Eat Ramen, Learn to Trade.

At 17, I moved to the US to study philosophy. I was getting $1,000 a mo from my parents for living expenses. I wanted to trade stocks but had no money So I did one-meal-a-day with three instant noodles and three eggs. I saved up to $2,500 and that was my seed money.

something like this 😄

I started an investment club at my college. I promoted it by promising a weekly lecture about fundamental investment. I didn’t know a jack shit about investing. I had to give a lecture every week so I learned a shit ton real fast. I did pretty well with my initial investment so I asked for real seed money from parents. I got $10k dollars to manage and I grew it +30% a year. By the time I turned 19, I was managing all parents’ money.

Making millions

I can’t remember the moment I decided to study Bitcoin. But once I did, it clicked. I spent an entire year to understand it, consuming every piece of information available online - Andreas Antonopoulos's YouTube videos, the history of money, political philosophy behind Bitcoin.

I was ecstatic. This was the technology that would give the humanity more freedom. A new force counterbalancing centralizing entities like big governments and China.

I majored in philosophy, economics and was also a self-taught developer. Very few people in S.Korea understood Bitcoin like I did. There was no Korean content explaining Bitcoin. I knew if more people understood Bitcoin, the price would skyrocket. I realized I was early. I went all in on Bitcoin in early 2017.

I swing traded Bitcoin and Ether, flipped NEO (a Chinese shitcoin) and got 10x, did margin trades, and reinvested all of my profits back into crypto. By the Q4 of 2017, my portfolio hit $3 million dollars. I was 20.

How I ended up losing it all

Around Christmas in 2017, it had one of the worst crashes in Bitcoin history. I had 2x leverage on my entire position on Bitfitnex. The liquidity that night was horrible. My stop didn’t work and got liquidated big time. That night I went from $3.4m net worth to $1.5m. I wanted to make it all back. I revenge traded for another year only to lose every profit I made plus the money my parents gave me. The only thing I was left with was my used car, a cheap Hyundai Sonata. I was flat broke. I had to leave the US and come back to S.Korea to live with my parents. Fun fat, I used to set alarms for Bitcoin price changes and I got PTSD for the default iPhone alarm sound. To this day, I mute my phone.

What’s your biggest learning from this experience?

Tbh, I m not sure what’s the byte sized lesson here. When my portfolio hit $3 million dollars, my mom wanted me to cash out and buy a nice property in Seoul. I didn’t listen. Too much self belief helped me make millions but I also went broke bc of it. I became a lot humbler and objective about my skills thanks to all the margin calls I had. Is it a good thing? I m not sure. But I did appreciate losing it all when I was young, Had I kept going and made tens of millions, I am sure I would have lost it all at some point. Be it business or trading. I was simply way too risk tolerant. Next time I make money, I will for sure buy a nice property : )

I m glad I experienced it. The storm of margin calls in crypto trading set a high bar for stress. Hard to top that!

P.S. In the last cycle bitcoin hit 60k, I did 10x this cycle and paid back the money my parents gave me.