as long as I want, which does not include Saturdays, Sundays and international legal holidays.
This is still a very lucrative profession. As long as your trading level can reach a stable profit, it is normal to have a conservative income of several million a year, and with the accumulation of experience, under the effect of compound interest, the future annual income will exceed ten million , over 100 million is also possible.
Although I don’t want to talk about my income, I can tell you very bluntly that my peers, even graduates from Tsinghua University and Peking University, if they didn’t succeed in starting their own businesses, they just went to work in big companies like Huawei, Ali, and Tencent. It is difficult to surpass me in income, and it is foreseeable that the gap will become wider and wider in the future.
In a word : an excellent professional investor has money, leisure, and dignity.
Is there anything better in this world than this profession? Anyway, I can't find it.
Well, seeing this, do you also want to be a professional investor?
My answer is: You should wash up and sleep, and stop daydreaming.
The probability of success in this business is no more than one in ten thousand. This is an extremely difficult road. Don’t look at the winners who are happy, and the dead bodies of the losers on the trading road.
As for why 99.99% of people cannot succeed, I won’t talk about it here. I have said a lot in previous articles.
You can think about it, and apply a line from the movie "Let the Bullets Fly": Kneeling to make money is not shabby.
If you still want to continue to be a professional investor, I will write some of my own experience below, as well as some suggestions——
The first is to become a professional investor and hope to make a living from trading, you need to meet the following two conditions:
First, your own trading should be able to achieve stable profits, and preferably last for more than three years.
What is stable profit?
This does not refer to whether you can make money in trading, even if you have made a lot of money in trading, or even made huge profits, it is not called stable profit.
Stable profit means that your capital curve should preferably rise upwards at a 45-degree angle, and the drawdown of the account should be small (preferably no more than 10%), and it should be maintained for many years.
It is not difficult to make money from trading, but it is difficult to make a stable profit. As long as you start to make a stable profit, even if the rate of return is not high, for example, as long as the annualized rate of return is more than 20%, it is very good, and you already have the foundation of professional investment. .
But let me tell you that this is very, very difficult, and I have barely achieved it in the last three years or so. Please pay attention to my wording: barely, which means that it cannot be said to be fully achieved now (the maximum retracement last year was about 15%).
Second, you must have a certain amount of principal.
If you have been able to make a stable profit, the principal is not very important, but you must have a certain foundation. I personally think that you must have a principal of at least 500,000 RMB, and it is best to have more than 1 million.
Why this number?
50*20%=100,000.
In other words, you can rely on your investment income to basically meet your consumption for a year.
If you can't meet the above two, I really don't recommend you to resign and embark on the investment path full-time.
So for ordinary people, who still want to take the career path in the end, what are some good suggestions?
If you really love investing and hope to embark on this path in the future, I suggest you do this——
First of all, you can find a job related to investment. This job can guarantee your basic life. I think it is best to have an income of 5,000-10,000 yuan. In this way, there is no problem with basic life and you have no worries.
Don’t underestimate the monthly income of thousands of dollars, although it is small, but fortunately, if you rely on investment to earn this money, then you will be under great pressure. If there is no market in the past few months, you will be If there is no income, the psychological pressure will be great, and the operation will be deformed.
And if you're a man and you have a family and you have to support your family, the stress is multiplied. Under high pressure, trading may not only fail to make money, but may accelerate your bankruptcy.
Why do I want to focus on this, because I am a person who has experienced it!
What is the core of doing business? I tell everyone: live!
Don't think about freedom, make a lot of money, and reach the pinnacle of life.
After becoming a professional trader, it's so fucking hard to live, and it's so hard to keep your stomach full.
In 2011, I broke my trading position and lost all my funds. At that time, it was a few months after my son was born. I had to repay the mortgage every month, and buy milk powder and diapers for the child. No, I have experienced that kind of despair.
Fortunately, I was not a professional investor at that time, I was still working in a bank, and I received about 2,000 yuan a month. With this 2,000 yuan, I survived the darkest moment in my life.
After more than ten years, although I hate the job in the bank, I am still grateful to the bank. After all, it made me alive in such a difficult time.
Just imagine, after you quit your job, you don’t have any money, and you really have to rely on trading to make money, and you lose a lot in trading. What kind of mental state is that?
In 2013, I finally made up my mind to become a professional investor, because I earned more than 1 million during the wave of gold and silver declines, and I had enough courage, but at that time my trading did not reach a stable profit level, to be precise , is still far from stable profitability.
