Leaving NZ: My journey into Trading
My background and how I got into crypto and trading
It’s been over a month since I left New Zealand, my job, my friends, and my family to travel the world while I trade crypto and stocks.
I’ve decided to start a Substack where I will document my journey. Some posts will be about the cities I’m visiting and what I’m up to, but the majority will be about the trades I’m executing, the strategy that I’m developing, what I’m learning, and how I’m going.
I like the idea of documenting it all and writing is my preferred method of doing so. I figured that being public with it not only will keep me accountable but it also may be informative or interesting to some.
To start things off, to provide some context for future posts, here’s a bit about my background and how I got into crypto and trading.
I grew up on a farm in New Zealand where the closest town was an hour's drive away. When I was about 10 years old we moved to Taupo, where I did all my intermediate and high schooling. My dream was always to be a professional footballer, so after school, I joined the Declan Edge Academy (now called The Ole Academy) for three years. When it became apparent that I wasn’t going to make the big time, I made the very tough call to quit, and soon found myself doing door-to-door sales in Auckland City.
It sounds pretty depressing—going from semi-professional football with aspirations of going pro to door-to-door sales. But I remember being very happy because, for the first time, I realized that there was this whole other world outside of football.
After three years in door-to-door sales, I joined a Real Estate company called Apartment Specialists, selling apartments in Auckland City. It’s an awesome company with great people, and this is where, for the first time in my life, I started making some proper dough.
I was fortunate to start in 2015 when the Auckland property market was booming. I saved a deposit fairly quickly, and in 2016, I bought my first property and went on to buy and sell a few more.
In mid-2017, crypto first came on my radar. It didn’t take long until I made my first investment of $10,000 NZD into XRP when it was around 20 cents. It did nothing for four months and then rallied 1,300% in two. So that $10,000 turned into $130,000 (at the highs).
Jackpot… if I had sold it.
Naturally, the crazy rise in price got me very interested in crypto. I was watching all sorts of crypto YouTube videos and was being sold on every single one! At that time, I didn’t understand markets at all. My thinking was as simple as: this tech is revolutionary, it will get adopted so surely the price must go up.
So instead of cashing anything out, I invested $90,000 of my hard-earned cash into the peak of the 2017/2018 bull market to round my total investment to $100,000, plus an approximate $100,000 of profit from XRP (as the price had come back from the highs). So, a portfolio value of $200,000 all up.
One year later, the crypto market had lost close to 90% of its value, and the portfolio value went from $200,000 to $21,000 at the lows. Pretty sickening, but a lot of lessons learned, which I’ll elaborate on in future posts.
In 2019, I wanted to see the world, so I sold all my apartments and went traveling without a return date. I still held my crypto but I was not actively engaged, the loss in value was so big I bought a little more and decide to set and forget it. Where a lot of my time spent on this trip was playing poker both online and live which is a game I’ve been playing competitively since I was 17.
The goal was to fund the entire trip from poker, but I only ended up profiting $12,000 over ten months and where I had spent about 6 x more than that. It was an incredible time with many stories that I’ll remember for life but after ten months, I was ready to return to NZ and back to Apartment Specialists but in a different role.
I’d been back for five months before March 2020—Covid. Stuck at home, and like so many other millennials, this is where we discovered the stock market.
I never went to university, and I would sometimes daydream that if I were to do it all again, I would go back and study finance and become a trader so I’m surprised it actually took me this long to get involved in the stock market.
So my younger brother Finlay and I started dabbling in the stock market and at the same time the crypto market started picking up again which grabbed my attention again. Over the next two years, it was no longer dabbling, as I was spending a lot of my spare time investing and trading both the stock market and crypto.
I still didn’t have a good understanding of markets and in hindsight, despite picking some winners, I did not have a proper trading or investing strategy.
This did not matter to begin with because it was almost impossible to lose in the markets in late 2020 and 2021 because of the low interest rate environment and the approximate 15 trillion dollars that had been printed an injected into the system. So by late 2021 I had recovered my losses from 2017/2018 and was in the green and still bullish as ever.
But in late 2021, the SP500 and crypto market topped and went on to retrace 75% and 25% respectively. That’s right, I went on to round trip another bull market and was back in the red.
A round trip is where you ride the price of something all the way up and all the way back down.
The volatility in crypto is crazy and it often shakes people out but I’ve always been able to stomach it. Don’t get me wrong, when you see over $20,000 of value disappear in one day my stomach churns but it’s never made me want to thrown in the towel. I’ve always been able to zoom out and look at the big picture and realize that these are just blips in a secular uptrend and sell offs are for buying. Or maybe I’m just a degenerate gambler…
By mid to late 2022, my overall position in both crypto and stocks was in the red, but I wasn’t far off getting back to break even which I considered not too bad given how significant the stock market and crypto sell off was. I was gaining a better understanding of markets and of trading.
It was around this time that I started to take this game seriously. I was losing interest in property and my day job in real estate whereas it was the opposite with this new venture into financial markets. My door to door sales role and Apartment Specialists were both 100% commission which I’ve always appreciated given that you get paid based on your performance. Trading takes this to another level. Predicting the outcome of something, making a calculated bet on it, getting it right and then getting paid!
I was hooked, so I started taking the necessary steps to educate myself on it properly to increase my probabilities of being right more than being wrong so I can do this for a living anywhere I want in the world. Like anyone learning anything, especially with a full-time job, making time was the biggest obstacle. But I changed my routine and started waking up at 5 a.m. on weekdays, dedicating a few hours each morning to it.
“Trade” is a very broad term as there are many different types of strategies. Swing Trading, probably best describes what I’m referencing which is where positions are often held over a number days, weeks and sometimes months. Day Trading, is as the name states, where traders are in and out of trades within the day. I don’t and never have day traded.
Therefore, when I am referencing Trading, I am referring to Swing Trading, not Day Trading.
“Investing” is often seen as buying a position with a longer term outlook often 6 months to X years.
By 2023, I had a strategy in place. Crypto was going through a bear market, so it was better to invest instead of trade. Also, with crypto being a 24-hour market, it is very difficult to trade well with a full-time job whereas with the US stock market, the daily close would often be around 8am - 10am (depending on the time of the year). This suits a swing trading strategy because prior to the daily close is often the best time to execute a trade. Therefore, I was able to swing trade stocks part time while working a fulltime job.
According to a lot of stock market analysts, 2023 was supposedly a very difficult year for trader but by October, I was up 26%. This gave me confidence while at the same time, as much as I loved NZ and Auckland I was keen to move overseas. I finally made the call, I told my boss who was supportive and we put together a plan to phase out of my role at Apartment Specialists.
It was locked in mentally but deciding to do this is just one thing and actually being able to do it is another and at that point in time I wasn’t in a financial position to do so. I own four apartments in Auckland but with a lot of debt and three of them with pending remedial work that will cost more money. So the idea was to sell one but without boring you with the details I was not able to without a significant discount.
This gave me the motivation to ensure I had a strong finish with Apartment Specialists so the commissions earned would help me fund the transition. This, coupled with a strong rally in crypto market enabled me to make it work. I’m now expecting a sale on one of my apartments in the coming months so once that is complete, it will be in a far better position with a bigger bankroll to play with. Exciting times ahead!
In my next few posts, I plan to cover my strategies and positions, how I’ve been doing so far this year and my thesis on why I am so bullish on the crypto market. I’m also going to start posting on X so for more frequent updates give me a follow at @therealjsmith88
Yeya.... your off. Proud of ya
All Aboard 💯🚀