Grist for the Mill

Social Media Innocence

I quit social media this week – at least for the time being. I feel I owe it to you to explain why. I can’t do that in a few words. It will take some explaining. I am absolutely not seeking pity. I just want to explain that I didn’t quit because of a few bad apples writing negative messages to me. It goes way beyond that.

Summing Up Why I Walked Away

If I was asked to sum up quickly why I quit, I would answer as follows:

I quit because I felt it affected my mental well-being. What people don’t know is that I have scammers exploiting my name. I have people sending me graphic sexual images with highly offensive and abusive messages. I have dealt with a fan committing suicide because I wouldn’t help. I have stalkers sending me presents. I have a social media outlet solely dedicated to creating homosexual deep fake pornographic pictures of me. And much more.

Does this mean I am gone forever? No. I will be back in a little while. Maybe that is all you want to hear, and you can stop reading now.

If you are interested in what goes on behind the scenes that made me react how I did, then feel free to read on.

Now the Nitty Gritty

Do you remember Danny Glover’s catch phrase in the movies “Lethal Weapon” with Mel Gibson. It was “I’m getting too old for this shit”. That is how I feel about my social media presence.

I was due to go on holiday at the end of July anyway, and I had announced my intention weeks ahead of the date. I had traded live on YouTube, and I was happy with the outcome. I made money every day.

Then on my penultimate day I lost money. Shortly after I started receiving abusive and threatening messages. On the last day before my holiday, I should not have traded. I was rattled by the content of the threatening messages.

I scraped through a breakeven day, but as I sat and reflected on my social media presence that night, I concluded that I was too old for this shit. It could not continue like this. Either I would quit altogether, or I would have to rethink how people in general are able to contact me.

Am I Thin-Skinned?

If you think I am thin skinned, and I should be able to get over a few adverse comments, I absolutely agree with you. You can’t please everybody.

However, would you say the same if you had to factor in the threats to my life, the suicide that I was unable to prevent, the stalker who harassed me, the deep fake homosexual images posted on a social media channel, which I can’t get removed because it “doesn’t break the policies of our platform”, and the obscene sexual images I am being sent to my private Telegram account?

I wrote this article to explain why I quit, and why I would like to come back to teach, but not until I have put in place a buffer between myself and the public. It saddens me because I mostly enjoy the interaction with the public. They ask great questions.

Warning

The stories I tell are 100% true, but I have at times changed the names of the central characters, in part to protect them or their families.

I call the article Grist for the Mill. It is essentially a description of our lives and how all our experiences shape us and who we become.

Fallos

I was staring at the picture, wondering what I was missing. It was someone in a bath, in a cheap looking bathroom, with a window, looking out over a bleak city landscape. My mind was trying to make sense of the image.

I am born in Denmark. We are famous for many things, good things like LEGO and Carlsberg, but perhaps less known for being the first country in the world to legalise pictorial pornography, incidentally in the year I was born – in 1969.

It is fair to say that Denmark and Danes have a relaxed relationship to nudity. On the beaches in the summer, it was all out on display, thus perhaps giving us Scandic natives a healthy relationship with parts of the anatomy that is considered a taboo in most other countries on our planet.

And yet, looking at this sizeable veiny erect penis, sticking out of the bathtub water, and reading the accompanying message, I was unsettled. I receive many kinds of messages on the Telegram App, most of them being questions on trading, some thanking me for what I am doing, and some supporting me after a losing day of trading.

Thankfully, the outlier messages are few, but they are still there. Opening messages is a never-ending Forest Gump chocolate moment. You never know what you are going to get.

And on this day, I got a big old dick-pic with the message “Fuck you Gay Boy Trader”. And for whatever reason, instead of just blocking the message, I wrote back “Wow, I didn’t know they came in X small”.

I must have upset his ego, because over the ensuing few minutes I received a litany of death threats and extremely graphic descriptions of how I would live my last moments of life.

