Ken Roberts Trading
My name is the Jack of Trades, and I am a Ken Roberts trading student. I don’t mean to start this off sounding like a confessional or an AA meeting, but I wanted to at least let you know who’s doing all this writing. I can’t say enough about the Ken Roberts trading course and what it really means to my life. It’s not even so much just the money that I made with trading commodities, but it has more to do with opening my mind to the unbelievable opportunities that are out there. Have I been wildly successful using Ken Roberts’ trading methods? Naw, I can’t say that. I’ve done okay. I’m not even actively trading right now due to some financial drama that I got myself into a couple of years ago (that’s a whole other story), but I can say this: While there is quite a lot of negative press about Ken Roberts, the Ken Roberts Trading Company, and other things relating to him, I have nothing but good things to say about him. Did he teach me all that there is to know about commodity trading? Nope. He simply introduced the basics to me, and I took the initiative to expand my knowledge base from there.
It All Started with the Sugar Brochure…
I remember back in my college days, I was an entrepreneur at heart, I had done a quick stint in Amway, and all that did was light my fire to figure out how I could own my own business, or just do something that would allow me to be my own boss and set my own hours, all that jazz. I was buying every get-rich-quick scheme under the sun, wasting hundreds of dollars a month on mail order scams and so forth (the internet had not yet come into power). Evidently, I got on some kind of mailing list, so I eventually received a brochure from the Ken Roberts Company. I remember in the brochure he was talking about making money from the Sugar market, and he had a chart on the cover (or maybe it was inside), and I didn’t quite get the concept, but I figured it would be worth checking out, so I requested more info. Long story short, I ended up buying the course, but at the time I was 19 years old with ZERO understanding of work ethic and diligence, so I just looked the material over, decided it was too much to learn, and went on to the next get-rich-quick scheme. I literally threw it away when I moved out of the house I was staying in at the time, and I moved to Georgia from North Carolina.
Once I moved to Georgia, fast forwarding about 7 years, I still had not found the thing that I really wanted to do, that would free me from my 8-to-5 job. I remember thinking that I would love to get ahold of that Ken Roberts thing again, because even though I didn’t grasp a lot of the concepts back when I was 19, now I was 26 and really looking for something to dedicate myself to. So, I actually ordered the course (the famous TWMPMM manual – it stands for “The World’s Most Powerful Money Manual”) again and got serious about learning the material. I studied the price charts, I studied the tapes and videos, and I studied the TWMPMM Manual like it was a college textbook. I got serious about chart reading and understanding the different chart formations and patterns (the 1-2-3 top/bottom, the sideways channel, exhaustion gaps, etc.), and then I bought probably the most pivotal book of my trading education—“How to Make the Stock Market Make Money for You” by Ted Warren. That book really put me over the line as far as being ready to get started. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that I filled up at least one notebook with paper trading notes and so forth, so I had done my research and all that. I ended up opening up an account with Orion Futures and I got busy. The only disadvantage was that I opened it with only $500.00—yep, just five-hundred bones. I decided that I would trade options to get going. Man, I did NOT do well at all.
My first option trade was a Cotton call option, and I lost about half of my trading money on that one…too stubborn to cut my losses. I then bought an Oats put and made about $150.00 profit on it…that was one of the highlights of my early trading career. Although the Ken Roberts trading course was mainly focused on futures trading, I simply did not have enough money to hang in those markets, so I started with options just to “get my feet wet”. Now that I look back on it, I was WAY under-capitalized, but at the time I was young and pretty financially stupid when it came to investing. I will say that I learned a TON of lessons about my own mentality when real money was on the line versus paper trading money. One thing that I appreciate about Ken Roberts is that he always did encourage people to paper trade and never stop paper trading…I have taken that advice to heart. Man, I have a lot more to say about my experience with the Ken Roberts trading TWMPMM course and so forth, but I will save it for some future blogs. I have gone on long enough.
