👋 About joEy

Photo: A young George Soros sits on a swing, circa 1934.

Meet my older brother, Eric

“Invest first, investigate later.” – George Soros

My first exposure to the stock market was in my mid-teens. My older brother, Eric, was dating a girl and her father was a day trader. He was rich. One day he took Eric back into his office and showed him a few things. That must've excited him greatly, for he was a father figure to Eric. What teenage boy wouldn't want to see a patriarch's private intellectual activity?

Eric presented the markets to me dressed as a philosophy problem. He liked to bring these to his little brother. By all measures, Eric was unspeakably exceptional for his age. He was reading Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead in freshman-year literature, to the discipline of the teacher who saw it as rule-breaking. I would follow in his footsteps two years later, reading the same book in sophomore English, and receiving the same punishment. I dropped out of high school just weeks after being lectured.

So Eric bringing little bro a philosophy puzzle wasn't unusual, and it was quite welcomed. I always enjoyed older bro's riddles. He shared with me his ponderings about whether a private individual could ever "beat" the markets. His position was skeptical. While he did not use the term, he appealed to the efficient market hypothesis. He pointed out that it was one against many, with the crowd all sharing their information into a single price consensus, whereas the individual was unlikely to ever have privileged or secret information alone. Looking back, he was a young boy working a single thought-tool to its exhaustion. I enjoyed ruminating on the social aspect of the markets for the next couple of years in my teenhood.

Eric started reading Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefèvre when he was nineteen. In usual and fortunate fashion, he shared his intellectual proclivity with me again. I read that book at eighteen and have read it many times since, but it should be understood that my book-reading style is probably unusual. I can spend years or decades rereading the first couple of pages of a book, sometimes even just the first page, before I move on to the second page, if ever. I developed this reading style from sheer passion: it excited me so much to stew on a single page's ideas for years that it rarely, if ever, occurred to me to read the rest of the book. I continue this reading style to this day.

Engineering software at TD Ameritrade

Twenty-seven was a difficult year for me. I was not working — sick, injured, and heartbroken. I remember being so terrified about paying my rent and having nothing to eat that when I landed my first "real" software job, I took home many snacks from the break room. I did not know that during my first day of work, I had converted from hopeless poverty to well-to-do overnight.

I quickly accelerated in software engineering and landed my third promotion in two years, this time at TD Ameritrade, in Ann Arbor, MI. Here I was exposed to "white-glove service" and worked in the same building as thinkorswim architects. We were on the "robo-advisor" team, part of long-term investing, or "LTI" as they liked to say. My technical chops and devotion to quality work won favor with the managers, and later that year I became the lead engineer of the robo-advisor on both mobile platforms.

My peers had an unfavorable attitude towards investors. The wing would joke that their job was to "make the rich richer." I was grateful to have a job and I found finance interesting. I enjoyed my time sitting with the senior architects on the thinkorswim platform. They were smart puppies. I started to read about investing to understand my job better.

joEy the BOGLEHEAD

My research took me to John C. Bogle. I became a BOGLE-head. I bought $VT, $VTI and $BND, roughly 45/45/10. I felt good about the philosophy. I drank BOGLE Kool-Aid every day and tried to sell it to others. I understood it to its core. I wasn't groundbreaking since index-fund investing had existed for decades, but I was still early to the crowd, as the American public would continue to find their retirement funds perma-invested (mostly without their knowledge or understanding) in index funds per "the institution".

A recurrent theme for me, which also appears in my investing, is my habit of waking up on ordinary mornings, with no plan, foresight or contemplation, and making life-changing money decisions. For example, at 37 I had no idea I was waking up one morning in January and buying a $40,000 grand piano that day. I would figure out what I bought after it was in my house, but I enjoyed haggling incessantly and spiraling up the sales manager in short and concentrated euphoria for an advantage. I've done that my entire life, whether it be blowing my full annual college loan money on a custom-made guitar the day I got the deposit to deciding to be a Hammond organ playing Director of Engineering at 28. I never seemed to make decisions, but instead decisions would make upon me.

