Warrior Trading is a day trading community and online educational platform founded by Ross Cameron, a full-time professional day trader.
Cameron says the idea for a day-trading school germinated after he started a blog chronicling his day-trading experiences. As his audience grew, he opened a chat room for readers to share their tips and tricks.
To that end, Ross Cameron has plenty of knowledge to share. He opened his first trading account more than two decades ago while he was still in high school. His first transactions — executed via Ameritrade — were conducted in the summer of 2001. He started with just $1,000; ExxonMobil, Caterpillar, U. S. Steel, and Pfizer were among his first investments.
Cameron examined his assets daily and studied them over the summer, but the value of his holdings barely seemed to move.
During summers in high school and college, Cameron worked as a pool boy, mowed lawns, and helped a pottery teacher. He learned much from each of these jobs.
But since he could only make $10 to $20 mowing lawns, Cameron was drawn to the stock market. He took odd jobs to be able to afford to go to the movies and buy candy but believed other people invested in the stock market to become wealthy. After his dismal results in the summer of 2001, he thought that to earn considerable money in the stock market, one required either a huge amount of starting capital or deep-pocketed personal connections.
After Ross Cameron’s father died, he was left with $100,000 from the estate. Not yet trusting his instincts for stock market investing, he considered buying a rental property and becoming a property manager. However, that required a mortgage and a $100,000 down payment — but Cameron was refused a mortgage because he had no significant income he could show.
Facing facts, Cameron reconsidered investing with his funds. However, he still doubted his financial management abilities, so he got a financial planner to advise him. Even after the market recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, returns were still relatively poor.
At that time, Cameron was living in Vermont, he was struggling to find work, and he began to think that if he managed his assets himself, perhaps he could generate enough profit each year to justify making the money his full-time focus.
This was optimistic, to say the least; even if he returned 25% per year, $25,000 annually would not have covered his cost of living at that time.
However, Cameron had an old school friend who had made over $16,000 purchasing a penny stock on a whim. It was a light bulb moment for Cameron.
Since his account held more money than his friend’s, Ross Cameron started to think maybe it was possible to grow his account by 50% in one year (making roughly $200 a day) by trading penny stocks.
Cameron’s real-day trading education started here. He tried a little bit of everything — penny stocks, small-caps, large-caps, options, trade alert services, and custom buy/sell indicators — but he didn’t find any consistency. He certainly learned a lot about trading, but he wasn’t finding success.
Cameron spent all but $25,000 from his father’s bequest on losing trades and living costs while piling up roughly $30,000 in credit card debt. His trading account balance dipped to just under $20,000 after a $5,000 losing day. Since his balance was under $25,000, he couldn’t day trade. To raise $5,000, Cameron sold some of the contents of his barn on Craigslist.
It was back to the drawing board for Cameron. He reviewed his previous two years of trades, looking for a hint or suggestion of what was working. In truth, he had a successful strategy, but the “noise” of many of the trades was disguising it.
His method included trading stocks that gained 20% to 30% in a day. Mostly, these were small-cap stocks that traded between $2 and $10. Cameron realized he would be better off if he stopped trading Apple and other large-cap stocks entirely.
After his funds were briefly over $25,000 again, Cameron said, “This is it.” He saw his next trades as one last opportunity. With this thought, he started employing more discipline and began to see more consistency in his returns. To be sure, there were still a few bumps in the road. He wasn’t entirely out of the woods yet, but this was a turning point.
In 2012, Ross Cameron started Warrior Trading as a WordPress blog (its original name was Day-Trade Warrior). To track his day trading progress, he posted blog entries. He kept track of his gains and saw that his blog had enough followers to warrant adding a chat room and other day trading services. In 2014, Cameron launched Warrior Trading’s day trading Chat Room, and in 2015, he wrote and published the book How to Day Trade.
Toward the end of 2016, he was regularly trading with a large account, and novice traders would sometimes ask whether or not his strategies could be used to grow a small account. Since he’d almost always been trading with an account above $25,000, he wasn’t 100% sure. Feeling challenged, he decided to put himself and his trading strategies to the test.
In January 2017, Ross Cameron opened a new trading account with just $583.15. He wanted to show his methods could still work on a modest account. And, in fact, they did; astonishingly, in 44 days, he grew this account to over $100,000.
Not satisfied, Cameron was determined to take things to the next level — he set his sights on turning the $100,000 into $1 million. It was a ludicrous aim, and he was only 10% there. Nevertheless, he grew the account to $1,000,000 within two years, reaching this milestone in May 2019.
In 2020, the stock market underwent a series of changes. After a 30% drop due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the market recovered to all-time highs. Retail traders who were newly unemployed began entering the market.
Volume and volatility increased due to millions of these new traders. Ross Cameron profited from this volume, and in 2020, he saw his first day earning over $100,000 and his first month making more than $1,000,000 in profits. He finished the year with more than $5,000,000 in gross profit — about $4,500,000 in net profit after fees and commissions.
January 2021 was a repeat of what happened in 2020, and in two weeks, GameStop stock rose from $20 to $500 per share. As a consequence, Cameron set a new daily profit record for himself of a little under $500,000 and a weekly trading record of over $900,000.
He’s now grown his original small account to over $10 million. Along the way, he’s learned that objectives are useful — but the market determines the earnings.