I loaded up so much I did not take into account risk I did not take into account what the worst case scenario be could I survive it and so around 10 20 a.m

I sell everything and then five minutes later the market started to rally and it rallied straight up for the next three months if I had just held on I would have had tens of millions of dollars

Hi everyone welcome to another edition of my life in four trades joining me today's James Altichar James is an entrepreneur angel investor author and podcast host in fact there doesn't seem to be much James isn't involved in which is exactly why we were so excited to sit down with him and learn more about his journey enjoy the conversation

this isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host this is the James Altichar show

Hi James welcome to my life in four trades Maggie what a great concept podcast this is like my life in four trades it's so interesting because obviously some trades lose money some trades make money some trades lose a lot of money like life changing money some trades make life changing money

and there's so many lessons to be learned from trades and not just lessons about investing but lessons about yourself and discipline and focus and mastery of something as critical as investing like not to hog this opening here but when you invest it's not a job it's your life is on the line like you could lose money you can't lose money at a job you could you could lose time but not money

but you could lose money and you eat what you kill you only there were there were many periods in my life where I could literally only eat if my trades were good

Yeah I think you beautifully understand the concept and I'm not sure we fully realize that when we started but through the conversations it really is more about people's lives and sort of decision making how they deal with failure how they deal with risk

it's been so fascinating yeah no risk dealing with failure these are all important concepts but also there's the insight and this is this is a very well known concept in poker but there's the insight in investing where you could make a right decision which you should do every single time and still lose money which is fine if you're making the right decisions it's fine to lose money and similarly you can make a bad decision and make a lot of money and those are very dangerous

because then you'll continue to make those bad decisions until you lose a lot of money and so people think oh you know I'm a genius I made a trade and I'm up 300% in a day and I'm thinking to myself that's probably was a really bad trade but there's absolutely no way to tell that person if that was a bad trade

So before we jump in to your trades why don't you tell us a little bit about your background where did you go up and what were the early years like

I did my undergrad in computer science I want to graduate school for computer science I was thrown out of graduate school because I wanted to be you know a young great American novelist so I started writing all day every day and failing all my classes and eventually they asked me to leave.

believe, although there's an open invitation for me to return, but it's been 30 years,

so I don't know.

And up and then I was a programmer.

I was still writing every single day.

I really wanted to be a writer, but programming was a way to make money.

And then I switched careers a lot.

Then I worked at HBO.

I worked in the entertainment business.

And then I built their website.

And this was back in 1995, 1996, when no companies had websites.

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