So, not understanding the law of compounding and the sacred rule of never-interrupting, I gladly liquidated my BOGLEHEAD to buy fine instruments. This ends joEy the BOGLEHEAD.

joEy rides the corporate ladder

As a new software engineer into corporate America, I progressed quickly. I doubled my salary in 3 months. A year later I added another 50%. One morning, I woke up and had an image. I was tired of being at the bottom of the corporate org chart. I wanted to see what it felt like to be near the top. I've always had this intuitive screen that flashes images in my brain. An earlier premonition was the morning I woke up and imagined a perfect GPA for the remaining 3 years of my college education. I went from a college failout, with F's, and graduated with three years of all 4.0 classes, finishing my GPA at 3.94. I was summa cum laude with an upper division thesis/defense, and I got letters from Greek fraternities for years. I was not interested in that, though; I was interested in inner-visions.

That morning I imagined being near the top of the organization. In an instant, single moment, I decided I was a director now. Six months later I was a lead architect at TD Ameritrade. I told them I was a director now but they said I wasn't. I recognized that HR titles are just made up and didn't reflect reality. I created the position myself and acted like a director at TD Ameritrade. I told people my title is my own business with HR, and I am a director now. Weeks later, I applied to another position, and they hired me in the company as a director. The moral of the story is do not wait for people to tell you what you are. You decide that yourself, then you tell them, and finally the external status comes.

joEy goes physically broke again

Riding that bubble to the director level paid well. I invested it in audio engineering assets. Audio is a terrible business. So is music. Unfortunately, the better I did in corporate engineering (the outside), the worse I felt (on the inside). I became sick and lost my directorship. Begrudgingly, I had to start my career again, this time back at the bottom with the original role that brought me to the dance. I rode that bubble another four years.

Sadly, I lost my older brother Eric 4.5 years ago. He was only 35. I was also losing my father to alcoholism, and I lost my grandfather. Shamefully, I worked through the loss of my brother without stopping to recognize what I had lost. This decision probably led to a three-year illness, which I continue to struggle with today.

In 2025, I took disability insurance. My hospital, CommonSpirit Health, wasn't paying my short-term disability insurance even with proper doctor documentation. Bullied, hurt, not-working and afraid, grace led me back to the markets. This time, I wasn't BOGLE-joEy, I was Day Trading joEy.

Day Trading joEy is a naive fellow

Thus begins the beginning of our joeytrades.com portfolio results ledger. At the time, I had no idea what I was doing or amounting, so imagine my surprise two years later when I calculated my turnover that year at over $50 million and 1400 fills. I publish my entire trading history to keep me honest. You are welcome to the full data-set if you want it, just reach out.

Eric had told me decades before about Warren Buffett. He knew about him when he was dating his girlfriend. That was my first clue. The first book I picked up was "The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life" by Alice Schroeder. It was likely the first page or chapter where she describes Warren "tap-dancing to work every day for sixty years" (rough memory quote, not actual). I started sobbing immediately. As someone who despised almost every single day of my engineering career for twelve years, I had a new sense of hope.

I steeped myself in Buffett and Munger, but I didn't trade like Buffett OR Munger. I liked short-term call options on $GOOG, my biggest winners. I liked and hated 0-DTE options on $SPY. I day-traded and scalped $JNJ and meme stocks. I started to enjoy the taste of danger: nearly full-porting $NUTX before its earnings call. I called Charlie Munger up "across the bridge" to get his advice, and panic sold 5 minutes after EDGAR posted the 10-Qs.

I more than doubled my portfolio very quickly. Next, I did something most nobody does: I stopped. I say most nobody stops something that makes me so much money and reward. But I stopped because what I was doing was not aligning with the Buffett and Munger books I was reading. In any case, I withdrew my profits and lived on them, which, while it destroyed my compounding, saved my life. Your portfolio does not matter if you do not eat.

Breaking apart and falling beneath all bottoms

"I rely a great deal on animal instincts. When I was actively running the fund, I suffered from backache. I used the onset of acute pain as a signal that there was something wrong in my portfolio." – George Soros

In 2026 I lost my father to alcoholism. I've been off work since April of this year. I decided to return to investing again. I quickly returned 30% in about 1 month scalping, day and swing trading $URA. In astonishing fashion, I decided to stop again. This time was much harder because I felt like I was putting multiple successful years together. I could not choose not to stop a good thing, however.

I am a spiritual investor. God tells me to buy, I do not understand why, so I follow through. We had an inner vision, much like our Director vision, that said "You will concentrate 100% of your portfolio on UUUU, you will hold it through 50-100% portfolio ruin, and your trading is done for the year." The higher powers asked us to research our position and prepare for an interview. That was completed today. That's where we stand now. A mystery I cannot understand.

We now shift our focus away from investing, towards turning our life into a "well-honed machine."