About Ross Cameron

As you may already know, Ross Cameron is a full-time day trader and the founder of Warrior Trading. But whatever you do, don’t call him an “entrepreneur.” It’s the last word he’d use to describe himself. He’s just the type of person who likes to stay busy. He loves trading, and creating Warrior Trading was a chance to create a community of like-minded individuals. It’s been a true joy for him to watch this community thrive.

 

Ross Cameron is Married with Children

Even more important than his role at Warrior Trading is his role at home. Cameron’s happily married, and is a father of two wonderful boys. Although it can be hard to pull him away from the computer, when he’s not trading and teaching classes, he loves sailing, playing tennis, riding his mountain bike, and working on classic cars. He even created a blog dedicated to his cars called “Tire Kickers by Ross Cameron.”

For the past several years, Ross Cameron has been making maple syrup at home. Winters are long in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, where he lives. When the days start to get longer in late winter, he and his sons get outside and start tapping their sugar maple trees to collect sap. This year he did an episode comparing his experience as a backyard maple syrup producer to his experience of learning how to day-trade. If you haven’t checked it out, you might really enjoy it. It’s called “The Truth About Why Most Day Traders Lose Money,” and it’s on his YouTube channel.

Becoming a full-time day trader

Let’s time-travel for a moment, back to where Ross Cameron’s interest in the stock market was born. This is the story of his journey to becoming a full-time trader.

It probably began in fifth or sixth grade when he learned his great-great uncle made a fortune in the stock market. His children, Cameron’s cousins, were still enjoying that wealth he’d created for them. Then, in seventh grade, in 1997-1998, it was the middle of the dot-com bubble and Cameron’s school decided to do an interactive semester on the stock market, including a trip to New York City.

Cameron’s friend Cooper was his partner. They managed their own pretend portfolio of stocks through the semester, buying shares of both well-established companies and some of the dot-com names. To say Cameron was inspired is an understatement. However, New York City felt a long ways away from his little life in Vermont. It was about this time that he also began to experience signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, and panic attacks. More on that later.

Cameron was so excited to put real money into the market that he called his local Edward Jones office and told them he wanted to invest $100 in the American Ski Company. They said, “One problem: Our commission is $50 to buy and $50 to sell.” So the $100 he’d saved from his first job as a newspaper delivery boy didn’t go into the stock market. “I can’t remember now what I spent it on,” Ross Cameron recalls. “The dream of being in the stock market took a back burner for a couple of years as I entered high school.”

Opening His First Trading Account in 2001

Ross Cameron made his very first trades in an Ameritrade account during the summer of 2001 while in high school, funding the account with $1,000. He bought shares in companies he knew, including ExxonMobil (XOM), Caterpillar (CAT), U. S. Steel (X), and Pfizer (PFE). He wasn’t actively day-trading, but trying his hand at investing. “I don’t think at that point I even realized there were stocks that moved enough in one day to make money as a day trader,” Cameron says.

By the end of the summer, despite checking positions each day and reading about the companies, Cameron noticed that the values were more or less unchanged.

During the summers while he was in high school and college, he worked as a pool boy, mowed lawns, and was an assistant to a pottery teacher. As you’d imagine, none of these jobs paid particularly well, but they were all great experiences.

He knew the stock market had the power to create wealth, and after making $10 to $20 mowing a lawn, the ability to make fast money in the market was appealing. Unfortunately, given his poor performance during the summer of 2001, he was left with the feeling that money could only be made if you already had a large account to begin with — or knew somebody who knew a lot about stocks.

Studying to be a teacher

Ross Cameron didn’t think much about investing or trading again for several years. He graduated from high school in 2003 and enrolled in college in New Hampshire with the intention of getting a teacher certification so he could try to teach ceramics classes, figuring if that didn’t work out, he could be a regular art teacher. Of all the jobs he’d had growing up, his two favorites were web design and ceramics. In 2003, web design wasn’t a major offered at any of the colleges he looked at, but a teacher certification was. So that’s what he began to pursue.

His life took a bit of a turn in 2005 when his father was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. He moved back home, overcome with anxiety as his panic attacks began closing in. He got a job working at the Sunoco gas station. He didn’t enjoy it, but it got him through the days, imagining a life where he owned his own little gas station. “In my dream, I made just enough to pay my bills and get by,” Cameron shares. “I enjoyed coming to work because I was my own boss. That dream never came to fruition. One of the good things that came out of working at the Sunoco station was that it was also a small service station. I learned how to change brake pads, change oil, and some other basic mechanical work. This was a skill I’ve used throughout my life in my hobby of fixing old cars.”

