Hip Hopping in the Stock Market

Stock Market Success

People always ask me whats the best way to make money without doing anything illegal? Well, before I got into “legit” hustling, I was doing a lot of petty things such as selling bootlegg dvds and mixtapes (and things I can’t really say here). That was until, a friend of mine, asked me, “Why don’t you try the stock market?” My first reaction was to be scared as I had no clue about how stocks worked as they seemed all very mystical to me. It’s hard to describe the feeling, think of it like when someone tells you to try something you have never heard of before and the only “knowledge” you have on the subject comes from little bits of hearsay you’ve heard in the past. Since I’ve always had a open mind and have a good appetite for risk, I decided to investigate further -as any true hustler would.

From that point on, for the next four years, I would spend my free time in the summer reading books on stocks. I would start with the basic introductory books on the stock market and than gradually move on to more sophisticated finance books and even started reading biographies of famous fund managers. Once I started looking into the whole financial game, it turned out to be really easy to understand and I even began doing fantasy trading, which is where sites allow you to trade stocks without actually investing real money. I did this throughout college, without even starting my own real brokerage account as I didn’t have enough money to start trading on my own, as I knew it would require a fair amount of capital to start.

What I did, however, do was save with the goal of eventually opening my own account. From working a slave labor part time job and from my petty hustling at the end of college I was able to fund my own account and begin stock trading. It was a crazy period and I did make many small mistakes starting out. I did, however, also make a lot of money. What I believe led to my success is that it isn’t the mistakes you make, but rather it is what you do after you make a mistake. Joe Budden has a line where he says, “I ain’t here cause I fell down, I’m here cause I got up.” This pretty much sums up success in anything, and pretty much sums up my success in the stock market.

If you really want to succeed in stocks you have to do your homework. If your an ambitious college student like I was, treat the way you learn about the stock market like how you would treat a real course. The only difference is you are graded on how much money you make and not how much you memorize some non-sense. And as every hustler should know money is the motivation.

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