How to Make Your First Million | Stock Investing for Beginners

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How I became a millionaire stock investor

In this video, I’m going to show you how I became a millionaire stock investor and why you may want to incorporate some of these practices into your own life.

First, let me say that I’m not a financial adviser and am only providing this information for educational and entertainment purposes. Investing is risky and I myself have both lost and made significant amounts of money.

With that disclaimer out of the way let’s jump in…

In my path to 7-figures in the stock market, I’ve identified 7 key principles that helped me get there. They are…

Education/ mentorship
Savings
Persistence/ Consistency
Mindset

Let me start with a story. For as long as I can remember I’ve been interested in investing even as a small child. However, being dyslexic and not very good at math I was hesitant. But at about the age of 11 my uncle married the daughter of a very wealthy man Mr. H who had invented patents that were included in CAT Scan and he held a number of other profitable patents.

He was very kind to me and lived in a huge mansion on the Northside of Chicago with an indoor pool, an elevator, and 5 Mercedes in each bay of his massive garage.

Needless to say, I was impressed. I was fortunate to get to spend time with Mr. H. and we enjoyed talking together. During our conversations, I would ask him about how he created his wealth, and among other things he told me that you needed to work for yourself and the money you made from your own business should be invested and above all the invested money should work as hard and preferably harder than you did.

My own grandparents also encouraged this approach as my grandfather told me how he was an early investor in Minute Maid, the orange juice company, and when it was acquired by Coca Cola 1960 he made a huge profit enough for him to buy a nice 3 bedroom house with a 2 car garage cash with money left to spare.

It was with this encouragement that I made my first investments in the stock market. Of course, I did not have my own business (yet) so I did odd jobs to make money and my parents helped with a little money too.

Then because I was a minor and could not invest on my own I got my mother to set up a custodial account for me with a stockbroker.

I remember the first investment I made was in a utility company in Chicago called Commonwealth Edison.

It was with this investment that I learned about the price-to-earnings ratio and a beautiful concept called the dividend.

I was excited to watch the results of the investment as I would track the stock price weekly in the Chicago Tribune.

Some weeks I was up and some weeks I was down.

But over time there was a definite uptrend in the worth of my investment.

Over about a year the ComEd investment performed well and I sold my stock and made a little over $300 even after brokerage commissions… which is worth roughly $817 today.

My grandparents and Mr. H. all applauded my interest in investing and even my uncles and cousins were impressed with the results.

Now you may be wondering how an 11-year-old decided on investing in Commonwealth Edison?

Utility companies certainly aren’t sexy or exciting.

Wll I asked for advice from my grandfather and Mr. H.

They both said people will always need and pay for electricity.

Mr. H. had informed me that ComEd had started producing electricity with nuclear energy which would make the company more profitable.

They turned out to be right and my investment was worth more than I paid for it.

This experience gave me my first clue on the value of education and mentorship in my investing.

I’m going to talk more about this in a few minutes.

But let me just say here that this was only the beginning of my investor journey.

Over the next couple of years I dabbled with a few other stocks.

But as you might expect from a kid, I lost interest and became distracted.

Still some of my later investments did OK. Several of them were complete bombs.

And eventually, I lost all of my small account.

At this point I became much more interested in chasing girls and then college.

Years passed and I grew up, and eventually went to law school launching a legal career and starting a family.

Predictably, at this point my interest in investing was reignited.

During this season of my life I had confidence in my abilities but remembering the lessons learned earlier in my life I knew I had to brush up my knowledge and get educated.

So I bought a bunch of books on the subject.

It was after reading some of them that I became very interested in options trading.

I really loved the concept of covered calls.

And I decided to once again try my hand at trading.

As it turned out I was not nearly as smart as I thought I was.

My first trade initially made money then lost value and eventually I lost more than half of the amount I invested.

I tried again with similar results.

Everytime I tried I came up short and I quickly ran out of money to invest.

My confidence and interest waned.

But the experience did teach me that I needed to have a systemized way to save money.

I had read the book Riches Man in Babylon (a book I commend to you if you have not read it yet) and it taught that a part of every dollar I made was mine to keep.

Fortunately, at this point I was working in a law firm and had access to a 401k.

I set up automatic withdrawals directly from my paycheck and saved 20% of everything I made.
Since I kept failing so miserably handling my own money I decided it was easier and better to just put my money into a couple of indexed mutual funds.

That is, funds that invested in all the stocks in an index like the Dow Jones or the SP 500.

I will say, that the ability to save money automatically made it much easier to accumulate money and I did.

For the next 6 years I was a consistent saver but definitely not an active stock investor.

Fact is, that during my years practicing law I WAS actively investing in real estate and making good money doing it. In fact, real estate helped me to build my networth over 7-figures
but that’s a story for another video.

