I am not rich.

I am not successful.

I have had some significant failures to reflect on. Each failure I’ve learned something new. I once lost $20,000 dollars in a day trading options. Mere hours after being up $22,000, the market was closed, volatility dropped and market turned on low volume and limited market access. My trading account was locked out and by the time it re-opened my gains made on futures swung to significant losses.

I sold to spare a small portion of my account, closed my computer, and jogged around the neighborhood in complete disbelief.

When I returned, I discovered had I not sold, I again would have finished the day with significant gains – perhaps netting $23,000 to $24,000 dollars.

Something about that jog… I look back and feel like I had connected to something. Extreme circumstances and emotions give us the ability to have extreme shifts in perspective that carry forward after life returns to normal.

Despite the losses, I gained something. I asked questions I wouldn’t have asked, and found answers I wouldn’t have otherwise come to know.

Everyone fails. Not everyone fails completely. No financial advisor will ever tell you to throw it all on the line because that is insane, stupid, and irrational. But it has been done, and some people have succeeded, consistently.

The market knows how to challenge your emotions better than anything I’ve ever faced. You can be right in theory and still fail, because you give into your emotions when things don’t go exactly as planned.

Once you have failed completely, however, and know the worst there is to experience and are willing to experience that again, you are finally in control.

And eventually, you will find others who are willing to fail and share that same experience with you. That is the point, perhaps, when things turn and you start winning.

But then again this could all be a dream…

“Some place warm, a place where the beer flows like wine, where beautiful women instinctively flock like the salmon of Capistrano. I’m talking about a little place called Aspen.”

“I don’t know Lloyd, the French are assholes…”

– Lloyd Christmas & Harry Dunn