Preface to all nine parts: today is Eclipse Day, so I am giving myself an exceptionally rare day off. I have no idea if I'll see anything, because there's so much cloud cover. In spite of that, I had devoted the entire day to this quest, so I'm setting up some posts in advance so my dear readers do not get bored. Once this all blows over, I'll be sure to tell you about whatever adventures I had during my Texas journey.

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This is a tale of how greed and lack of risk management can blow up in a big way. Brace yourselves.

Allow me to introduce you to one Matt Todorovski, a resident of Australia who wanted to become a trillionaire – – yes, a trillionaire – – by sitting in front of his computer trading the FOREX markets.

Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with being ambitious, setting goals, and trying to beat the markets. Millions of people around the world do it, and the vast majority of them fail. It’s a tough business. That’s why the handful of winners make so much money. Because almost everyone else loses.

For years, Mr. Todorovski did plenty of losing. From his start in 2009 up through the beginning of 2018, his efforts yielded nothing but financial pain (being a resident of Australia, his reporting was naturally in Australian dollars, each of which is about 0.72 of a U.S. dollar). About a year ago, he was looking at lifetime “winnings” of about negative seven hundred thousand dollars.

Then, for reasons unknown to me, his trading luck started turning around. He finally wiped out his losses in September 2018, and then he started making……….profits! And, million by million, he proudly noted the date of each milestone. He also, strangely, decided that the sky was the limit, and he would put in placeholders for future profit milestones, up to and including $1 trillion. Because God knows the way to get ten times richer than Jeff Bezos is by trading FOREX on your personal computer.

This fellow wasn’t shy about sharing the specifics of his account, either. He would regularly update followers on the various automated systems he was using and the gains or losses from each one. As shown below, he had amassed over $13 million in profits as recently as about a month ago.

And then, late in December, things took their first serious turn for the worse:

Perhaps to bolster his spirits – – and keep naysayers at bay – – he started amassing a bunch of bromides, motivational lines, and inspirational quotes.

And then, positive thinking notwithstanding, he losses accelerated.

As illustrated below, there was a big move in the USD/JPY, and this one-day wonder was enough to wreck the guy. (In just a few weeks, however, the damage to the chart vanished).

Which reminds me of a similar wipeout James Cordier went through with OptionSellers.com and its own centimillion-dollar wipeout. (Here, again, the destruction would have never happened if he had somehow been able to hold on just a few weeks).

But getting back to our hero in Australia……….having lost so much in such a short amount of time, and with public visibility, he started getting pounded with I-told-you-so style hate mail, some of which he shared.

Within the span of hours, he was wiped out. The entire $14 million of his account was gone.

You probably know where this is leading……….

Although he shouldn’t hold his breath. Someone (maybe a relative) kicked in $100, and about ten days later some big-hearted soul augmented it with five dollars of his own.

I suppose the lesson learned here, at a minimum, is one that Matt expressed in his own “Methods Of Procedure.”