Now I do realize that many people do not have access to automatic savings where they work.

I found this to be a huge problem after I gave up practicing law and started my own publishing business.

For several years without automatic payroll deductions I saved very little… maybe 1 or 2% of my income and even that was difficult.

One of the ways I solved that problem was by using the Acorns App.

I did a video about using that app here… But suffice it to say that another key element in my journey to stock market millionaire status was automatic savings and one way or another you should get that set up.

It was after I went into business for myself that my stock investing journey took another turn.

As result of publishing my book Speak On Cruise Ships: 8 Easy Steps To A Lifetime of Free Luxury Cruises I got to know many of my readers and not surprisingly most of them were very accomplished people.

One of these people was Dr. Scott Brown a finance Ph.D., a tenured professor, and author of Agora Publishing’s best-selling stock investing course ever.

For those of you who don’t know, Agora is probably one of the most successful financial publishers on the planet with about $350 million dollars in yearly sales.

In any event, I helped Dr. Brown get booked on a bunch of free cruises and he invited me to be a guest lecturer at his university on Internet marketing.

Over time we became great friends and even traveled together.
As our friendship grew and matured Scott began to help me with my retirement accounts. Slowly, he became my financial mentor and rekindled my interest in investing.

About 6 years ago with Scott’s help, I went all in and fully committed to investing for my retirement.

Along the way, Scott also introduced me to one of his good friends Lan Turner who as it turns out is a gifted financial educator in his own right and has that rare ability to communicate complex financial topics in a way that makes it easy for a beginner (like me) to follow.

Consequently, with their guidance and education, I was able to grow my accounts to well over 7-figures!

Now I had long had a million-dollar net worth but there something deeply satisfying about cracking open your stock account and seeing a million dollars plus all on one platform.

I will say here that the ride has not been all peaches and cream – not by a long shot. Even with their help, I made some bone-headed investments where I lost significant amounts of money. Losing over 6-figures several times.

But that’s where I learned yet another important investing lesson: persistence and consistency.

That is, it’s super important to stay in the market through both the ups and the downs.

This is substantiated by a study Fidelity Investments did in investing a hypothetical $10k 40 years ago.

If you had stayed invested in the market every market day for the last 40 years your $10k investment would have turned into $697,421!

But here’s where it gets interesting…

If you missed the best 5 days in that 40 year span your investment would be worth $432,411 or a difference of $265,010

If you had missed the 10 best days your investment would be worth $313,377 or a difference of $384,044.

But it gets even more interesting when you missed the best 30 days in the market in the last 40 years your investment would be worth $115,481 or a difference of $581,940 – get it you would have over half a million dollars.

And for the show stopper… if you missed the best 50 days in the market in the last 40 years your $10k investment would only be worth $48,434 today or an astounding difference of $648,987!

Said another way, you would have missed 93% of your return by sitting out just 50 of the best days in the last 40 years!

And here’s one of the most important things I’ll say during this video: You can’t predict which days will be good or bad in the market.

As one thing is for sure NO ONE can accurately predict the market with any consistency and far greater minds than mine have tried and failed.

So if you can’t accurately time the market that means you should be in the market every day.

This brings me to the last big factor in me becoming a stock market millionaire and that is mindset.

That is when Scott and Lan started to train me I began to BELIEVE I was going to be successful. My confidence increased as I got more educated. I changed my mindset from one where I saw myself as a bad investor (after all I lost a bunch of money in bad trades) to one where I was good investor. From loser to winner.

And as my mindset came in line with the idea that I was a winner surprise surprise I won more. As my knowledge and wisdom increased I made better trades.

But as I analyze mindset now, I realize that this crucial aspect of making good trades started with education and mentorship.

That’s why if you’re interested in continuing (or starting) your journey as a trader I’ve got an exciting announcement for you.

In fact, Dr. Brown and Lan Turner have teamed up to launch a brand new streaming channel called the Stock Market Trading Channel.

If you’re interested you can check out www.StockMarketTradingChannel.com it’s available on all the major streaming platforms like Amazone Fire TV, Roku, Apple TV, and Google Play.

And depending on when you’re seeing this you can even get a free trial subscription.

In any event, as I look back on my success trading the markets…

Education/ mentorship
Savings
Persistence/ Consistency
Mindset

All played a pivotal role.

And as you reflect on your own approach to investing it ia my hope that you’ll be able to use some of my experiences and insights here in your own investment journey.

And if this information was helpful to you… Please throw a hulk smash on the Like button and if you haven’t subscribed to the channel… there’s no time like the present

Now go out and be the blessing!

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Tagged with: personal finance • stock market