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Penny Stock Basics

Are You Studying And Working The Wrong Way?

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Written by Timothy Sykes
Updated 1/24/2023 9 min read

A lot of people message me every day in my chatroom for my newsletter subscribers and on every social network wanting to get rich and I REALLY don’t think they understand how to actually achieve that.

The good news is I’ve been trading for nearly 20 years and now teaching for 10+ years so I have the actual blueprint and you just have to sit back and follow my instructions to a T.

It won’t be easy…at all…and in fact it’s going to be harder than you ever thought possible, but the journey alone is worth the price of admission and in the end you’ll look back at your grinding and hustling and appreciate it all, even when you make mistakes and fail a little every now and then along the way too…as long as you keep moving forward and learning from everything, your gains and your losses too!

Sure, sure, you see success stories like my top Millionaire Trading Challenge students and mine:

…and you message me saying things like “Tim, I’m definitely next!”, but do you really mean it. And even if you do really mean it, do you understand how many THOUSANDS of hours of research and study you’re going to need to put in to be able to rise above the roughly 90%+ of traders who continually lose?

Forget just about trading, most small businesses fail and no matter how hard you work to get into a good college, an Ivy League diploma doesn’t mean you’ll get a good job, let alone any job once you graduate. And even if you do get a good job, in this choppy economy, there’s no guarantee you’ll have it for very long.

The odds of you achieving great financial and career success are so small, but too many of you think you’re “special” and that it’s going to be you who will beat the odds.

This is your wake up call, when your mom says you can do anything you want in life and that you’re special, she’s lying…yes, that’s right I’m calling your mom a liar so get offended if you want or let me explain why.

You ARE capable of achieving anything when you put your mind to it and you ARE special to your mom, but you’re not special as in the sense that reality and the odds of great success vs. failure in life don’t apply to you.

Those odds apply to EVERY single one of us and my top Millionaire Challenge and upcoming Millionaire Trading Challenge students are no different, we just studied and worked harder than everyone else to get where we are.

And I’m not talking about working 2, 3 or even 4 menial labor jobs to try to pay for rent, mortgage, basic living expenses and saving up puny sums of money over many years that too many people mistakenly believe is the definition “working hard”.

That’s not working hard, that’s the definition of working in a dumb way.

And when I say you must study hard, I’m not talking about going to school for a decade and accumulating six-figures in student loan debt like too many people do.

That’s not studying hard, that’s the definition studying in a dumb way.

Now if you dream of being a Hollywood star, a doctor or lawyer or Wall Street banker one day this blog post doesn’t apply to you, you follow those dreams and you do whatever you have to do for the next few decades to make it happen in those tough industries.

But if you don’t want to spend decades chasing dreams in industries like those that literally do take that long to achieve anything substantial, it’s time I cut through all the BS you hear about how to really make it in this world and remind you that we’re in the single most exciting time in history where relative peace and democracy rule and you’re reading this blog post on the single most important invention in centuries, The Internet, that can speed up your path to financial freedom in life.

You don’t just have the option of doing things the old/dumb way any more — you could and should utilize this radical new invention to enhance your education and your life like all my top millionaire and upcoming Millionaire Trading Challenge students and I have done in order to study and work hard, but also study and work in a smarter, more efficient way.

No longer must you work jobs that depends on your manual labor hour after hour after hour forever and then try to save up over time for anything meaningful, instead learn skills like stock trading or even HERE so that whatever you learn to earn in the beginning might be small like those other professions, but which can multiply many times over years form now as if you choose well, the work you do on the Internet is SCALABLE, a word that doesn’t apply to old-world industries.

There are internet strategies now where you can make money while you sleep and wake up to more money in your account…tell me ANY construction worker, plumber, electrician, trainer, chef, cab driver, security guard, bartender, waiter, waitress etc where that happens?

It doesn’t…those jobs take hours and hours of back-breaking work and sweat to get paid and if you want to ever earn a ton of money that way, you better do it every damn day and save your pennies too.

Long story short, no longer do you need any BS college degree to try to find a solid paying job after you waste years or even a decade or more getting a fancy degree and entering into a profession like the medical field or Wall Street that is so intense and competitive that you’ll need another few years even after you graduate, or even another entire decade on top of the initial one you already put in studying, of nonstop dedication before you can pull in a consistent six-or-seven figures per year.

I’m sorry to be negative, but why are so many people wasting time on those old-world-time-consuming not-worth-the-time-and-headache industries when these new and better-paying-in-far-less-time industries are here and available to you?

Oh, that’s right, you’ve been marketed college and “solid” industries all your life and all these Internet businesses seem to have pretty low odds of success?

Wake up! Even if you go the old-world route you STILL have low odds of great success, you just have a basic financial cushion upon which many people rely and never allow themselves to fully spread their wings and see what they’re capable of.

It’s sad that it takes one of my Trading Challenge students whose English is his 4th language to help you understand your own potential:

And it takes blog posts like “What’s The Minimum Needed To Trade Penny Stocks?” to get you to realize that you’re not going to be a millionaire if you always put in the minimum investment and minimum amount of effort into ANYTHING!

Here’s another newsflash: even if you get into college and get your fancy degree and have all your manual labor jobs and you put in your minimum effort because it’s easier and you’re taking the safe route in life you’re going to be sorely disappointed with how your career and financial future plays out…you’ll get by financially-speaking, but just barely and I know too many downright people who get by barely and I don’t want that to happen to you.

