have admired Marc Chaikin’s work for decades. Marc is an incredible thinker and student of the markets. He’s been a good friend for decades. And I still learn from him every single time we talk.
Brad Martin was a floor trader in Chicago for 20 years. He teamed up with me to design and teach trading seminars for half a dozen years. He shared much of what he knows with me about how floor trading works, about short-term trading, and was a naturally gifted teacher for our students.
Dr. Chris Szymanski helped me write through a section of the book that we ending up saving for later publication. Chris is a caring friend who is a fine trader and top-notch thinker.
All of us involved in the project would like to thank Tula Weis at John Wiley & Sons and her team for their wonderful help. Tula has been the steady, guiding hand throughout this project.
Unlike the lawns I mowed as a teen, the process of writing a book doesn’t always play out in straight lines. But there’s still that same great feeling of achievement when the job is done. Especially when you know there was such a wonderful team effort to get here.
PROLOGUE
It was March 27, 1988 – Palm Sunday, in fact. I was watching the sun rise from the very top of an 80-foot chemical distillation tower in one of the world’s largest industrial complexes.
And I was unwinding.
You see, I’d been working at the South Carolina site for almost 24 hours – the white-collar version of a college all-nighter. The team I headed had been finalizing the startup of a facility known technically as a “continuous uranium de-nitrator.” The plant, built to prepare spent uranium for long-term storage, would be the first of its type in the United States.
For an engineer like me, it was a fascinating project to get to lead.
And a demanding one, too.
For months, team members and I had been running through a comprehensive startup checklist. The dangers of processing multiple deadly materials had been accounted for and controlled. Every switch, valve, and control loop was tested and retested.
But with a plant startup like this one, there’s a defining moment – a climax, if you will – when the rehearsals must end. Someone must push the button so that the facility’s live performances can begin.
That’s when you find out if all your hard work – and the care you put into the risk-reducing checks and rechecks – has paid off.
When you’re working with radioactive materials, as we were, those efforts, and this final moment, are critically important.
Here’s one example. Before the plant went live, we could actually work on the equipment wearing a minimum of protective gear. But once uranium entered the pipes, the system was “hot” – meaning it was actually radioactive. From that moment on, even simple tweaks to the system required us to don full protective gear.. and to use a much more elaborate safety plan.
For us, that first live performance had started before dawn on Palm Sunday in 1988.
I was the one who had the responsibility to push the button (hit the “Enter” key on the control system keyboard).
I can still see it all in my memory: circuits closed. Valves opened. Pumps started. The sophisticated chemical plant awoke from its startup slumber, came to life, and ran like the well-oiled machine we’d designed it to be.
Without a single hitch.
All of the startup team’s hard work, all of the systematic checks and rechecks paid off. By every metric, the project was a success.
We even brought it in on time and under budget.
It was quite an achievement.. and I was understandably proud of what our team had accomplished.
But hours later, as I’d perched atop that distillation tower and watched the light come up, I remember thinking – for the first time ever – that I wanted to be something other than a chemical engineer.
I was physically exhausted and mentally drained (100-hour work weeks will do that to you). I was 600 miles from my lovely and talented wife. And we hadn’t started our family (a biological impossibility when both spouses are in two different places).
With this project now receding in my professional rearview mirror, I realized that I was already thinking about the next phase of my career.. and my life.
With the benefit of hindsight, I now see that my high vantage point on that March morning gave me more than just a great view of daybreak.
It also allowed me to look into the future.. my future.. and the new professional course that ultimately led to this book.
I should tell you that by this point in my life I’d already been actively trading and investing in the financial markets for two years. I’d made some interesting discoveries. And I’d begun to understand the obstacles individual investors faced in their quest to trade effectively, safely, and profitably. (Take the area of information, for one example. I’d seen the paucity of data available to retail investors, and had seen that the little bit of information that was available was tough to understand – or just wrong.)
As an engineer, I’d spent years distilling sophisticated chemical processes into simple systems – with simple instructions – that anyone we hired and trained could follow. And I’d built in risk-management controls that let those same workers operate safely.
As I relaxed at the top of that tower that Sunday morning, I realized I could take that same simplicity, clarity, and safety and apply it to the complex and off-putting world of investing.
In other words, the same “keep-it-simple/keep-it-safe” approach that made it possible for a plant to churn out a stream of badly needed chemicals could also be used to create a system that would churn out a stream of profits, and wealth, for individual investors. And thanks to the easy-to-follow instructions – and attention to risk-minimization – the system in each of the two worlds (chemicals and investments) could be monitored and optimized in very small chunks of time.
The 10-Minute Millionaire is the result of that March 1988 epiphany.
After I climbed down from that distillation column, I spent the next 10 years straddling both worlds. I stayed with DuPont until 1999. I was the team leader and ultimate “push-the-button” guy for yet another startup, a project that also came off without a hitch – even though it posed even greater potential dangers and risks than the project I described earlier.
Having paid my dues on projects out in the field, I moved into a business-development role in a newly created DuPont-owned venture – an idea incubator designed to hatch new products, including cutting-edge fibers and composite materials.
However, even as I worked on these projects, I became more and more immersed in the investing world – learning from and trading alongside some great financial minds as I refined my own systematic approach to the financial markets.
By 1999, I was able to take early retirement from DuPont – and devote my full attention to trading and investing.
When doing something that you’re passionate about, time really does fly.
Since breaking out on my own, I’ve co-founded two different financial-seminar and trader-coaching companies. I co-authored the book Safe Strategies