 

When his father was first diagnosed with cancer, the doctors told Cameron’s family he had less than a year to live. “I remember him waking up from his surgery, and he asked me how it went,” says Cameron. “I told him what the doctors had just told me and my mom. He didn’t seem surprised.” Over the next year, Cameron’s father underwent chemotherapy and radiation. A year after he was diagnosed, he began to lose his balance and show signs of neurological decline. The doctors discovered his cancer had spread to his brain. “During his final months,” says Cameron, “we watched him transition out of this life as he lost awareness of the world around him. I admired his strength, even in the worst moments. He often seemed to be in a dream state. I recall one moment where he called me Steve and asked me about life in Chicago. Then he said he had to go and began to paddle against the side of his bed. I realized he believed he was in a canoe. He didn’t seem unhappy. In some way, this part of his life became very peaceful. My father passed away in 2007 at the age of 61.”

Ross Cameron’s life in New York City

After his father passed, Cameron struggled to find direction. He had immense anxiety and fear. He had moved down to New York City with a girlfriend and applied for a few internships while finishing his college classes. He applied to work at a hedge fund and was turned down. He applied to work at an architecture and design firm and was accepted. That became his path for the next several years. He studied architecture and design as he completed his Bachelor of Arts degree from Vermont College. He worked at the firm first as an intern, and then as an office manager, eventually helping with project management and bookkeeping. But then the financial crisis hit. Work began to slow down, and he decided to move back to Vermont.

He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 2009. “To be honest, I only did it out of guilt to make my father proud,” he says. “I put a lot of guilt on myself. To this date, I’ve never applied for a job or used my degree on my resume in any way. I graduated during the Great Recession.”

 

Ross Cameron’s interest in the stock market returns

When Ross Cameron’s younger sister turned 21, their father’s estate was distributed equally between the siblings. They each received $100,000. “I still remember bringing the check to the bank,” says Cameron. “I was split between a few ideas of what to do with the money. I considered buying a rental property and taking the role of being a property manager. However, that required using the $100,000 as a down payment and being on the hook with a mortgage. I wasn’t able to get approved for a mortgage given I didn’t have any W2 wages. So that was that.”

Cameron thought the next logical place to put that money was into the market. But he didn’t trust himself to manage it on his own. He used a financial adviser. While the market began to rebound in 2009-2010, the returns were poor. At that time Cameron was living in Vermont, struggling to find work, and he began to think that if he managed the assets himself, perhaps he could generate enough profit each year to justify making it his full-time focus.

This was optimistic, to say the least. Ross Cameron recalls, “Even if I returned 25% a year, $25,000 a year would not have covered my cost of living at that time.”

 

Inspired by a Friend who Made Money Trading

Ross Cameron had a friend who made about $16,000 trading a penny stock, sort of on a whim, and he thought, “If he can do it, I can do it.” It was one of Cameron’s best friends growing up, they were Cub Scouts together, and in high school, the friend had an amazing trade on a penny stock. Cameron was definitely inspired by that memory when he started trading. And since he had a larger account, he began to think maybe it was possible to grow the account by 50% in one year ($200 a day) by trading penny stocks.

That was the beginning of a two-year journey of learning how to day-trade. He tried a little bit of everything — penny stocks, small caps, large caps, options, trade alert services, custom buy/sell indicators, but didn’t find consistency. He certainly learned a lot about trading, but wasn’t finding success.

Discovering his Momentum Trading Strategy

Over the course of those two years, Ross Cameron’s cost of living combined with trading losses had liquidated all but $25,000 of his father’s estate, and simultaneously accumulated nearly $30,000 in credit card debt. Things weren’t looking good, and his downward spiral worsened when he had a $5,000 red day as it put his account down just below $20,000.

Since it was below $25,000, that meant he couldn’t day-trade. That’s when he began listing things in his barn to sell on Craigslist to raise $5,000 so he could give it one last shot.

While his account was below the minimum, he wasn’t able to trade and instead studied all his trades from the past two years, hoping to find a clue or a hint at what might have been working. He found that he actually had a strategy that was generating nice profits.

It was based on trading stocks up 20% to 30% or more in one day. These were typically small-cap stocks priced between $2 and $10. He realized that if he stopped trading Apple and many of the other large-cap stocks, he’d actually be better off.

Once his account was back above $25,000, he told himself: “This is it. This is your last shot.” And from there, he became a more disciplined trader. The stakes were high, he followed his newfound rules, and he began finding some consistency. He still had a few bumps in the road and wasn’t entirely out of the woods yet, but that was his turning point.

