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 BoBo... What?
Now a little insight into who I am. Online i've been known as Bo’Bokus. That screen name comes from something my Grandmother said to get us as kids to sleep at night, I can still remember her saying that "if we didn’t get to sleep Ole Bo’Bokus would get us." The name has just kind of stuck with me and somewhere along the way it evolved into my own nickname.
My real name is Jeff Sorrells I am 43 years old and retired. I am from Alabama, and yes I am a redneck, but proud of it. I didn't attend college as I didn’t feel I needed it. Instead I joined the US Navy after high school, I thought joining the biggest party in the world would be more fun than continuing with school. I finished my term with the US Navy and although it was fun and I did see things I never thought I would, I knew it wasn’t for me. My destiny was yet to materialize. My entire life I’ve always had a sort of knack with math and I’ve always been interested in the stock markets and how they worked.
My destiny was yet to materialize. My entire life I’ve always had a sort of knack with math and I’ve always been interested in the stock markets and how they worked. During my short career in the US Navy there was one experience that stuck with me the most. While overseas, especially in the European countries, I learned something from the old timers. During our deployments we were sometimes given several thousand dollars for per diem. They would take the money and go back and forth to the local banks in whatever country we were in at the time. I asked and found out they were exchanging their cash back and forth with the banks to try and make a profit from the exchange rate as it changed from day to day. They wouldn’t make very much, maybe $20 sometimes, but it got the wheels going. Soon it was all I could think about, I got a notebook, a calculator and a pen, which soon turned into several notebooks of me playing with the numbers and exchange rates. I theorized that if you could do this on a daily basis and trade these currency pairs back and forth several times per day a fortune was there to be made. I knew this was the career for me everything just seemed to fit.
To The Boiler Room And Back
The heart breaking part came when I found out that only International banks were trading currencies at the time, we didn’t have what we have today with the retail side of forex trading, it was simply non existent. Years later back in the civilian world I thought I would do the next best thing, I would go to school and become a stock broker and at least I would be trading. After getting my series 6 and 63 licenses I went to work for a broker in Atlanta and things turned into a fiasco. It didn’t take me long to figure out that you don’t just go to the trading floor. I was stuck at a long desk with other new hires and all we did was call on what seemed to mostly be older retirees. Our job was to try to sell them on whatever new mutual fund the company had put together. I didn’t last long there as every call I made felt like I was talking to my grandmother and trying to convince her to invest into a fund that I had absolutely no faith in myself. After not very long I left and went back to what I knew how to do utilizing my experience as an aircraft electronic tech in the Navy.
One night after work I was surfing the Internet doing random searches, when I found an advertisement for a retail forex broker and as I read on It felt like I had just been reborn. Finally forex was available to the general public through these new retail brokers. My lifelong dream was a reality!
Adventures In Forex
My stab at self employment had basically emptied everything I had built up over the years in savings, but I didn’t care, I immediately opened a live account with what I felt I could afford to loose. At the time this was a whopping $1,000. Heck I figured with my "knowledge" I would turn this into $10,000 in no time. I couldn’t have been more wrong as I proceeded to lose almost every penny in the account and was in denial about losing it. Surely I didn’t really loose all that over the course of 1 month? but I did. Being in denial I Immediately re-funded the account with another $1,000 and went right back into the same habits. My story really isn’t any different than what I’m sure a lot of you have experienced, I lost both of those accounts and that it couldn't happen because I knew what I was doing.
I started looking around for different brokers and found the MT4 platform with basically unlimited amounts of adjustability in the indicators and charts. This time I thought maybe I should learn more about Forex and try these demo accounts to actually test some things before I throw real money at it. I went the very same route everyone takes, I tried every single method I could get my hands on, tried all the different indicators, I even taught myself some coding so I could take the indicators out there and rewrite them to my purposes, nothing worked over an extended period of time. So I started to ponder, what techniques have been used over the longest period of time and what are the majority of the big traders using. I came to the conclusion it’s the simplest of things that really worked. Basic support and resistance. It’s the simplest but makes the most sense. I sat down in front on my cpu for at least 12 hours a day until I found how it could be traded successfully. I was trading with money I could not afford to loose and this to me is almost a death sentence to a trader.
I found that using fibonacci also helped so I began working with fibs and even looked into getting professional training for using them to trade support and resistance, that idea was scrapped when I found out how much the cost was to get professional training, wow it was expensive. 10 years ago I could afford it, but now no way. I had to find my own way of using them so I did. I spent another year of sitting in front of the computer with demo accounts until I found they weren’t so complicated and I simplified the use of them by splitting the market between a long and short condition with the fib tool and everything started to come together. It took a long time to trade my way back to being profitable because I found that after loosing my first 2 accounts I became somewhat gun-shy about entering live trades. It was difficult to trade with real money again even though my back testing and the results in the demo accounts were unmistakable. I was trading with money I could not afford to loose and this to me is almost a death sentence to a trader. In the back of my mind though I knew I could not give up yet, this was the dream I’ve always had and here it is and I’m doing it. I traded feverishly for the next year or so.
I traded my way out of the hole I dug and actually made back my $2,000 original investment and for the first time withdrew around $3,500 leaving about $2,000 in my live account. Certainly not the results I had originally dreamed of. At this point I even thought of giving it up because now that I was profitable I felt a lot of pressure to continue to be successful. Once again it was difficult to pull the trigger on a live trade, my fear of loosing was powerful since I really could not afford to loose. If I lost what had left in my account I would not refund it again or I would be back to square one again.
A Final Turning Point
In one final twist an opportunity came up to trade someone else’s money for them, having limited capital myself at the time, I figured what the hell. After all I turned out a 550% profit in my account so if I traded theirs with caution I could earn close to that and a hefty commission to boot, which I could in turn use in my own account. This added an entire new dimension of pressure and needless to say the psychology prevented me from trading as I normally would. I began to trust myself and this was the most important turning point in my trading career.
It was also one of the worst ranging periods you could imagine. I had only made a few trades in the span of about 2 weeks and was down about 40 pips. It could have been worse, but I knew I needed to focus first on myself and my own account.
This is the point I knew it was time to put up or shut up, what in the world was I thinking, I myself had forgotten who I was and what I was capable of. I was letting others determine my future and my decisions were being swayed. Never again have I looked back, I began to trust myself and this was the most important turning point in my trading career. The thing I wanted the most was to retire and become a full time trader since I was still working full time throughout this. I couldn’t retire until I could relieve myself and my family of our debts. It was a hard road and you will never hear me ever say that trading is easy, it’s never easy. I fully understand why so many fail at trading now. I am retired now and all I do is trade. It almost killed me, but I am living that dream now and nothing that anyone says, thinks, or does can change that.
This is my background and where I am coming from. I started with basically nothing and still by no means do I consider myself wealthy yet. I still do not own my own International bank, that’s my next goal.
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