3 minute read
THE APPRENTICE: A MATHEMATICAL EDGE
from January 2023
AS HE LEARNS TRADING, A TEENAGER IS ALREADY STOCKPILING FINANCIAL WISDOM—AND CASH
BY ELIZABETH OWENS-SCHIELE
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In the case of 18-year-old Jacob Intrator, youth isn’t wasted on the young. While learning to trade equities, he’s increased his nest egg nine-fold in four years.
Not many 14-year-olds pick up Burton G. Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street to study the markets, but Intrator says the book changed his life. He also became a follower of the tastylive financial network, where he gained valuable insights on financial markets.
It all started with his eighth-grade macroeconomics class. Homeschooled in Miami throughout high school, Intrator, a triplet with two sisters, set up his own course of study.
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He became fascinated with the theoretical mechanics of pure economics, as well as how personal decisions play a role in behavioral economics. So, he devised a plan.
He spent hundreds and eventually thousands of hours conducting research, back testing, analyzing trends and modeling. Although he won’t reveal the details of his proprietary system, he can share how he got there.
“I eventually found something in ticker symbols OILD and OILU, which were oil exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and are now extinct,” he said.
Intrator dove into the market, investing his first $4,500.
“I had a blowup and I lost 11% of that— $500—on my first trade,” he said. “My first drawdown taught me perseverance and to fight through the hardships.”
So, he kept at it, eventually growing his capital to $15,000 until another setback struck.
“I was confident my system was working,” Intrator said.
He eventually stopped trading oil ETFs because they became too volatile. He turned to small and mid-cap equities because he liked the pricing structure.
“With small caps, I could risk less money, which made me sleep better at night and still have very good returns,” he said.
This spread trading, as veteran tastylive investor Tom Sosnoff called it during his own interview with Intrator, contributed to growing his nest egg from $4,500 to $41,300.
For the first three years, Intrator said he made around 600 trades, an average of about 15 a month. But during the last year, he’s only made about six trades.
Although he didn’t touch meme stocks, he has explored cannabis equities in what’s known as a sympathy-sector play. It’s called that because the stocks in the group move together in price as a reaction to news or market events. The cannabis sector often experiences sharp volatility.
For now, Intrator is managing his own portfolio and is up 3.5% this year, thanks to his models which positioned him in a risk-off stance.
He has found great success investing in Guardion Health Sciences (GHSI), adding $6,000 to his own assets and another $2,000 to his family’s portfolio.
He’s also serving as an intern to U.S. Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a Democrat representing the Fifth District of New Jersey.
Intrator, who runs a non-profit foundation promoting financial literacy among American youth, earned a 1540 on his SAT.
He hopes to attend The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, or another university of that caliber.
But what’s his long-term goal? “Run a hedge fund.”
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