TSP Talk Blog

This is tsptalk, posting for RevShark:

RevShark's Traditional Thanksgiving Post

In the course of our day-to-day lives it is very easy to overlook the many good things in our lives. Every year at Thanksgiving I like to take a step back and reflect on those positive things a bit.

I am most thankful for my wonderful and loving family but the one blessing that surprises me the most is that I am able to earn a living by trading, investing and writing about the stock market. I truly love what I do and it still surprises me that I have ended up where I am today.

Back in the early 1990's I had business and law degrees from the University of Michigan. I had earned a CPA certificate and was working to establish my own law practice in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was a struggle, but I was making progress, and the future looked pretty bright, but then I lost everything.

Ever since my teens, I have suffered from some minor hearing loss. It was a mild inconvenience and caused some embarrassment at times, but it didn't have much impact on my life. All of a sudden, for some unknown reason, I rapidly lost the remainder of my hearing, and was completely deaf.

I'll never forget being on the telephone with a client, and being totally incapable of hearing what she was saying. I tried hearing aids and various assistive devices, but you need to have some residual hearing for those things to work, and soon I had none.
I was forced to give up my law practice, lost all my assets, my marriage ended in divorce, and I was greatly depressed. One of the worst things about hearing loss is that it cuts you off from the world. You become very isolated when the only way you can communicate with someone is to have them write a note. Sign language is great if you are around people who use, it but I knew no one in the Deaf world.

Luckily, I had a disability insurance policy that provide me with a small monthly stipend, but I was alone and completely lost. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. Even the most menial jobs required some ability to hear and communicate.

With nothing much else to do, I started tinkering around on a computer I borrowed from my brother-in-law, and discovered the fledging online services known as Prodigy and Compuserve. People were having discussions about all sorts of things, and it gave me a way to actually have a conversation and to forget the fact that I couldn't hear.

I spent a great amount of time exploring the online world, and then one day I stumbled across some stock market message boards on Prodigy. I had dabbled in the market a little bit and had a class or two about it in business school, so I knew about the traditional investment approach, but this board was different. There was talk about obscure stocks that people would buy and sell in the matter of a few days. They didn't just try to buy low and sell high; they would buy stocks at their highs and wait for them to go higher. They would ignore fundamental considers and consulted charts.

I was greatly intrigued and thought I would give this try. There weren't any online brokers back then so I established an account with Olde Discount, and since I couldn't talk on the phone, I would visit the office each time I wanted to make a trade and communicate via written notes.

I had very mixed success at first, and was burned badly on some penny stocks that were outright frauds and some big caps that turned out not to be nearly as safe as the term 'blue chip' indicated. But eventually I started to found some approaches that worked, and I slowly developed an investing methodology. I was very eager to learn and constantly tinkered with my approach, but it was working. Over time I focused more and more on the psychology of the market and discovered how charts can provide an insight into the emotions that are driving stocks up or down.

I was due for some good luck, and it turned out that I had discovered the market at a very good time. The market had started a huge run that began in the mid-90's. Momentum investing and technical trading worked extremely well, and eventually my small stake doubled and then doubled again, and in a few years I was up 10-20 fold and continued to build.

After the great insecurity I had suffered due to my hearing loss, I was extremely anxious to not give back any of my gains. I protect my gains with great zeal and always made sure to keep my account close to its highs. I don't take big risks and go for homeruns, but just constantly tried to hit singles and to be consistent and methodical. It worked well.

Not only was I making great money but I loved what I was doing. It was like a giant chess game with all sorts of subtle nuances. It had more to do with understanding people and emotions than it did about balance sheets and earnings. There was something new and different happening every day and always a slew of new opportunities.

I loved talking about stocks on the message boards and soon I had a home on the Motley Fool site on American Online. The Fools despised me for my constant criticism of their long-term buy and hold approach, so they set up a board for active traders to isolate me, and that was soon my headquarters.

In the early days of their site, the Fools were very bullish about a stock called Iomega. Their promotion of it helped turned it into one of the great momentum stocks of the internet era. While they sat and watched as it flew to the moon and back down again I traded it aggressively, long and short, and made huge profits.

A journalist by the name of Herb Greenberg, who worked for the San Francisco Chronicle had a site on AOL and was quite critical of the Iomega story. I attacked him with great zest and let him know that trading a momentum stock and investing in one are two different things.

Herb loved my aggressiveness and insults and asked me to join his site. I grabbed the opportunity and soon set up The Shark Attack. It was the real first home for active investors on the internet. We featured The Shark Tank which was the first internet chatroom dedicated to the stock market. It was a fantastic community of like minded people who were loved trading and the stock market.

Eventually I moved my site to the web where it is now know as www.Sharkinvesting.com. The Shark Tank chat room is still operating a dozen years later with many of the same traders who were in it back in the old AOL days.

In 2002 my old friend, Herb Greenberg, was now working for theStreet.com and I asked him if RealMoney would allow me the privilege to post a few comments about trading. I was surprised to learn that Jim Cramer used to follow my comments back in the Motley Fool days and he welcomed me with open arms.

For seven year now I've had the great honor or being able to share my thoughts about the market with readers. I even wrote a book called 'Invest Like a Shark: How a Deaf Guy with No Job and Limited Capital Made a Fortune Investing in the Stock Market' that was named the second best investing book of the year by Amazon in 2007.

Medical technology also improved substantially and a few years ago I had cochlear implant surgery which has given me back the ability to hear. It is imperfect, but I now can carry on conversations and interact with other people quite easily..

This past year has been one of the most challenging of my trading career. I have experienced my worst performance relative to the major indices ever and have felt out of step with the market far more than usual. That is the nature of trading, and I know that if I stick with it that, I can continue to grow and prosper. We will always face new challenges as we live our lives and can never take the stock market for granted.

That is my story and I'm very thankful for what God has given me. The great irony is that the tragedy of my hearing loss turned out to be a great blessing. If I hadn't happened so many wonderful things would not have happened to me.

Everyone has misfortunes and challenges in their lives but it is amazing how often things work out for the better. Just make sure you don't ever give up and always keep a positive attitude.

Happy Thanksgiving.
James "RevShark" Deporre

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