The Marble Copybook

Sixty-second binary options. Sixteen years old. A marble copybook from the drugstore, the black-and-white kind every kid gets handed for school, filled front to back with charts I drew by hand.

That is the part people skip. There was no software. I watched the same pair for hours and I drew what it did, candle by candle, in pencil, in a notebook, until the shapes started repeating on me. Then I marked what I thought came next. Then I checked whether I had been right. Hundreds of times.

It worked. I got the read up to a win rate around ninety percent on sixty-second trades and made about $15K in about two weeks, at sixteen, out of a composition book. I have made a lot more money since. I have never again been that certain about anything.

Then PayPal worked out how old I was and banned me. Permanently. That account has been banned since 2009 and it is still banned today, which I find funny now and did not find funny then. My parents stepped in and helped me get the money out. No lecture came with it. They handled the part a sixteen-year-old could not handle and let me keep what I had earned.

I bought a bright orange Chevy Cobalt SS. Not the smart purchase. Not the one anybody advised. It was the nicest car in the student lot that somebody's dad had not paid for, and every day I parked it I knew exactly what it was. The car was never the point. The copybook was. I have been drawing charts by hand ever since, in different notebooks, about different things.