The Inspiration

For more than twenty years my career was dedicated to broadcast television, with the latter and majority of those years in sports broadcasting.  Over that time I held various creative and executive management positions with ESPN, FOX, ABC and CNN.

During my television career I held leading management roles in launching two new sports networks, ESPN2 & Fox Sports Net, and fifteen new or revamped programs. For those of you who may be familiar with broadcast television, and most specifically sports television, you may know that sports television work is primarily a nights and weekends profession, when the majority of games and events occur.  So for the greater part of those twenty years I worked nights and weekends.  It was great, for a single guy.  Another benefit of this business is that your days are largely free to pursue other interests.  For me, and for many of my friends and colleagues, we used that time to trade and invest in the stock market.  As the great bull run of the mid-late nineties developed, many of us discovered that our hobby was becoming more and more of a successful endeavour.

Most unfortunately, and just four months after being married in 1999, my mother was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer. During the subsequent twenty-two months, I traveled consistently on a bi-weekly basis from our home in Southern California to Michigan to help care for her and assist her in managing the construction of the very first house she ever owned. Ultimately, my incredibly compassionate employers at ABC, who had provided me with almost unlimited paid time off for close to a year, and I mutually agreed that I could no longer satisfy my responsibilities as Executive Producer and continue traveling indefinitely to Michigan.

After discussing the situation with my then new wife, she and I decided that perhaps I should consider investing and trading as a full-time career since proximity was not an issue and it would not require either the hours or the travel of managing sporting events. During these extended periods of travel I had already become much more active in the market. It was early January 2000, the market was very exciting and everything seemed to be working. Between January and March, when the outcome of my mother’s illness had become more apparent, we had begun to delve into her finances and initiate the inevitable planning that would be necessary as her health deteriorated, as was the prognosis.

As a side-note for those of you may be wondering where I’m going with this story, and what it has to do with this website or this new educational trading service… I am certain that you will see the connection almost immediately. I am not sharing this story in any way to illicit sympathy or promotion, but rather to illuminate the positive developments that resulted from our family tragedy and how these unfortunate events ultimately led to the commitment to this project.

As we began to analyze my mother’s finances, investments and retirement assets I began to realize that she had little understanding of her assets, and in many cases even how she obtained them, or why.  Now early March 2000, and the market was becoming fairly irrational, as I am sure we all remember well.

In February, I had decided to shift the majority of my investment portfolio to a largely conservative bias as my mother’s treatments became more intensive and required much more time and care. I felt the need to focus primarily on her care, and on organizing the financial morass that her estate had become, and not have to worry about my own investment activity. 

By April, the market volatility had started to get a little scary, especially with technology stocks.  Not surprisingly, many of her mystery investments were technology stocks and occupied significant positions in both her retirement and private accounts.  Virtually all were “tips” from her friends and colleagues and she literally had scant or no knowledge whatsoever about any of these companies or why she should own them, only that a friend or colleague had suggested that she should.  Fortunately, I was able to convince her that we should liquidate all of her stock based assets, transfer them into fixed income vehicles, and wait to see how all of these simultaneously occurring and overwhelming events, most importantly her health, would progress.

In retrospect, that decision turned out to be a godsend, though motivated by the cruelest of tragic ironies, and likely may never have occurred if her illness had not been diagnosed when it was. If the discovery had come even thirty to sixty days later, the financial consequences for our family, dozens of her friends and their families and many others, as I will next describe, may also have been catastrophic, similar to the thousands of retirees, families and individuals who discovered too late that they were unprotected and unprepared for the magnitude of that most painful of market corrections. If any positive outcome could be taken from her illness, and ultimate passing, the resulting events became largely responsible for my goal and ambition to educate and assist individuals, and particularly retirees, about protecting their investment and retirement assets.

