Lessons Learned about Speculative Trading

(Minghui.org) Master has told us that as practitioners, we should not buy or sell stocks, and the same principle also applies to other speculative financial instruments. However, I didn’t follow Master's teachings and learned my lesson the hard way.

I heard about an international gold trading platform in early December. The platform has a leverage of 100:1, which means that for every one dollar I put up, I can either gain or lose one hundred dollars.

Since I studied finance while I was at school, I had some understanding of how the trade works. I knew that this was a frequently-used financial instrument and can produce high returns in a short period.

I knew Master told us not to play with stocks, and I felt this investment was similar enough to stock speculation. So I didn’t want to do it.

However, I didn’t watch my speech enough, and told my spouse – an ordinary person – about the platform.

To make things worse, my showoff mentality only intensified after reading Master’s recent teaching:“If you had really wanted money, if you had really wanted positions of power, if you had really wanted to be the ones in charge, you would really have been the elite of human society—you would have been able to achieve that. But you didn’t want those things.” (“Fa Teaching Given at the 2014 San Francisco Fa Conference”)

After reading that, I bragged to my spouse about my own abilities, and about how I could make a lot of money in the human world if I wanted to. In the past, I also made a few accurate predictions about the rise of Bitcoin and the U.S. dollar. All this together made my spouse believe that I could make a lot of money if I were to invest, which created a lot of tribulations for me.

My spouse began to believe I was purposely not making as much money as I could be making, and began pestering me about investing on this gold platform.

I could not stand the continuous pushing anymore and finally opened a simulation account, rationalizing my decision with two reasons. Firstly, gold was not stock, and Master only said not to speculate on stock. Secondly, I will give all my gains to my family and not take anything for myself.

After doing pretty well practicing on paper for a few days, I opened a real account and started gambling.

Surprisingly, the U.S. market turned its course immediately. I lost big on my first day of real trading.

This cooled me down. I started looking within and found many hidden attachments:

I had a showoff mentality, and wanted to prove to everyone that I had skills in investment. I also had an attachment to material interests and became obsessed with this trading game. Finally, there was the pursuit of comfort – I had wanted to go after money in order to live a more luxurious life.

But what’s most important was that I didn’t follow Master’s teaching directly; instead, I had only read what I wanted to read. In hindsight, my heart was going up and down when I looked at the moving prices of gold. Doesn't gambling on stock do the same thing to a person?

I did what practitioners should not do. I fell completely on this issue.

I also wasted a lot of time during those days. Though I told myself that I should not get attached to results and should only spend half an hour on trading each day, it was not like that at all in reality. I sat in front of the computer for a long time, and stayed up as late as 3 a.m. It impacted the three things I'm supposed to be doing and even my regular life.

Luckily Master was looking after me. A drastic market turnaround woke me up. Otherwise, if I kept making money, I would have fallen to the absolute bottom on cultivation.

I did lose a lot of money. But didn’t I ask for this tribulation?

From this, I have learned quite a lot. I should always put the Fa at first and not use any excuse to cover up my own attachment. I should be careful not to let my own attachments bring additional tribulations; even if I can get over it, it is an unnecessary trouble. Also, if I have extra time, it is better to spend it reading Zhuan Falun, and if I have money, it is better to burn DVDs with information of Dafa than waste it on trivial pursuits.