You see, I first started making significant amounts of money, in 1998, when I was 16 years old. And what happened was, I was a tennis player, and I wanted to sell one of my old, beat up, and used tennis rackets. I offered it to a friend, but he didn’t want to buy it, but what that friend told me changed my life forever. He said: “Why don’t you try to sell it on ebay”. At that time, I had no idea what ebay was, in fact I had very little idea about internet in general. All I used internet for was to go to AOL chat rooms, trying to pick up girls. As I got older, I now realize that most of those girls were probably old, fat men, probably wearing suits and glasses, but anyway….so I went to ebay for the very first time, I opened an account, I figured out how to post my tennis racket, and I started thinking of a price to put it at. Since I bought it on sale two years ago for something like $55, I decided to put $35 as price for it. So I put up a 7 day auction, and the racket ended up selling for $67. I was shocked. So being kind of a little young, dumb, and naïve, I thought…”Well…if I bought this racket for $55 two years ago, I beat the crap out of that racket, and now somebody was willing to buy it for $67, why don’t I go to a store, and see how much new rackets will sell for.” So I did. I bought two types of cheap rackets at retail prices, in a regular sports store. I paid $19.99+tax for one, and $29.99+tax for the other. I put them up on ebay, and they sold for around $65, and $75 respectively. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I received checks in the mail for them, because back then, almost nobody paid and accepted credit cards for ebay items.
Back then I hardly had any money. I was living by myself in Los Angeles, USA. My mother was sending me money from Russia for rent and food, so at any given time, I was lucky to have a couple of hundred dollars of available money. And those couple of hundred were meant to be for food. I had no car, I had to get everywhere by a bicycle, but the sports store wasn’t far, it was only about 3 miles away, so what I started doing, is I started listing these tennis rackets in massive quantities. I put $49.99 for the one that cost $19.99, and I put $59.99 that cost me $29.99, and I was putting up several auctions every day, starting with $1. And people were buying these rackets for crazy prices. I couldn’t throw enough into this ebay animal. So I started having very nice cashflow, I would keep little to no inventory, every week, I was shipping out dozens of these tennis rackets, bicycling from the sports store, to my house, then again biking to the post office, packaging everything, and mailing it. I started making thousands of dollars per month, didn’t need anymore money from my mother, in fact I started offering money to her. Imagine, being 16 years old, living by yourself, making more money than your friends’ parents, doing something so stupidly simple…buying tennis rackets from your local store at retail prices, and reselling them on ebay. I thought I was given a right to print free money. All the time, the store I was buying from had inventory problems, they wouldn’t have enough of these rackets, so I had to go to other stores, or make my customers wait. Plus it was a hassle bicycling all the time with all this metal on my back. Every time I had to do a mailing, or shopping, I had to make several trips back and forth. And few miles back and forth, is a lot of biking.
So that’s where I learned first the power of buying low and selling high, same as we have in forex. And as you can see, it was a very logical and simple process. I know you may not appreciate these stories at this point, and you may think, Felix, what a heck does this have to do with forex trading systems, and making money in forex? Believe me…it has everything to do with forex and trading systems. Let me continue with my story, and at the end I’ll tie it all together into a very nice and practical lesson, that will tie in very nicely with the forex trading system that I currently use.
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