I tried to report his messages to Telegram, but there was no function enabling me to do so. I blocked the individual, accepting that with a few keystrokes on the Telegram App, he could change his identity and contact me all over.

And he did. Over and over I received swollen penis pictures with obscene and threatening messages. And that is the curse of being publicly available. There is a bright side and a dark side to being directly contactable.

The Bright Side

For example, did you know that my book Best Loser Wins, simply could not have been written, had I not been asked and answered thousands and thousands of questions on psychology and the behaviour of traders. That is the bright side of being approachable and thank God for it.

Being available to the public is an image I have worked hard to cultivate. You see I love my profession. Being a trader is a noble profession, one that requires you to overcome many obstacles, some of which are technical, but most of them are personal and related to your psyche.

By being available to those traders who seek answers, I am able to, in my own small way, contribute to the betterment of likeminded people. I like that self-imposed role. I like helping people navigating the learning curve of trading. It gives me a purpose in life beyond just trading for the sake of earning money.

The Dark Side

The dark side is a small price to pay for the bright side. Of course there are jerks around, trying to ruin it for everyone else. They are unable to achieve their own goals, or meaningfully move towards them, so they lash out with hatred. In reality they are just hurting, and it is their way of expressing their pain.

So how did it come to this climatic break with social media? Am I that thin-skinned? No, I am really not that thin-skinned at all. I didn’t close my channel because I was hurt by a few idiots.

I (temporarily) closed shop because I became overwhelmed. The angry comments after the one losing day, I had on YouTube was simply just the straw that broke the camel’s back.

The honest truth is that I have been too available and as a result of it I have inadvertently become emotionally invested in many people’s lives. That is a nice human trait, but it is not entirely practical when you are trying to run a business, especially one as demanding as trading.

Furthermore, it has been detrimental to my emotional well-being because I have been put in situations that I have absolutely no training or experience to handle.

Let me explain.

Stalker

The first time I sensed that my involvement with other traders could be an issue in my private life was on Christmas Eve 2018. I can’t go into specific details, but here is the story in broad strokes. In 2016 I had taught a lady at a 1-day course. At the time of the course, I felt the individual was out of her depth knowledge wise. She had that “deer in the headlight” look on her face, and I sensed she should not be at my course.

During the lunch break I asked her if she wanted to leave. I offered her a full refund, but she insisted she wanted to stay and learn. I accepted, and that was the end of that.

On Christmas Eve 2018 there was a knock on my front door. As I opened the door, a car pulled away in haste. On my doorstep I found 3 large boxes. I pulled the boxes inside and wondered what to do. There was no address on the boxes. There was no name on the boxes.

I opened them and found they were filled with expensive presents: a watch, clothes, a wedding ring, another watch, roller skate wheels, perfume, chocolates, cakes, an enormous home-made ornate Christmas decoration, and many symbolic artefacts such as a compass, a heart and a key.

There was no message in the boxes, just a small note saying, “From Rikke”. I had simply no recollection of that name. A friend of mine suggested that it might be someone I had taught. I went through my list of 1-day delegates, and I found three individuals with that name.

I managed to get hold of two of them on that night, both of whom confirmed they had not sent me presents. A few days later I got hold of the third one, and I realised this was the lady who I felt had attended my course but should not have been there.

The conversation I had with her was incredibly disturbing. She claimed that we were in a relationship, and that we were engaged to be married. It was truly heart-breaking and frightening to hear someone talk with such conviction on a matter, which was pure fabrication.

Through a bit of detective work I found her mother, called her and introduced myself, and we spoke for a long time. Later I met up with her mother, returned all the presents to her, and I heard the story of her daughter and her mental illness. It was truly heart breaking, involving a young girl who had been physically assaulted and who had never been the same since.

The whole episode left me uneasy about my public availability. I was in a relationship at the time, and obviously my partner was convinced I was unfaithful to her. Eventually things calmed down and life moved on.

