Hi I’m Rick Montieth, full time day trader
and trading mentor. This is my story…

==============
The Early Days
==============

Many moons ago, way back in the 80s I was
a total rookie to trading.

I read a few books on investing, I learned
the basics and decided to dip my toe in
the markets.

How hard could it be?

I started out with a Prudential broker. He
talked me into shorting bond futures.

I took his advice and lost $1,000 in my
first trade. Not a good start!

Then he advised me to short corn so I agreed
to let him short a couple of contracts
for me…

Corn went ‘limit up’ that day and I suffered
another loss.

I chalked it up as a lesson… Don’t listen
to your broker!

So anyway…

I left that broker soon after and opened an
account with a brand new commodity broker
local to me.

I was their first account, in fact.

I began trading currency, gold, silver,
palladium & grains.

My new broker was a big gold trader. He
expected a big correction in the metals at
the time and strongly advised me to consider
getting short.

I did my own analysis and agreed with him.

So we started building a decent sized short
position in gold & silver futures.

I got a call from him early one morning to
tell me that metals were down big time and
I was in the green. It worked!

I netted about $45,000 in profit from that
one trade.

It felt great. As I’m sure you can imagine!

[ – – – – – – – 80s Flashback – – – – – – – ]

Things were really different in the 80s…

To place an order I had to call my broker
who would then call the order in to the floor
for me.

At that time my only form of ‘charting’ was
weekly price charts I had mailed to me.

I subscribed to a few newsletters and would
make trading decisions on their advice.

That was the full extent of my technical
analysis!

Back then there were no real time data feeds
or tick by tick charting software.

A few years later though…

I had my CQG data coming in via a satellite
connection on my roof.

I even had a couple of dedicated CQG trading
screens in the house.

It was high tech stuff at the time!

Thankfully though things have come a long way
since then.

[ – – – – – – – /80s Flashback – – – – – – – ]

Anyhoo…

I was riding high after my big $45k win.

Oh man, I had discovered the holy grail.
I was on easy street. I felt Invincible.

Nothing could stop me! I thought I had
arrived.

But the market had other ideas…

Encouraged by my early success I began
trading larger positions.

But I was making trades based on emotion
rather than any solid analysis. And
that rarely ends well.

I had a few wins and a few losses.

Overall though my account balance was
generally heading south.

And I was losing more money than I was
comfortable with.

I decided that omething significant had to be
done to reverse my fortunes…

Within a year my broker and I began building
another, much larger short position for the
next leg down in the metal markets.

That was the plan at least…

By the time we were done my full short
position was 11 big sized gold & silver
contracts.

I felt good about it. Confident.

I fully expected to see my account
balance several times larger over the
coming days and weeks.

Easy money!

So I went to bed feeling pretty pleased
with myself and I got some shut eye.

=========
The Call
=========

Then the phone rang.

Bleary eyed, I looked at my alarm clock and
saw it was around 2AM. Uh oh.

On the other end of the line was my broker. It
was a margin call… to the sum of $100,000.

There had been a violent short squeeze in the
overnight trading of the metal futures.

I had no stop losses to bail me out. Big
mistake.

My trading capital had been wiped out in the
blink of an eye. But even worse than that
I was now facing a huge margin call.

My broker closed the trade and I was done.
Busted. Account well and truly blown.

Big time.

I wondered if I was still dreaming…

=============
The Aftermath
=============

Talk about devastation.

Having to tell my family what happened and
coming up with what little money I had…

It was gut wrenching.

Fortunately my parents were able to loan me
the money to meet the margin call.

I was done trading. It took me over 7 years to
pay back the loan.

It was a brutal lesson.

So you can trust me when I tell you that I
understand the pain of losing to the markets.

I’ve been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt.

I know how it feels.

That was the end of my trading adventures for
the next 15 years or so.

I didn’t trade futures again until the year 2000.

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