Abir: Jack of all trades, and now a master of ONE.

This week, we had the pleasure of speaking with Abir, otherwise known as @DeepPocketsITM on Twitter.

He's an options trader who found his success after 3 years of painstaking effort and working various side hustles.

In this interview, we'll dive into

• Abir's trading journey
• His unique situations and challenges along the way
• How he was able to find improvement
• Future goals

Without further ado... let's get into it.

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His trading journey and growth

TZ: Hey, Abir! So excited to feature you this week. We've been seeing your consistent posts on Twitter and just had to get a hold of you. Could you start of by telling us how long you've been trading for?

A: I started trading stocks and crypto at 18. so it’s been about 4 years in the markets.

Those first three years were honestly just me losing money. I’d have periods where I’d make crazy amounts in my P/L, but keeping it was the tough part.

In October 2021, I found out about options trading. Before this, I was a jack of all trades and master of none, but options trading is where I really stuck with it and stayed resilient through all the tough points and obstacles that every trader faces.

I don’t know any other point in my life where I allowed to keep myself going while failing for so long.

I would always see the crazy amount of gains I’d make in my trading, but my losses were just so much bigger. I knew that if I can just reduce the losses and be able to keep my gains more, that would be life changing.

This would lead to the cycle of highs and lows, but it all lead me here to the trader I am now.

I was losing money the first 10 months. The next 6 months I was in a boom-bust cycle.

After that, I’ve found consistency and a solidified strategy/system.

Sounds short and simple when I try to sum it up, but it’s anything but that.

TZ: What a great example of powering through. 3 years of not feeling successful at something you're working hard at often leads people to make excuses. Your resilience is unparalleled! There must have been a lot going on outside of trading as well to keep you afloat.

My trading journey has created a pivotal moment in my life.

I was doing many things prior to options trading. I was drop shipping for two years, reselling sneakers and clothes, and mass completing assignments for other students.

I was straight hustling, but that’s in my blood as a New Yorker.

I was pretty good at the things I had already going for me and it was working, but I didn’t enjoy it because I felt that all my time was going into doing the work and if I spent less time it would decrease the growth.

I found trading to be the opposite of that, something I can leverage while keeping the time spent the same. It was also one of the few things that I was continuing to fail at and saw no progress for months and months.

I enjoyed the challenge of it, and even though then I was spending more of my time reading books, backtesting, journaling, etc., I found a challenge that kept me going and I knew that if others could do it, then I could too.
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Trading took me to very low points in my life. Everything I worked for prior to it was all erased as my trading losses mounted up. That obviously wasn’t great for my trading either.

Trading really broke me down as a person, and built me back up through the journey that it put me through.

I started meditating to increase my patience, working out consistently to build my health, reading books to leverage the knowledge of others and grow my mind.

I was a completely different person midway through my trading journey, even though I was still red most days, I saw the growth it brought in every part of my life except for the financial area.

It was only after this growth did I start seeing growth in my trading.

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I honestly found that to be life changing itself, the gains I make now are nice, but the person that I’ve become throughout this process and the growth is overall priceless.

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On using a trading journal

TZ: Well said. It's not until we see a change in ourselves that we see a change in our trading progress. Throughout your growth process, did you utilize any trading tools or journal your trades?

Prior to using TradeZella, I would manually journal my trades using an Excel sheet.

It was okay, but nothing like what TradeZella provided me.

I started using TradeZella during my boom-bust cycle and it honestly is one of the key factors in turning me into a more consistent trader and cutting out those mistakes that would ruin weeks of good trading progress.

I first found out about it through Umar posting about it on Twitter.

Since he was a trader I looked up to creating this platform, I knew it would be a tool that could only help me as a trader since there was someone behind it that went through what we all went through as traders.

TZ: That's amazing. Diving deeper into this topic, what problem does TradeZella solve for you?

Journaling was made easier with TradeZella.

The way I looked at it, it created very little resistance in importing my trades and being able to analyze them right away compared to having to manually type in every trade on Excel like how I used to do it, and that’s why I made the investment.

My favorite part is being able to tag each trade and see which setups/mistakes are costing me the most.

This is what created consistency in my trading as I reduced that cost slowly over time. Then I would move on to the next costly mistake, and then the next one, and so on. It was a rinse and repeat process.

On his future goals

TZ: Any goals for the future?

I’m going to be graduating this May from college and transitioning into working remote and trading at the same time.

This last year in college, I was able to enjoy life more by being able to travel more ever since I was able to get myself together in my trading aspect.

Looking back, I’m glad I spent these past four years working on this skill because I know that I’ve developed something that I’ll be able to reap the benefits of for the rest of my life.
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I’m excited to trade and work, and slowly size up while maintaining consistency to really take my trading to the next level.

In the future, I want to continue the type of life I was able to create for myself this past year. Being able to travel, enjoy life with the people that mean the most to me, and continuing to level up my trading to the point where I can stop working a job.

In the future, I intent to use the money created from trading to start projects of my own, continue creating ways to give back to the trading community to help others, and enjoy life with less bad stress and more good stress.

TZ: Great to hear, Abir! Thanks for sharing your story with us as it can inspire other traders to stay the course. We're excited to see how you progress this year!