Deep Fake Porn

As my channel grew in popularity, especially after my book was released, I received an influx of people who wanted to communicate with me. As I stated earlier, you can’t make everyone happy all the time. Some people are just immature jerks.

Salomon was one of those. He kept asking questions which would have been answered, if he had read the welcome messages I had sent him. If I didn’t answer his questions almost immediately, he would send me the same message, repeated over and over, until I answered him.

One day I snapped and told him to read the f###ing messages I had sent him when he joined. He didn’t like that, and he told me so, calling me all names under the sun. If that was all there was to the story, I would have been happy. But it wasn’t.

Within 24 hours Salomon had set up a channel, closely resembling my channel name, and filling it with homosexual pictures, with my image carefully photoshopped in place of the real participant in the sex act.

I tried to get the social media platform to shut down the channel, but to my absolute horror it stated that the content did not violate their company policy. What the fuck???

I am not homophobic in the slightest, but I felt sick to my core seeing so many sexually explicit images with my face on it. I had many people contacting me about the content, and yet I was unable to do anything about it.

But you move on, don’t you. You try not to think about it, and you move on, moving forward, focusing on the good things in life. It is not an attitude you acquire out of desire, but out of necessity.

Suicide

My trading skills significantly improved when I began to pay attention to my inner environment. I began to make quite serious money in 2012 with 6-digit months being the norm – in Sterling Pounds.

Before that I had spent two years in darkness, not really making much of my time in trading. A chance meeting saw me change my behaviour and relationship to trading preparation. All of this was described in my book Best Loser Wins.

There were and still are not many people I can discuss the real psychology of trading with. Sure, there are popular and famous authors and coaches who focus solely on the psychology of trading, some of which are my friends, but they are not traders.

I think that is what makes me stand out from the crowd. I write about it. I talk about it, and I walk the walk. So, when I do meet other traders who have truly studied the human psyche, I pay attention. One of those was a lady called Eleanora.

It was a friend of mine who made the introduction. Eleanora was a trader, who had studied psychology at university level, and she was using her knowledge of the mind to better understand her trading performance.

Eleanora and I would frequently exchange thoughts and ideas on behavioural thinking during trades.  She was in her 30’s, a native Russian, living in Italy, and she traded solely Nasdaq futures. I enjoyed our interactions, and I learned from Eleanora.

However, I sensed early on that Eleanora had a dark side too. This made a professional friendship difficult to maintain. At times she was overtly flirtatious, whilst at other times she would profess her love for big black men. It was like dealing with night and day.

She would at times be extremely critical of my trading decisions, while at other times be complimentary in excess. I never quite knew what kind of mood she would be in, and as a result of it I scaled back my communication with her.

Then in late December 2021, I had a message from Eleanora, telling me she desperately needed my help. She was being evicted from her rented house, and she was unable to find a new place to live, which would allow her to bring her 3 dogs.

You are probably thinking what I am thinking. Three dogs? A little excessive, but to Eleanora, her dogs were her children.

Eleanora would send me audio messages, pleading with me to come to Italy and help her find a place to live. She had money, but no landlord would take her AND her three dogs. She wanted me to act as a guarantor for a property to rent, or better yet, buy her a place she could live in.

I was obviously not complying, but instead of being blunt about it, and leaving it at that, I got sucked into this vortex of drama, as the eviction date of her current property got nearer and nearer.

In late January, a month after she first asked for help, she began to openly threaten me that unless I helped, she would kill herself. I knew roughly where she lived in Italy, so I contacted the local police and the municipal’s social services, alerting them to the situation.

I also sought out temporary accommodation for her, twice negotiating with landlords about how many dogs Eleanora could bring. However, no matter what I did, she moved the goal post, and there was repeatedly something else that had to be sorted.

Then on Saturday the 12^th of February the situation got so bad I reached out to her mother, who lives in Russia, and by using Google Translate, I was able to establish a conversation with her about her daughter.