In this life, and remember that as despite the many conspiracy theories we still likely only have one life, you must study and work your butt off to get anywhere and achieve your goals, so if you’re going to do all of that you might as well get rewarded the most and the quickest and partake in the new Internet world which requires less investment and less years of your life, right?

I mean it makes perfect sense to me, but what do I know, I’ve never had a real job as I gladly invested my time and energy into the Internet world of education, being a self-taught trader and blogger and it paid off handsomely as I became a millionaire right around the time I could legally drink…it’s good to get started early!

And when I started there was literally nothing on how to trade penny stocks safely, no free guides like this great guide and this free guide, no free video lessons like these bad boys it was all learning through trial and error and let me tell you that sucked!

You have it FAR easier now that you’re coming aboard now and you have all these resources, not to mention case study after case study of people who started out knowing NOTHING and now thanks to studying hard — and not just just studying hard on anything remember, but smart too — and working hard —and not just working hard on anything remember, working smart — they have financial freedom with just the smallest of investments in their education and just 1-2 years before they really mastered their strategy and made it work for them.

So, my only question to you is why don’t more of you realize this and why aren’t you following in the footsteps of young traders like Grittani and this young man, what’s stopping you?

Perhaps you just needed a blog post like this to simplify everything for you and help you realize your options?


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Author card Timothy Sykes picture

Timothy Sykes

Tim Sykes is a penny stock trader and teacher who became a self-made millionaire by the age of 22 by trading $12,415 of bar mitzvah money. After becoming disenchanted with the hedge fund world, he established the Tim Sykes Trading Challenge to teach aspiring traders how to follow his trading strategies. He’s been featured in a variety of media outlets including CNN, Larry King, Steve Harvey, Forbes, Men’s Journal, and more. He’s also an active philanthropist and environmental activist, a co-founder of Karmagawa, and has donated millions of dollars to charity. Read More

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* Results are not typical and will vary from person to person. Making money trading stocks takes time, dedication, and hard work. There are inherent risks involved with investing in the stock market, including the loss of your investment. Past performance in the market is not indicative of future results. Any investment is at your own risk. See Terms of Service here

The available research on day trading suggests that most active traders lose money. Fees and overtrading are major contributors to these losses.

A 2000 study called “Trading is Hazardous to Your Wealth: The Common Stock Investment Performance of Individual Investors” evaluated 66,465 U.S. households that held stocks from 1991 to 1996. The households that traded most averaged an 11.4% annual return during a period where the overall market gained 17.9%. These lower returns were attributed to overconfidence.

A 2014 paper (revised 2019) titled “Learning Fast or Slow?” analyzed the complete transaction history of the Taiwan Stock Exchange between 1992 and 2006. It looked at the ongoing performance of day traders in this sample, and found that 97% of day traders can expect to lose money from trading, and more than 90% of all day trading volume can be traced to investors who predictably lose money. Additionally, it tied the behavior of gamblers and drivers who get more speeding tickets to overtrading, and cited studies showing that legalized gambling has an inverse effect on trading volume.

A 2019 research study (revised 2020) called “Day Trading for a Living?” observed 19,646 Brazilian futures contract traders who started day trading from 2013 to 2015, and recorded two years of their trading activity. The study authors found that 97% of traders with more than 300 days actively trading lost money, and only 1.1% earned more than the Brazilian minimum wage ($16 USD per day). They hypothesized that the greater returns shown in previous studies did not differentiate between frequent day traders and those who traded rarely, and that more frequent trading activity decreases the chance of profitability.

These studies show the wide variance of the available data on day trading profitability. One thing that seems clear from the research is that most day traders lose money .

Millionaire Media 66 W Flagler St. Ste. 900 Miami, FL 33130 United States (888) 878-3621 This is for information purposes only as Millionaire Media LLC nor Timothy Sykes is registered as a securities broker-dealer or an investment adviser. No information herein is intended as securities brokerage, investment, tax, accounting or legal advice, as an offer or solicitation of an offer to sell or buy, or as an endorsement, recommendation or sponsorship of any company, security or fund. Millionaire Media LLC and Timothy Sykes cannot and does not assess, verify or guarantee the adequacy, accuracy or completeness of any information, the suitability or profitability of any particular investment, or the potential value of any investment or informational source. The reader bears responsibility for his/her own investment research and decisions, should seek the advice of a qualified securities professional before making any investment, and investigate and fully understand any and all risks before investing. Millionaire Media LLC and Timothy Sykes in no way warrants the solvency, financial condition, or investment advisability of any of the securities mentioned in communications or websites. In addition, Millionaire Media LLC and Timothy Sykes accepts no liability whatsoever for any direct or consequential loss arising from any use of this information. This information is not intended to be used as the sole basis of any investment decision, nor should it be construed as advice designed to meet the investment needs of any particular investor. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future returns.

Citations for Disclaimer

Barber, Brad M. and Odean, Terrance, Trading is Hazardous to Your Wealth: The Common Stock Investment Performance of Individual Investors. Available at SSRN: “Day Trading for a Living?”

Barber, Brad M. and Lee, Yi-Tsung and Liu, Yu-Jane and Odean, Terrance and Zhang, Ke, Learning Fast or Slow? (May 28, 2019). Forthcoming: Review of Asset Pricing Studies, Available at SSRN: “https://ssrn.com/abstract=2535636”

Chague, Fernando and De-Losso, Rodrigo and Giovannetti, Bruno, Day Trading for a Living? (June 11, 2020). Available at SSRN: “https://ssrn.com/abstract=3423101”