This is my first blog post ever, so go easy on me. I aim to inspire. I've been trading for about 6 months now, and I'm still losing pretty consistently. Has my confidence diminished? Not even a little bit. Allow me to give a little background on myself so everyone can understand that nothing is required to succeed except dedication. My entire adult life has been about survival. Let me explain. I got married and joined the US army right after graduating high school. At that point in time, i believed that everything in my life was going just perfect. I had a wife, a step son, and one of my own on the way, while i was thousands of miles away from my new family for a year in South Korea. Every payday was a lifesaver, because we were always broke a few days beforehand. After returning to my family from duty, it was the same story. Always struggling to get from payday to payday. In 2014, one year after I was released from active duty, my wife asked for a divorce for reasons that are inconsequential. So here i was with 3 children to pay child support for, and working a shitty factory job. Since then, I've moved on to a better paying factory job, but I'm still struggling to save money. All this being said, I've been saving a little bit here and there, and started building my trading account. It's taken some time, but I'm up to almost $1,000 now. I'm getting ahead of myself though. In 2014, I lost my identity. For my entire adult life, I was a family man, and now I was out on my own for the first time and, if anyone reading this has listened to the steady trade podcast, i was that black hole that Stephen Johnson mentioned in the first season. I was barely scraping by after child support and bills. To top all that, I was living in a shitty, roach infested studio apartment because it was all i could afford. I was definitely at rock bottom. The lowest i could have possibly been. I've moved around a few times over these 4 years after my divorce, and was even forced to live in my car a few times, but no matter what I did, i always ended up in the same financial situation. I can't pin point the exact day that it hit me, but sometime around early 2017 I finally became disgusted with the lifestyle of just "surviving". I searched and searched for opportunities for months on end, but regardless of my efforts, I found nothing. Then, one day around early July 2017, an old memory seemed to emerge from the abyss of my most deeply buried memories. Mr. Quarles... My high school computer science teacher. I remembered how, in every class he had taught, he had all of his students look up 5 different companies of our own choosing on Yahoo finance and track their stock price once a week for the span of the semester. I never thought much of these numbers back then. All i cared about back then was writing depressing poetry, and listening to my emo music. But the memory stuck with me. So in Mid July, I decided to open an account with E*TRADE and start watching stock prices. I was never suckered into the buy and hold strategy. I understood that if I wanted to make any sort of real money, I would need to focus on very fast moving prices. Needless to say, I learned quickly that "real" companies had no such opportunities. So penny stocks were my main interest. After watching the prices go up, down, sideways, in circles, and around the world, I placed a few foolish "beginner" trades in some sub-penny level stocks, and made nothing at all. Shortly after all this is when i found Tim Sykes while researching penny stock trading on google. I won't go into detail on my entire journey thus far. For, the purpose of this post is simply to show people that ANYONE can make a change in their life regardless of their situation. It has been a long, but exciting 6 months so far, and it didn't take me long to realize that i had found my calling. I am still consistently losing, and will probably still consistently lose for some time before i start making real profits, but I am in this game for the long haul. I'm here to be an example to everyone that you don't have to be born with any special circumstances to take control of your life. You just have to grab life by the balls and decide to do it!!