Tuesday, 5:51 a.m. The mouse was clicking. The keyboard was tapping, and the tabs were flipping. Light peered through the blinds as the sun began to rise. Sophomore Deven Patel was scrutinizing an array of candle charts, line graphs and spreadsheets on his monitor. He woke up early to practice his favorite hobby: stock trading.
Despite being only 15 years old, Patel has already established himself as a trading whiz with years of experience. But what exactly is stock trading? How did he get into it?
Senior Aarit Tewatia is the current secretary for Wall Street Society, a club at Central dedicated to educating members about stock trading.
“The stock market is a general way for people to trade and invest in different companies. People can buy or sell different stocks,” Tewatia said. “When you make an investment in a company by buying shares of theirs, you would see a gain on your investment if that company makes money. [But] if the company is not doing well, [then] its valuation goes down.”
Patel got into stock trading after learning about it through his father. He was fascinated with how people can purchase shares of a company and generate money passively.
“I was about 10 years old when I started [trading]. I’ve been doing it for about six years and I’ve just been doing it pretty frequently since then,” Patel said.
Patel’s father opened a stock account for him with $1,000 during the summer of 2018. Using that account, Patel learned how to exchange shares and generated a substantial amount of money.
“I have made a pretty massive profit,” Patel said. “It’s almost 30 times [the size of] my account when it was first opened.”
One of Patel’s favorite parts of stock trading is the flexible nature of the work. He’s able to balance trading and the rest of his life according to his own schedule.
“It’s the fact that you can become your own boss and [that] you’re not working for anybody,” Patel said. “It’s all [on] your own terms and you can make unlimited upside potential.”
Stock trading also generates lifelong lessons that people can learn from. These takeaways can transfer to other aspects of one’s life.
“The biggest lesson I’ve learned is not giving up and trying to be better every day,” Patel said. You gotta keep grinding it out and not quit from one or two losing trades.”
Sophomore Mikayla Belisario is a close friend of Patel’s. She shares multiple classes with Patel and consistently observes him stock trading on his laptop during school hours.
“He’s teaching people about stocks,” Belisario said. “He’s [always] telling us if his stocks went up, or [about] what [he’s] invested in, or about how much money [he]’s made.”
Despite his tendency to consistently trade throughout the school day, Patel still manages his academic work and other facets of his life successfully.
“[Stock trading] is not affecting him at all,” Belisario said. “Deven is a really smart student, [and] he’s helped me with so many of my assignments for journalism and other classes.”
Patel also plans to spread his knowledge from the past six years of trading. He believes that stock trading and finance are fields that everyone should learn about. Patel created a public Discord channel where people can learn more and ask questions about these topics.
“I just teach everything,” Patel said. “Nothing is for sale. It’s all just my knowledge I’ve accumulated over these past six years and I’m just trying to teach people how to do what I do.”
Patel plans to keep trading in the future. He wants to major in finance and develop his trading skills. As of right now, however, he’s strictly focused on trading stocks and his academics.
“You don’t [usually] see a lot of 16 or 15-year-olds trading stocks,” Belisario said. “I feel like that’s just going to lead to so much success for Deven in the future.”
