Hey, I’m Mike Swanson I’ve been a professional stock trading investor for over ten years now and started out with $15,000 to go on to manage millions of dollars in a hedge fund. However, the strategies that I used to manage millions of dollars are the same strategies that I used to first build my personal investing account and the ones you can use to do the same.

It all starts with just grasping some stock trading basics. You have to beyond beginner investing which to me means having a real methodology when it comes to online stock trading and stock picks.

I know, because when I first started out I lost money. I grew my $15,000 into about $50,000 in less than a month. But due to my inexperience within a year I had turned the fifty grand into about seven.
It sucked.

And I don’t want you to make the same mistakes.

You see most people simply throw money at the stock market. They have no game plan when it comes to investing or any grasp of some simple swing trading basics. They don’t have a method for cutting their losses at the right time and do not know how to let their winning positions grow and still take a profit on them at the right time. They simply haven’t taken the time to develop a method to take advantage of the financial markets.

Without a trading strategy you are putting your entire financial life at mercy to the gyrations in the financial markets, which is an incredibly risky, dangerous, stupid, and unnecessary thing to do.

You see when you trade stocks online or buy any financial instrument you are entering a huge game in which you are competing against people who do have a game plan. You are competing against lions and you are a lamb if you just throw your money into the arena blindly.

The good news for you though, is that is exactly what almost everyone does so it is easy to beat the competition and make money from the markets. And when I say everyone I don’t mean just individual investors, but even hedge fund managers and mutual fund managers. They tend to follow each other like a herd and buy at tops and sell in panic on bottoms like everyone else. They have no special abilities.

So in the end you don’t have to fear them. They are just like you.

The key is that you have to be a lion in the stock market and to do that all you need to do is develop a game plan and the discipline to follow it.

That’s it. That is all it takes to win in the stock market and that is what I want to help you accomplish.

My goal with my email list is to educate you to be a lion in the markets and to provide you with my thoughts on what is happening in the stock market and what I think the best ways to profit in it are according to the broad market trends.

I took my own journey from a lion to a lamb in the market. At first I had a game plan, but it took me a year to actually stop throwing money at the market like a gambler and to apply a plan I knew would work. Once I started to do that I started to make money and eventually I built a reputation on the Internet.

You see I first started to trade back in the Internet stock bull market days. I didn't have a website back then. Every morning I would look through roughly a thousand stocks and pick out 10 stocks that I thought had the best chance to break out and go up big the next day. I'd email them out to a small list of friends and then buy them.

Well those friends passed the list on to other people and talked me into putting up a simple website with an email list form. In a year that email list went from a dozen people to over 12,000 and I didn't spend a dime on advertising. It all came from word of mouth and from people I talked with in forums that I used to post in.

In a way I guess I was a pioneer on the internet when it comes to stocks. I had a simple website even before Jim Cramer's Thestreet.com was up. He was still running his hedge fund back then and throwing chairs around his office while I had no plan or thought of going from my small friends list and making a big email list and website. I had no notion of what was to come.

So I kinda just fell into this business by happenstance – all because I had a knack for picking stocks – and more importantly knew when to adjust my strategies to fit a bear market.

Of course any idiot can make money in a bull market, but to make big money in bull markets means picking outperforming stocks. But bear markets force you do make money differently. Bear markets aren't about stock picking, they are about focusing on market timing. I've known when to make that switch.

You can too. All it takes is to stay objective about the market and to not be one of the guys that just throws their money at the market and hopes. If you have a game plan then bear markets don’t beat you up – your plan gets you out when you need to be out. But to start you must take control of your money and that means getting the right mindset.