How It All Began...
Cliff's Channel Trading began in the spring of 2019 as a way to connect with other traders and to show them how Cliff has successfully traded the market for the past 8 years. My first trade was made in the early 1990’s. I went over to my local bank where my wife and I had our checking and savings accounts and I spoke to a “financial advisor”. I told him that I wanted to buy some stock and wanted to see what it would take to make that purchase. He goes on to inform me that he would have to look up the price of the stock that I wanted to own and asked me which one it was that I wanted to purchase. I told him that since Pan American Airlines was a local airline company and I thought that buy “keeping things local”, I’d be interested in Pan Am. I do not remember exactly how many shares of this stock I ended up purchasing, but I do remember the $1500.00 that I had “invested” in Pan Am.
After purchasing my very first stock, I was on “cloud nine” and I had dreams of getting rich because I just knew that Pan Am was a very good stock to own. Once I returned home, I informed my wife of my decision to purchase our very first stock with our $1500 savings account. She told me that I was “crazy” and that she had hoped I knew what I was doing. I constantly looked in the newspaper at the local stocks and how they were performing. The following day after I had made my initial purchase, things looked pretty good. The stock value had increased. I told my wife about the increase and she said, “Okay, let’s see how it turns out.” I looked every day for a few weeks. By the end of the first week, my stock was valued at approximately $1650.00. I thought to myself, wow, this is really doing great for us.
After another few weeks or so, I had read an article about Pan American Airlines in the newspaper. It mentioned something about having financial issues. I rushed to look at the stock price and that day, things seemed to not have affected the price of the stock as the price was still holding its own and my account was still performing well. However, the very next day, I looked at the local stocks, and would you know it, Pan Am was NOT listed. I went over to the “financial advisor” that sold me the stock and asked him why Pan Am wasn’t listed in the stock section anymore. His reply was apparently they had gotten themselves in to some trouble and would probably be filing for a bankruptcy.
What was I to do? I had taken our savings account and had “foolishly” invested in a stock that I did not do any research on and ended up losing every bit of it. How was I to go home and tell my wife that our savings account had been “blown up” and that it was all gone? There was nothing that I could do but just go home and “face the music”. I was instructed to never trade the stock market ever again. Our main source of investing was primarily a standard savings account, CD’s (certificate of deposits), and mutual funds for the next decade or so.
Fast forward approximately 20 years. No longer are the days of looking in the newspaper for stocks to invest in and to get their prices and then going to a bank to make your trades. There are now online brokers, trading platforms, and a host of other “gadgets” needed to do your trading in your own home. You can even make trades now from your phone. You now have the capabilities to look up and do your own research at any hour of the day or night.
Since my initial stock purchase of Pan Am that ultimately went bankrupt, I have dabbled in the stock market as well as stock trading groups to get back in to actively trading the stock market. In the early 2000’s, it seemed that to me, penny stocks were the craze as they still are today to some individuals. I will not mention any names here, but I also belonged to several stock groups that would either focus on penny stocks, small cap stocks, large cap stocks, and/or options. Most of these groups that I belonged to, charged a hefty fee to be a member and what I finally decided was that these groups did what is called a pump and dump scenario. They would “pre-buy” certain stocks, talk it up in the chat group, and then have their members buy their shares that had already been purchased. This usually resulted in those members that got in late, left “holding the bag”, therefore, these stocks again, like Pan AM usually either goes out of business or at least to what is called a sub-penny stock.
Here I was, a member of a stock trading group, paying for a service that I really didn’t understand and am losing money once again. It was all my fault because even though there was all this technology available, I didn’t take the time to learn about it and how to actually use it. I was “chasing” what someone else was putting out there. I so wanted to be like everyone else and make as much money as I could in the stock market. However, each time I made a trade, it ended up being a losing trade. So once again, I found myself asking the same question I asked after I had lost my initial $1500.00 on Pan Am; “What am I going to do?”
Finally, one day in chat, there was a member that was actually “teaching” a specific trading method. That method is called channel trading. That method really interested me and that is what I will use to this day in all my trading activities. But from that day forward, it seemed my trading has evolved from losing trades to winning trades. My trading strategy has also changed but I still use channels to determine which trades I will make. With the knowledge I have gained throughout my trading career, I am trying to pass that knowledge to other up and coming traders so that they do not make the same mistakes that I have in the past. In 2013, I was able to take a $2500 trading account to over $100,000.00 in less than 2 years. I did that through a strategy that is similar to the Power of 3's. There are so many styles of trading to include scalping, day trading, swing trading, investing, and others. During the days of LNKD, I was a "master" at day trading/scalping LNKD as I made in excess of $75,000.00 on a single trade using options. During the days of the initial Brexit days, I also lost in excess of $48,000.00 in a single day. Bottom line, sometimes by trading less; can sometimes be more.
If you would like to know more about Cliff and the Cliff's Channel Trading service, I encourage you to fill out the contact form so that I can get you as much information as you would like.