Later that day I spent two hours on the phone with Eleanora, listening to her screaming at me because I refused to fly to Italy to rescue her. Eventually I calmed her down enough to make her understand that she needed to contact the authorities and ask for help.

The following day things went from bad to worse. The messages were heart breaking to read, and I felt utterly helpless. I contacted the authorities again, and I once again reached out to her mother.

The last message I received from Eleanora was stating that she would kill herself now, and she would look down from heaven to see me suffer, because I didn’t stop her, and I had refused to help her. I called her again, but she did not pick up the phone.

From here on her Telegram status showed “last online the 14^{th of} February”. I continued to call her and send her messages, but I could see they were not being read.

I didn’t give up hope, but as I was unable to reach her, I hoped and prayed she got the help she needed, and her phone was simply switched off. Then 4 months later her mother reached out to me. It was in Russian, and translated it read:

Dear Tom, my daughter died on February 14. I still can’t believe it, I couldn’t come to bury her, the war with Ukraine started, and Italy closed the border for Russians. It’s very hard for me, such grief is impossible to survive. She so hoped that she would find a home, settle down and move on in trading. But everything went wrong. She was exhausted and despaired. Neither you nor I could help her, although we tried.

I was on a night flight, on my way to Europe to give a talk, when I received this message. I sat on the plane, quietly crying in the night, for a mother who lost her child, without being able to see her daughter, and help give her the help and support she so clearly needed. I cried for a woman I never met, but who I got to know through a mutual love for trading and psychology.

I struggled with guilt after Eleanora’s suicide. I have young children myself, and I wondered how I would have reacted, as a parent, if someone had refused to “rescue” my child. Could I have done more than I did?

Saving a Life

I hope you see now that my relationship with social media is not just a casual take-it-or-leave-it encounter. I genuinely try to help people. I feel I have a responsibility to those who contact me.

It is not all bad news. At times I am reduced to tears of joy over the stories I hear.

For example, in Las Vegas a man comes up after my talk and says, “thank you for saving my life”. I asked him to explain, and he told me the story of how his son’s alcohol abuse had torn the family apart. As a father he was helpless, and it was killing him, until one day by chance, he read my story about my own alcohol abuse.

I had sent him the book that helped me, the book I have pledged to send to people who need help with substance abuse, in particular alcohol abuse. The son read the book and like me experienced a deep insight into what alcohol abuse really is. The son got help, cleaned up his act, got sober and stayed sober.

The father had flown into Las Vegas to thank me personally. He started crying, and that set me off crying tears of joy. I wish I had written that book, but the real honour goes to Jason Vale.

Believe me or not, but I get a hell of a lot more joy from an encounter like this than I get from someone saying that my School Run Strategy has turned them into profitable traders. Sure, I love to hear stories of trading success, and while trading is my life, there are things that transcends making money.

Threats

Perhaps my experiences with deep fake porn images, sexual photos, stalkers and a suicide has left me sensitive to a certain kind of criticism. I don’t think that I am being hostile when someone asks genuine questions about my techniques. I try my best to answer all the serious questions I receive.

However, what made me lash out and quit were the following messages, all received in the 24 hours following my first losing day in 14 days:

Best cocky braggy Danish baldsack guys Win (but go humble at the end of loop) ,,, that’s what you deserve for a stupid  book which not even yourself have balls to follow it’s rules , well you lost 17000 after a braggy and arrogant on first week on youtube

I HOPE you get better on listening TO YOUR FUCKING BOOK and stop being braggy after a  real humbling day – I spent the money for the FUCKING BOOK which the Stupid writer doesn’t believe  in it 

go watch ICT Loosing Streak Draw down plan

I WANT MY FUCKING MONEY BACK

I WANT MY FUCKING TIME BACK

I FIND YOU AND FUCK YOU CON ARTIST

I FUCK YOUR FAMILY IN FRONT OF YOU – GIVE ME MONEY

Messages like these might make some people just smile and delete, while others will feel threatened by them. If I had not had as many situations as I have, I would probably just shake my head and delete too. However, the above is by no means an isolated event. I receive many messages which are disrespectful and insulting.