As the market began imploding, my mother realized and understood that if we had not intervened, which she resisted initially, that her assets and estate may have been ravaged without the action we took to secure them.  As a result, she began calling and telling all of her friends, mostly retirees, what we had done and that they too should act before it was too late. Beginning in May of 2000 and for the balance of the year and well into 2001, no fewer than one-hundred of her friends, friends of her friends and friends of their friends began calling for help, some begging for help, about what to do about their retirement assets, stocks, mutual funds and other investments that were quickly, and in many cases tragically, withering to fractions of their peak values. Some had already lost thousands, some hundreds of thousands, and a few had losses exceeding a million dollars. 

One of the common themes among the hundreds of calls and discussions was that time and time again advisors and brokers had assured them that their portfolios were adequately and properly diversified to whether the storm of these inevitable and normal market corrections, and that they should not be overly concerned.  As we all know now, this advice could not have been more wrong or misdirected.

It was during this time of witnessing such intense fear, frustration, insecurity and financial pain that I decided, from that point forward a significant part of my trading and investment career would, and must, include a personal commitment to provide critical educational assistance to individual investors on how to protect their investment assets from the kinds of catastrophic losses that so many suffered during those painful and sobering years.

As a result, for these past seven years, in addition to full-time investing and trading for my living, I have also provided educational services to my family, friends, friends of friends, referrals, and to my local community on the basic but critical methodologies for safe investing, risk management and portfolio protection.  Over the past three years, my small number of clients had grown to the point that I began to think seriously about how to create a more efficient method of providing these services in order to continue offering them, and be able to manage my own trading activity with the attention necessary for success. 

Additionally, many existing clients and nearly all new clients and referrals began inquiring about, or requesting, more sophisticated trading education beyond the basics of Risk Management and Portfolio Protection that I had been providing.  As a result, I began providing more extensive trading and investing education on a limited basis, with just 2 to 4 students at a time, dependent upon their goals and my time constraints.

So… In order to accommodate this growing demand, and in pursuit of the more efficient vehicle which would streamline the educational process and provide access to it from a larger contingent of traders and investors in need of this type and scope of education…  One year ago I took a couple of baby steps and purchased several website domains with the intent of casually developing and launching an educational trading and investment service that would help me manage the growing demand from my current clients, as well as other individual investors interested in unbiased (a phrase of paramount importance) education.  A service focused on teaching sound and proven methodologies directed toward an individual investor’s needs, and not on trading systems or otherwise product directed services that inevitably bombard subscribers with add-ons, proprietary software, DVDs, seminars and huge volumes of other marketing spam, ultimately having little or nothing to do with appropriate education on becoming a successful investor. The market is overrun with these opportunities and their ridiculous claims of 80, 90, and even 100% successful trade rates, many masked as educational services.

Then I met Sam, a real life full-time trader with an interest in providing unbiased education to people about only the most important aspects of his profession and his success.  No systems, No products, No special software, just his experience and the proven methods of experienced and successful traders, and in my opinion, exactly the proper approach for educating prospective traders and investors, as well as for traders and investors of almost any skill level.  This is why I was immediately drawn to Sam, because he provided exactly the kind of critical education that I also was attempting to provide, unbiased educational services based on simple but critical lessons and methodologies learned through years of experience, strict adherence to risk management criteria and trading rules, thorough research and acceptance of failure as a critical learning tool.

Getting to know Sam has now provided a huge boost to bringing The Trade Coach educational service vision to realization. With the many gracious contributions Sam has made to our new educational website, he has literally saved hundreds of hours of development that otherwise would have been necessary to launch the service as envisioned.  For those of you familiar with Sam and his work, I am sure you will take notice of his influence, partially because I too learned much from him, but also because I believe he and I profess and practice the same principles that lead to success in this difficult business. For those of you who are new visitors, I am fully confident that you will discover that the methods, educational tools, commentary and discussions taking place in this new educational community can be invaluable in assisting you in becoming a more complete, educated and successful investor and/or trader.

You may even find our content and discussions somewhat entertaining at times. The Coach does enjoy mixing it up a bit, so for those of you who enjoy a good spar or some healthy debate now and then, you may have discovered just the right place. However, my ultimate hope and goal is that you have found an invaluable service that provides the necessary methods, tools and insights that will help you achieve all of your investment and trading goals… and maybe have a little fun doing it.

Most sincerely,

The Trade Coach