The worst thing that can happen to a beginner is an early win

Nineteen years ago I was sitting in an internet café in Ulaanbaatar, paying by the hour, when I saw an advertisement for forex trading.

It is hard to explain now what that time was like. The country had come out of socialism not long before, and people's minds had not caught up with the new economy. Many of the adults around me had grown up being told that buying and selling for profit was shameful — something that could get you arrested. Then the rules changed, and everyone was supposed to know how to trade. My wife and I were very young, our first son was on the way, we were living in a rented side room of someone else's house, and I could not find work. I had no money to travel to China and back with goods, which is what people did then.

Internet was not something you had. It was somewhere you went and paid for, and it was slow. The ad promised a great deal. In the state I was in, it looked less like a promise and more like an answer.

I clicked. I studied as much as a person can study while watching a clock and paying by the minute, which is to say: almost nothing. Almost all of the material was in English. There were no video courses, no communities, no free lessons — none of what a beginner today can open for free in an afternoon. I did not understand the platform. I did not understand what the numbers on the screen meant. And I decided to start.

I borrowed two thousand dollars from a family friend, a Japanese translator who worked for an NGO, and opened an account.

It worked

The first trades went well. Not a little well — well enough that within days the account was several times its starting size. I remember the feeling in the room that evening. We had never had that kind of money in our lives.

I know now what had actually happened: I was trading positions far too large for the account, and for a short stretch the market happened to move my way. That is all. There was no skill in it, and nothing I did could be repeated on purpose.

My wife said, take some of it out. Just some. Keep it.

I did not. I was certain this was only the beginning — that I had found the thing that solves everything, and taking money out now would be taking it out too early. A few days later all of it was gone, including the borrowed money.

I have thought about that evening for nineteen years. If those first trades had lost, I would probably have stopped, paid the friend back somehow, and gone looking for a job. The win is what kept me there. It taught me the wrong lesson with total conviction: that this works, that it works fast, and that the only thing standing between me and the result is how much I am willing to risk.

The part that took six years

I did not stop. I borrowed again, from other people, and lost again, more than once. By the time I finally stopped borrowing, what I owed was several times what I had started with, and people were asking for their money back.

So I went to South Korea and did manual labour for six years. Roughly one of those six years of work went to paying off what forex had cost me.

That is the real number in this story. Not the size of the losses — the year.

What I actually got wrong

For a long time I thought my problem was knowledge: I hadn't studied enough, I hadn't found the right method. Looking back from here, that was not it, or not the main thing.

The first thing I got wrong was putting serious money — borrowed money — into a business I had never done, never practised, and did not understand. I would not do that with any other business. I did it with this one because the advertisement told me it was fast.

The second thing was that I had never prepared my mind for it. Greed and fear are not side effects of trading; they are the conditions you work in. I could not control either of them, and I learned much too late that a person who cannot control them cannot do this at all, whatever method they use.

The third thing is the one I underestimated the longest. In those first months, with nobody to correct me and nothing to learn from, I built habits — how I entered, when I moved a stop, what I did after a loss. Bad habits, formed at the very beginning. They are what kept the losses going long after I understood the basics, and they were far harder to remove than they were to form. A beginner today can get that part right cheaply: the guidance I could not find in Mongolia in 2007 now exists in every form, for free and paid.

What eventually worked for me was narrow and unglamorous: write down the rules, then follow them in order — in the actual order, not rearranged to suit the moment. Following them out of sequence is how the old habit comes back wearing a rule's clothes. That is not a method, and it is not a shortcut. It is just how I got the habits to change.

None of this is advice. It is what one early win cost one person, and why I am still careful with anything that looks like a fast answer.

This article is for information only. It is not trading advice.