 

Creating Warrior Trading in 2012

In 2012, Ross Cameron created Warrior Trading as a WordPress blog. It was formally known as Day Trade Warrior. Since his early interest in web development, he knew how to build websites. He created the blog to chronicle his journey of learning how to day-trade. He documented what was working, what wasn’t working, and eventually realized he was getting enough traffic on the blog to turn it into a hub for everything related to day-trading, including a chatroom.

In 2014, Cameron opened his day-trading chatroom, and in 2015, he wrote his first book, titled How to Day Trade. He wrote it as a supplement to the day-trading courses he was teaching. Toward the end of 2016, he was regularly trading with a large account, and beginner 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. He decided to put himself and his strategy to the test.

Turning $583.15 into over $10 million

In January 2017, Ross Cameron funded a brand-new trading account with just $583.15. He says, “As I share with you my experience with this small account challenge, I want to remind you that my results trading are not typical. Most traders lose money, and there is no guarantee that you’ll find any success. But you already know that. And I’m sure you understand that I’m not a typical trader. In fact, I don’t know anyone else who has done what I’ve done.” When he set out with $583.15, he wanted to prove that his strategy worked on an account that small. In 44 days, he turned the account into over $100,000 — and that was just the beginning.

From there, Ross Cameron decided he wanted to turn it into a million dollars. It was a crazy goal, and he was only 10% of the way there. He spent the next two years growing the account into $1,000,000. He crossed that milestone in May 2019.

In 2020, things changed in the stock market. The COVID-19 economic shutdown caused a 30% drop in the overall market and then a dramatic full recovery back to all-time highs. During this time, more and more retail traders who were out of work began trying their hand in the market.

As a result of millions of new traders coming into the market, volume surged, and so did volatility. In 2020, Ross Cameron had his first day to make over $100,000 in profits, and then he had his first month to make over $1,000,000 in profits. He finished the year with over $5,000,000 in gross profit and about $4,500,000 in net profit after fees and commissions. You can see those broker statements here.

January 2021 was a continuation of the inflated levels of volume and volatility, as GameStop surged from under $20 a share to over $500 a share in two weeks. As a result, Cameron hit a new record of just under $500,000 in one trading day and nearly $900,000 in one week of trading.

He’s now grown his small account to over $10,000,000 in trading profits. Naysayers can check his broker statements and the latest progress; the links are posted at the bottom of this page. Says Cameron, “I wrote about how I turned $583 into $10 million on Entrepreneur.”

 

 

He adds, “I’ve found that while goals are helpful, ultimately I can only make as much as the market is willing to give me. I profit from volatility, and if we see a lot, I’ll do very well, but if things seem to cool off, my profits will decrease as well.

“Since volatility is out of my control, I should not beat myself up for falling short on a profit target if it’s due to markets cooling off. I should also avoid trying to force aggressive position sizing to meet a goal I set if the market is cooling off. Instead, I focus on trading the market I’m in and teaching beginner traders the momentum day-trading strategy that I love so much.”

 

Ross Cameron’s Trading Performance Audit

For those who are curious, you can see an independent accountant’s report of the first leg of Ross Cameron’s $583.15 small-account challenge here.

The future for Ross Cameron and Warrior Trading

Ross Cameron continues trading each morning, working on classes for students, and supporting traders at the beginning of their journey. He’s found being a teacher brings a great deal of satisfaction. “I really enjoy being in a position of understanding something so well that people want to learn from me,” he says. “I’m still a student of the markets. I’m always trying to learn as much as I can, and I want to continue to teach what I learn to aspiring traders. In addition to the classes I teach students, I have a reading list over at Goodreads of my recommended reading.”

Cameron also regularly uploads new videos to Warrior Trading’s YouTube channel and keeps folks updated through both his personal Ross Cameron Instagram and Facebook, and also the Warrior Trading Instagram and Facebook accounts. Recently he’s been uploading occasional blogs to the Warrior Trading Medium and the Warrior Trading LinkedIn accounts, and you’re also welcome to visit rosscameron.com to check out more of his projects. He also writes for Entrepreneur. You can explore Ross Cameron’s articles on Entrepreneur here.

In 2019 he started a new project called Tire Kickers by Ross Cameron. It’s a blog dedicated to his passion for anything with wheels, but primarily classic cars.

Occasionally, Warrior Trading brings on college students to work as interns. They help Ross Cameron around the office and learn a bit about trading and running an online business, so you can check that out too, if you’re interested.

It’s been more than 10 years since Warrior Trading began. From its origins as a simple blog, it has grown to a thriving community of active traders. Ross Cameron’s goal is to be able to continue to invest in providing students with the best platform. That means software that gives them scanners, charts, community, mentoring, and classes to support their learning. In 2024, you’ll see a new version of How to Day Trade by Ross Cameron hit the shelves.