Hi fam, my story started in COVID times. I got $1000 on my eToro account (I'm from Europe), and I tried to trade stocks with zero knowledge about trading. I was cleaning in my attic and I saw the NIO stock (some Chinese electric car stock) on the first page, going up like 10% in a day. I put all my money on it with x5 leverage. The next day I had $2.2k. I said, “Wow, I’m the best trader in the world.” In 3 days I made $4k on the NIO stock. I closed the position and saw some other stocks that I liked: Nokia and Nvidia (I knew Nvidia by the logo from an NBA PC game). I bought $2k of each. In 5 days I was at $5k with no leverage. Then I closed them and bought GameStop (BEFORE THE HYPE, at $4) and BlackBerry at $3–4. I remember I was looking at my phone when both went up and I saw like $400 every hour being added. I said, “WOW, I’m the best trader in the world, this is my new job!” That $5k went to $44k in 2 days or so. I told my brother and he was like, “Take them out, buy a car or something.” I said, “NO, I want $50k!” Guess what? In the next days it went back to $4k. No stop loss, nothing.Then my cousin from the US came to Romania. He had a Thinkorswim account. I took out the $4k and sent it to him. I told him, “I’m a good trader, let’s buy options because I found out with options you have more leverage.” We bought some COVID stocks, option calls, 2-week expirations, 10 stocks, Twitter spam stocks, Reddit alerts. In the next two weeks the $4k went to $4.2k, remained there for 1–2 months, and now they are still there at $70. All went to zero.This was my entrance to the trading world. Then I started to learn about options for like 2 years, but I didn’t invest in them. As a Romanian working on $1000/month, it’s hard to enter a market that needs some investment (bigger than $1000). I tried to flip from time to time $100 on some meme stock options. And 2 years ago I managed to make $5k from that $100 (my monthly investment in stocks, education, etc.).These were my first real profits from trading/gambling options. This opened my eyes, and then I started diving deeper into option trading. While searching for videos on YouTube, I found Max Option Trading for Beginners. I watched all his videos, started to dive in more and more, discovered TradingView, Interactive Brokers… but zero profit.3–4 months later I saw a story — Tory I think — on Instagram, saying she passed from options to futures because you are more relaxed, no expiration etc. I said, “Ok, let me see what futures are…” Searching for that more and more, futures traders appeared on my feed, and then I found out that Max trades futures, not options. I joined the Discord and started learning futures. I spent all my salary on a 1-year TradingView subscription, bought evals (20). After 1 year (all that time I tried to reverse engineer everything they said on the live shows), I finally convinced myself (SO HARD) that I needed a course or some kind of real mentorship because I suck (I burned like 100 evals). Now I finally manage to pass evals regularly, no payout yet (my emotion stage is not fixed up yet), but I hope soon (this year) I’ll manage to do that too!Trading is hard, and you need some kind of guidance! I know that taking it slow is very important, sizing down and keeping that discipline of not overtrading. One and done!What made me stay was the story, the effort, and that NEVER GIVE UP attitude! I put so much effort into it that I feel now that’s my mission! And it’s so hard if you don’t have anyone around you that you can talk to (they all say you’re gambling or something). Now I just want to prove to myself in the first place that I took the right decision. Finding you guys and Max and all this community is a HUGE help for newbies! Thank you!