Do you know what the irony is? These people would never say this to my face. That is the real curse of web-anonymity. We think we can say anything we want, with absolutely no filter whatsoever. We are quick to forget that this could leave a lasting impression on the recipient.

Another irony is that so many other YouTube personalities actually have products they sell. I won’t mention names because I am not interested in creating a conflict with anyone. But look around, and you will see one of the biggest trading channels was selling courses, developing an almost cult-like following, on concepts that are rehashed words of concepts from decades ago.

And even after this channel was exposed, by another channel, for trading on a demo account, it changed nothing, even though the channel doing the exposing, is promoting trading challenges, earning a commission for doing so.

You can hardly blame the public for being highly sceptical about everything they see. And yes, I too am selling something. I sell a book, and I would like to address that now.

Best Loser Wins

Like many people, I am a complex person. Who isn’t? I am obsessed with trading, and I love making money trading. I am however not a big spender. The car that I drive now is bought in 2009. I am just not bothered about cars and watches. It is not what gives me the juice of life.

Now if you ask me about what exercises are best for longevity and what supplements increase your concentration and your strength, then we can talk for hours. If you ask me about cars, you will get a blank expression from me. I am not bothered.

My book Best Loser Wins is a best-seller, earning me hundreds of thousands in royalties. I have never spent a dime of them on myself. All royalties go to charitable causes.

I have bought a food truck, financed a building to house a soup kitchen, bought vital epileptic cannabis medicine for a little girl, supported an up-and-coming young, kick-ass, handicapped tennis player, as well as supported hundreds of struggling alcoholics, as they attempt to relieve themselves of the shackles of addiction. I have supported schools and bought countless laptops for various educational institutions.

I have refused to have my name associated with the donations, because I am not giving for the recognition. I am giving because it is needed, and because I am able to. The same can be said for my Telegram contributions, although here I am not able to stay anonymous. I am not charging for my education and I have no intention of ever doing so.

I do not belong to a sect. Nor do I believe in a particular god, or any god for that matter. I am giving, because I like how I feel when I am able to create a betterment in another human being.

It is as simple as that. I like creating change in others. If I wanted to, I could run a seminar business or create courses and sell them, but I am not interested. I prefer to trade. Trading and research is what I have devoted my professional life to.

Reflection

I admit I was exhausted on Wednesday night, after 10 days of twice daily YouTube live trading. I felt that I had given something of lasting value for those who watched me trade live. I had completed 13 consecutive trading days with profits.

In hindsight that should have been enough. I had traded well, and although I lost money on day 14, it was well up on the month.

Fatigue makes cowards of us all. I was tired when those messages trickled in, and I reacted from a vantage point of fatigue, rather than just ignoring them, and dealing with them after a good night’s sleep. I regret that.

Not Very Smart

I admit I am not a very smart man in certain areas of my life. For example, I deal with all Telegram questions and channel requests manually. It means I spend about 2 hours a day, every day, answering questions, and granting people access to my channels. This has been on-going since 2018.

I shudder to think how many hours I have spent on Telegram in the last 6 years. I guess it must be close to 5,000 hours. That has to change. I have never used a BOT, but I will now.

The Future

I am on holiday now. I am in my beloved Denmark, relaxing and reflecting. I think I need a break from it all for a while. I aim to be back by September, at the latest.

When I am back, things will have changed. I want to focus my time on the trading, the research, and the explaining of the trades, and less time on answering the same questions over and over.

Closing

Thank you for taking the time to read this article. It was not easy to write because it meant reliving situations I would like to put behind me. I guess sometimes we react to minor infractions because of much larger issues hidden deep within.

I will see you soon.

Love and respect,

Tom Hougaard