About Me

I'm David Alan Carter. I began trading stocks back in 1997, just as online brokers began to make their presence felt and the information technology bubble began its historic inflation.

What started out as buying-and-holding a couple of mutual funds quickly turned into active trading individual equities, and then into day trading.

The latter was my sole taxable occupation for ten years.

Up and Down and Sideways
From 1997 'till now, we've witnessed a financial marketplace that included the collapse of the dot-com bubble, any number of regulatory twists and turns, and macro economic crises to include the recent Great Recession. As a trader, I've had to adapt and evolve so many times that I now look like a platypus.

Looking back over the past two decades, I see two constants:
  1. Like many of you, I've had good years and bad years. But even on good years, I rarely beat the S&P 500.
  2. I lived each day in a state of tension given the stock picks I was working at the time.

Through it all, I kept imagining a strategy that would remove emotion from the game, reduce volatility, and still produce decent returns relative to the S&P 500.

A Better Way
At the end of 2014, I began developing what would become the DIY models The 12% Solution and the Stock Market Cash Trigger, and ultimately, the strategies outlined within these pages. As stated before, my goal with each of the strategies was to take as much emotion out of the buy/sell process as possible, reduce volatility and drawdowns (peak-to-trough decline of an investment), and still generate returns competitive with the benchmark S&P 500.

I've stopped day trading.

Don't get me wrong: I still fixate on the markets. CNBC is a constant companion. But my portfolios are now tied to the strategies on these pages. And my money is safer now than it's ever been -- and generating more of its kind than it ever has. I sleep like a baby.

If you - like me - have struggled to make sense of the market and find a way to achieve a respectable level of return while still being able to sleep well at night, I welcome you. I can't promise every trade will be a winner and every month will be green. Many will not. But I think I've developed a way to trade intelligently, profitably, with minimal fuss, while getting on with one's life. See if you don't agree.

Best of luck,
David Alan Carter
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