I prepared myself for the worst:
I used the money I made to pay off the mortgage of more than 700,000 yuan. My wife still has a job. I thought about it. If the transaction is really unsuccessful, I can barely survive with only 3,000 yuan a month. I am confident about this. There are still.
Here again, why is stable profit the most important?
Many retail investors fantasize about stepping into professional investors for the following reasons:
One is that some people do not work well and their career development is limited. For example, they can't understand their own leaders, so they regard career investment as a tool to escape reality.
This kind of person should not enter the professional investor industry, because in essence, this kind of person has a weak heart. Professional investment is 10,000 times crueler than your part-time job. People with weak psychology cannot survive the dark moments in professional investment.
The second is that some investors have made a lot of money in a big market, such as a big bull market, so that they have an illusion: it is much easier to make money in trading and stock trading than in going to work.
This kind of situation often happens after a big bull market. Many investors have a serious perception bias, thinking that they are an investment genius, and they don't think that this is the wealth brought to them by the big bull market. Once the market is not going well, not only will you lose all the money you earned in the bull market, but you will also lose your own pants. Forced to return to work again.
The third is that some poor people born at the bottom hope to achieve sudden wealth through leverage, so as to reverse their miserable lives.
In fact, this is a bit similar to me. I was born at the bottom of the society, with no resources, no background, and maybe no education (I have a degree anyway). I feel that it is impossible to get ahead in other industries in my life. I only have fantasies to gamble in this market. Give it a fight and see if you can succeed.
First of all, if you have this kind of thinking, you will lose with a high probability, because you are at the bottom and really can't afford to lose.
Even if you are really talented, if you want to be truly successful in the investment industry, I think it is impossible to be less than 5 years. It is very likely that you will need about 10 years of investment experience before you can gradually succeed.
Let’s take a look at the well-known and successful investors and fund managers in the world. Most of them started to succeed when they were around 36-42 years old. I vaguely remember that Soros also established Quantum Fund when he was 39 years old.
There are no shortcuts in this line of work. He needs a lot of practice, a lot of trial and error, experience needs to be accumulated, and talents are likely to succeed. This undoubtedly requires a huge "tuition fee".
And the bottom investors can't afford to pay the tuition, you can't afford to lose.
Can you imagine, can you not make money from trading for ten years in a row?
The harsh reality of life has already defeated you.
And people at the bottom will have a psychological problem that is almost impossible to overcome:
I only have tens of thousands of principal, how can I quickly increase the principal?
If you take a steady approach to trading (earning 20% per year), you can only reach 1 million in the year of the monkey?
The only way is to gamble heavily. As we all know, if you do this, it may take half a year at most, and you will be out of the market.
People are eager for quick success, let me ask, who can accept ten years of hard work?
They all hope that I will get rich tonight.
Written here, can answer a question:
Since you said that stable profits are more important than sudden wealth, how can I solve the problem of not having much capital but wanting to get rich eventually?
My answer is:
First, it is almost impossible for you to make stable profits, especially in the early stages of your career.
Second, if you really achieve stable profits, it is so easy to earn a lot of wealth, and it is very simple.
One is that you can enjoy the huge benefits of compound interest if you make a stable profit, which can snowball.
This kind of snowballing is very scary. Here is an example of my own:
At the worst time in 2018, my account net worth was only 16,000 US dollars. Let alone the current figure, many people should not be able to reach it.
2020 is the year with the highest rate of return for me (about 6-7 times), and last year was the year with the lowest rate of return in the past three years, but I will tell you a fact: I only made about 30% of the profit last year, but the whole year Earn more money than in 2020, do you believe it?
Second, once you make a stable profit, you can help people manage their finances. The best way is to issue private equity funds and gradually expand the scale of management. You only need to manage more than 10 million, even if the annual rate of return is only 20%, the dividends are enough for you to live. It's very good.
After writing this, if you are really a long-term investor with super willpower, do you still care about your own principal?
What you have to do is, through strict risk control, keep repeating small losses and big gains, so that funds can grow steadily.
Of course I know that no investor would listen to the above words, they are all nonsense, it is like saying to a child:
If you study hard now, your life will be much smoother after you are admitted to a prestigious university...
I have written a lot, so I will stop here for the time being. If I have a chance in the future, I can continue this topic.
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