Hello Steem Leo's Community!

Greetings SteemLeo!

Today I am joining this new community of people interested in investing.
I am excited to join a community on the Steem blockchain because I am very impressed with Steemit, the Steem blockchain, and I think it’s a fabulous opportunity to be an early participant of a community with such great potential. I c think there is a great wealth of knowledge here on the blockchain to be explored and shared and I am very impressed with the launch of this project, so not only do I hope and pray for its success I want to help promote it by joining and I hope to get my followers from my other blog to follow me here!

I personally have been investing in stocks, bonds, mutual funds and most recently options for close to 20 years. I started like most people, investing in mutual funds in my IRA and in my children’s college funds I started when they were born. Then I began investing in stocks and US Treasury Bonds. About 14 years ago I started my journey into solo investing with “blue chip’ stocks like Ford, GM and IBM. During that time I experimented with one aspect of option trading called covered calls. Then came the tech stock bubble and I invested in high flyers like Amazon, Apple, AOL and in that wildly giddy environment of everything rising in price for a year I discovered another aspect of option trading called buying and selling calls options. It was a wild ride with huge profits buying and selling, I remember making 14,000 USD in one day on some call options purchased before a stock split and sold after the split settled. I almost quit my day job. Fortunately I didn’t and diversified into real estate moving into larger, nicer and newer properties in an attempt to invest these option gains into traditional assets I understood, because despite my success I realized I didn’t completely understand the options market. The tech stock bubble burst and I was glad I kept my day job! But I continued my part-time study and trading of options.

Three years ago I discovered “Tasty Trade” an Option Traders education Network online which was very extensive and Free. I completed all there online training videos and tests and I literally I felt like my eyes were suddenly open for the first time and I began to understand options trading. It was turning point for me, as the course equipped me with the understanding of trading terminology, trading math and trading techniques. Suddenly I possessed the ability to read and understand options trading books, which had previously seemed to be written in code! Suddenly websites, chat rooms and forums, whose knowledge had previously been beyond my comprehension became open to me and I found others who loved to write, teach and discus options trading. Now I feel very comfortable listening to discussions of various types of option trading techniques and I am able to distill the pearls of wisdom from the mountains of words. I went from a learner to an explainer, translating options strategies posted by others to new students of options and slowly the student of options became a teacher. I found that to truly teach you must understand the mechanics, but it’s also very helpful to play the game or trade.

As a trader I do mostly options spreads, covered calls, cash covered puts and the occasional naked call or put, but in general I do spreads. I have honed my skills on the vertical spread, focused initially on high probability trades, which were out of the money. But as I have traded and continued learning I honed my own trading techniques based on my successes, strengths and failures. We all bring different strengths, talents and weaknesses to the trading game. It is by recognizing which personal traits we have in those areas that we can reduce our losses and maximize our gains. I look forward to discussing options terminology, buying and selling call or put options along with my current trading focus called spreads, along with why I trade spreads exclusively.

Two years ago I discovered Bitcoin and I started researching this new investment world called cryptocurrency, the blockchain and this passion called mining, which was becoming popular. I studied, networked, watched large numbers of YouTube videos and eventually built a computer contraption called a miner. I started mining and joined a mining pool to improve my success rate and I was getting rewards every day. I built a single GPU version miner first, then a second miner with two cards, then a third with four cards and then expanded that one to six, then I bought a motherboard upon which I planned to run eight cards, an Octominer, but never got that far. I mined Zcash and Ethereum. At first I made money and it looked like I might get my money back which I invested in a few months. But then the cryptocurrency market entered its bear market. I started studying again and I found Staking coins, coins which earned sitting in your wallet, then I found Staking Pools. I again started earning good profits with staking. Then I discovered the cryptocurrency Dash and from their masternodes. A truly wonderful software construct and the backbone of many blockchain, but going by many different names and of course variable earnings. From there I discovered Steemit and this project is where I weathered the Storm of Crypto winter or the cryptocurrency bear market. I had studied and been an investor in many projects in the name of diversification. But I traded most of my coins for doge, litecoin, Ethereum and Bitcoin and while I kept some of those currencies I put the bulk of my investments here, in the Steem blockchain.

These are the reasons why I am here investing in Steem. I feel that compared to Steem, most of the cryptocurrency market is like being poor, and living in a 3rd world country. It’s very bad. Being in the Steem coin community is like being middle class in a first world country, like the USA. Here in a first world country we have problems like cell phone batteries that give 12 hours of life instead of 13-14 as advertised. But we are not starving, we are not afraid of being eaten by wolves or tigers as we go about our everyday activities. Being here after being a newbie in the crypto jungle I feel like Steem is amazing. From a strictly technical analysis view, when I assess cryptocurrency value I look for longevity, community, use cases, development activity, community activity and transparency. Steem has not just one use case, but several. Steem has not one developer but several hundred! Steem has a huge active community, Steem has DAPPs.

Steem has so many positive attributes missing from your every day coins that it is like a beacon of light in the darkness.
I know that sounds dramatic, but the differences between Steem and your average Alt-coin are dramatic. I have lived life in the crypto jungle and this “the Steem Community” is an oasis, Steem is a highly advanced cryptocurrency civilization. And now comes SteemLeo, the chance to join a community whose interest is something I have both experience in expertise in, plus the rare chance to join in the beginning. In the Cryptocurrency world, this is a rare opportunity. So I jump at it and I am ready to go all in on this one.

I am willing to share the ideas, techniques and hard work I used to go from plankton to dolphin on Steemit in one year.

I hope you join me, so that we can be successful together.

@shortshots