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Breaking Boards: Successful Trades and Lessons Learned 93

bution days were increasing, so when EMC dove below the 200-day moving
average, I sold my entire position.”

• KEY POINTS •

• Consider forming a Google group for e-mail discussions
with other investors.
• Big winners will offer several entry points.

Switching Careers: Trading Full Time
Debra Kloote’s father first got her interested in the stock market in the
1990s. She started out investing in mutual funds but by 1999 was investing
in individual stocks. Although Debra had some success, she wasn’t really fol-
lowing the market or stocks closely enough.
All of that changed when she found the Clearwater, Florida, IBD Meetup
Group. She began attending the free monthly meetings and understood
more about the paper and Investors.com. By this time, she was really ready
to focus and learn.
In March 2011, an IBD Meetup leader from Naperville visited the
Clearwater group and talked about switching careers. For years, Debra had
been an accountant working in the corporate world, but she really wanted to
spend more time trading and turn investing into a full-time job. This
Meetup discussion made her realize that was a real possibility.
Later that year, Scott O’Neil, Bill O’Neil’s son and president of
MarketSmith, spoke to the Clearwater IBD Meetup Group and said some-
thing that really resonated with Debra: “Don’t give the market your money
unless it deserves it.”
Debra attended some of IBD’s advanced level workshops and began to
do a post analysis of every trade she had made for the past three years.
Doing this analysis really helped her learn where she needed to make
improvements in her trading.
She wasn’t upset with her past trades but looked at them as valuable
learning experiences. She says, “Mistakes equal learning. Reviewing what I
did wrong keeps me from making the same mistakes again.”
Debra saw the market changing quickly in January 2012, and recognized
the “window of opportunity was there with the beginning of a new uptrend.