How Content Creation + Algorithmic Trading = More Revenue & More Joy in My Life

Embracing the Purpose of Money

Before I can share about how I got there, I’ve got to be upfront about shifting my perspective on the Purpose of Money. Let me explain.

Maybe you’ve heard one of these phrases:

“Money doesn’t equal happiness.” Often proudly spoken by a monk-like figure or a preacher thundering from a pulpit. Sometimes they’ll cast it as a moral imperative, incorrectly quoting the bible, “Money is the root of all evil”.

Or, “More money makes you happy!” In my mind, when I hear this phrase, I think of ‘Mr Wonderful’ from Shark Tank/Dragons Den — Kevin O’Leary and his laser focus on money.

I think both these narratives are wrong. Seeing money as either ‘evil’ or ‘the answer to happiness and joy’ just doesn’t work. Embracing either only leads to hurt, pain, lack, and damaged relationships.

Instead, I had to learn to look at money differently.

Here’s a few thoughts about money. Money gives me options. Money allows me to invest in the things that are important to me. That might be something tangible like a company on the stock market, but it could also be something intangible like having extended time with my newborn son.

I realized there are 5 purposes to money.

1. Money allows you to invest
2. Money allows you to provide
3. Money allows you to create
4. Money gives you space
5. Money enables growth

What money doesn’t (or shouldn’t) do is:

1. Control me
2. Make me think about it all day every day
3. Make me happy when I have some and sad when I don’t

Those thoughts above are mine to own and work through, because money is just a tool.

Connecting to this perspective on the purpose of money changed everything for me. I became so excited by my future. I unlocked a brand new me! And the brand-new me decided to set out doing a few things I’d always wanted to do but been a bit afraid of.

It was this perspective shift which set up the rest of my journey so far.

Revenue Creation through Automated Trading

I’ve always been interested in financial markets, stocks, and trading activities. When I was 10, I used to get up every morning, open the paper and look up the latest stock prices on key companies (back in those days, that was the closest I got to market data feeds).

I even convinced my grandfather to help me purchase some shares in a company. That $500 seemed like an impossibly large sum back then!

I Stopped My Self-Destructive Money Behavior

However, my twisted understanding of the purpose of money kneecapped my growth as an investor over the next 25 years. I was at war with myself: on one side, wanting to build wealth and security and on the other side looking down on this as somehow immoral or wrong. I would often feel like an investor version of Jekyll and Hyde — I’d make a great investment in share or crypto, then a few weeks/months later self-destruct. It was costing me millions of dollars in lost opportunity.

After finally making peace with money’s purpose, I decided it was time to whole-heartedly commit to being an investor.

I Learned How to Be a Great Investor On Purpose

So I did! I learned all about algorithmic trading strategies. I put my relatively basic programming skills to work building some trading algorithms. I created a trading bot from one of the trading algorithms — and it actually made money.

Encouraged, I went even further. I decided to look into crypto trading — not just play around the edges like I previously had. I researched market conditions, and thought about how crypto could change the world. And guess what — I made some more money!

Not only did this process bring me a lot of joy, I was able to radically expand my giving capacity. Over the course of 3 financial years, I was able to give thousands to charitable causes. This giving felt like an investment to me — an investment into the lives and futures of those who the money helped.

Content Creation and Personal Branding

As I shared my journey with my family and friends, I started to get questions about what I was doing. People like my mother would ask me about how they could get involved. They would ask ‘How do I get started?’

I Learned to Share

I would be at a party, and suddenly be surrounded by people asking about my trading portfolio and trading strategies. With nothing to prove, and also nothing to lose, I happily shared my investing journey. I shared about the times I nailed it — picked a stock or crypto which went up. I shared about the times I missed out on trading opportunities because of fear or ineffective risk management. The times I didn’t do my own research and had a loss. I would talk about the time investment in research — and the joy this process would bring.

As more and more people kept asking me about my journey, I decide to start writing about it. At first I didn’t share my writing with anyone except my wife. I was too scared and afraid. I thought: “I’m just some new kid on the block. What do I have to offer?”

With lots of encouragement from my wife, I eventually decided to start writing on Medium. Looking back at my first pieces of content, I often have a chuckle. They’ve got heart, but in terms of quality? Yikes.

Still, I keep them around to help me remember where I came from.

I Learned About Growth

Then one day something unexpected happened: people started reading my content! People started following me! I quickly passed the 100 follower mark, and got excited when I got $3.00 revenue.

It might seem silly now, but that experience truly kick-started my content creation journey. I was using my writing to express my thoughts, share my ideas and build a community of like minded people. Every month my revenue would more than double, and I quickly got to the stage where I could see pathway to doing this for the long term.

I realized that I truly enjoyed creating content. The joy I would experience from researching a topic then writing about it was amazing!

Not only had my revenue gone 🔼, but my joy had gone 🔼 as well.

Building An Automated Trading System

One day I was discussing my experiences with my brother-in-law. He started sharing about his research into forex trading, and how much of trading software available was difficult to use and overly complex. He showed me his extraordinary skill in using technical analysis to identify trading opportunities, then demonstrated how time-consuming manual trading was.

Although I was excited, I took a few weeks to research our discussion. I was astonished to find how inaccessible and challenging it was for people to access trading tools. Trading bots were either expensive, or used programming languages which are so old-school and challenging to learn, you would need to commit months to learning them. It put things like algorithmic trading systems and auto trading completely out of reach for people unless you had:

1. Lots of money to buy trading signals from experienced traders
2. Lots of money to pay someone to build it for you
3. Lots of money to afford to take the next 6 months of full time learning

I was just as shocked at the lack of entry level material for human traders to learn how to trade. Without even getting to the point of codifing and building their own algorithmic trading system, I couldn’t believe that in the era of the internet, knowledge sharing, YouTube, and basically material creation this situation existed. Don’t even get me started on lack of content to help people learn how to be intelligent investors!

My First Automated Trading System Series

My first series after this moment was about how to build an automated trading bot using MetaTrader 5 and Python. The series took me about a week to build and develop — and I loved every single minute of it.

I shared it around and the response was amazing. People loved the practical approach and how I walked them through the steps to build their own auto trading bot. I showed people how to build a simple forex trading strategy, and how to use a demo account to practice. I demonstrated the code for making buy and sell orders, automating trading decisions and integrating a persons trading account.

The series ended up being published in a number of leading online Medium magazines, including Geek Culture. To this day, it remains my number one series of all time. It has the highest number of views and is my top earner on Medium. Several clients have read the series then contacted me on Upwork or our website to ask me to build a trading bot for them.

As time went by, my confidence grew. I wrote series about crypto trading using Binance and different ways of calculating technical indicators. I started to plan my content and build a social media profile.