I Watched 6 Friends Try to Get Rich Trading. Here's Where They All Are Now.

By IlY · Jul 18, 2026 · 7 min read

We started around the same time, in the same group chat, chasing the same thing. Six years later, the results are in — and the one who "made it" is not who any of us would have bet on.

In 2019, a group chat formed almost by accident. Six of us, friends of friends, all somewhere in our twenties, all catching the same fever at the same time: we were going to learn to trade, and we were going to get rich doing it.

It felt like the beginning of something. We sent each other charts at 2 a.m. We shared course links and screenshots and the specific, electric optimism of people who believe they've found a door most people don't know exists. One of us said, unironically, "in five years we're all going to be doing this from a beach." Nobody laughed. We believed it.

It's been six years now. The group chat still exists, technically, though it mostly goes quiet for months at a time. But I know where everyone landed, because these are my actual friends and life doesn't let you lose track of people you sent 2 a.m. charts to. So here's the honest accounting. Six people, one dream, six very different endings — and the lesson in how they sorted out is not the one any of us expected walking in.

Marcus — Quit in Year One, Never Looked Back

Marcus lasted about eight months. He lost his initial stake — maybe $3,000 — got scared, and quit clean. No drama. He just said one day, "yeah, this isn't for me," and went back to focusing on his actual career.

At the time, we quietly pitied him. He'd given up. He didn't have the stomach for it. He was going to miss the beach.

Marcus is, by a wide margin, the most financially comfortable of the six of us now. He got promoted twice, bought a house, and has a boring index fund that's up a lot over six years because he just kept feeding it and never touched it. He "failed" at trading faster than anyone, and it turned out to be the best financial decision in the entire group. He quit while the loss was small and put his energy somewhere with an actual return.

I think about Marcus a lot. He wasn't weak. He was just honest, early, about something the rest of us spent years refusing to admit.

Devon — Still "About to Break Through"

Devon is still trading. Six years in. And if you ask him how it's going, he'll tell you he's "so close," that he's "finally cracked it," that this new system is "different."

He said the same thing in year two. And year four. Devon has never had a sustained profitable stretch longer than a few months, but he's also never had a loss big enough to force him to quit. He lives in the worst possible zone — not winning enough to actually make it, not losing enough to be forced out. Just endlessly, perpetually almost.

He's spent, by my rough estimate, around $15,000 on courses and tools over six years, plus whatever he's bled to the market, plus — and this is the real cost — six years of evenings and weekends and mental bandwidth poured into a thing that has given him nothing back but the feeling of being close.

Devon is the cautionary tale nobody tells, because it's not dramatic. He didn't blow up. He didn't lose his house. He just quietly spent his entire twenties chasing a breakthrough that never came, and he's still doing it, and he might do it forever. The slow fade is scarier than the blowup because it doesn't have an ending that forces a decision.

Priya — Blew Up Spectacularly, Then Got Free

Priya went the other direction. She got good enough to get confident, then leveraged up, then had the kind of catastrophic month you read about — lost most of a $40,000 account in a matter of weeks during a stretch where she was revenge-trading a drawdown.

It was genuinely bad. She disappeared from the chat for a while.

But here's the thing: the blowup was the best thing that ever happened to her. It was violent and clear and impossible to rationalize. There was no "I'm so close" — there was just a wrecked account and a decision to make. And she made it: she quit trading, took the brutal lesson, and redirected all that intensity into starting a small business that's now doing genuinely well.

Priya lost more money than anyone. She's also, after Marcus, the most successful. The clean catastrophe gave her the exit that Devon's slow fade never will. Sometimes losing big is the only thing that saves you, because it's the only loss you can't pretend isn't real.

Tobias — Turned Pro (Sort Of)

Tobias is the one who technically "made it," and even his story is more complicated than the dream promised.

He's profitable. Consistently, provably, over several years. But not the way any of us imagined. He doesn't trade from a beach. He trades a small, mechanical, almost boring strategy for a couple of hours a day, takes very few trades, and treats it exactly like a job — because it is one. His returns are good but not insane. He'll never buy a Lamborghini off it. He grinds a real edge for a real, respectable, unglamorous income.

And the thing that separated Tobias from the rest of us was never talent. He wasn't the smartest in the group — that was probably Devon, ironically. What Tobias had was the ability to be bored. He found a small edge, and then he just… did it. The same thing. Every day. For years. No drama, no new systems, no chasing the exciting setup. The most boring member of the group is the only one who turned it into a profession.

If you'd asked us in 2019 who'd make it, nobody would have said Tobias. He was too quiet, too plodding, too unexciting. That was exactly why he made it.

Sam — Sells the Dream Now

Sam pivoted. Somewhere around year three, Sam realized something the rest of us hadn't: there's far more money in teaching trading than in doing it.

Sam has a following now. Courses. A Discord. Screenshots of wins. If you found Sam online today, you'd assume Sam was a wildly successful trader, because that's the impression the whole operation is built to create.

Sam is not a wildly successful trader. I know this because I was in the group chat when Sam couldn't make it work either. What Sam is, is a genuinely talented marketer who figured out that the dream sells better than the reality, and that a beginner cannot tell the difference between someone who trades well and someone who talks well.

I don't fully know how to feel about Sam. It's not illegal. Sam's students are getting roughly what every trading course delivers, which is to say not much. But every time I see Sam post about "financial freedom," I remember the 2 a.m. chart Sam sent me in 2020 asking if the setup looked right, and I feel a little sad about the whole ecosystem that makes selling the dream more rational than chasing it.

Me — Somewhere in the Middle

And then there's me. I didn't quit like Marcus, didn't blow up like Priya, didn't fade like Devon, didn't turn pro like Tobias, and didn't start selling like Sam.

I spent about four years losing before I got honest with myself about why I was really doing it — which took a level of uncomfortable self-examination I'd been avoiding the whole time. Eventually I clawed my way to something like consistency, mostly by becoming a smaller, more boring, more mechanical version of the trader I'd started as. I trade now, modestly, as one thing among several, and it's fine. It's not a beach. It's a skill I have that occasionally pays.

If I'm honest, the person I most want to be like is Marcus — the one who saw it clearly and left early. I got where I got the long way, and the long way cost me most of my twenties' spare time and a chunk of money I'll never see again. I don't regret it exactly. But I don't romanticize it either.

What the Six of Us Actually Taught Me

Line up the endings and a pattern falls out that has almost nothing to do with skill:

The two who did best financially were Marcus (quit immediately) and Priya (blew up and quit). Both left. The best financial outcomes in a group of six aspiring traders came from the two who stopped trading.

The one who succeeded at trading — Tobias — did it by being boring, mechanical, and unexciting, which is the exact opposite of everything the dream is sold as.

The one still trapped — Devon — is the one who never won enough to stay and never lost enough to leave. The slow fade got him.

And the one who looks most successful from the outside — Sam — makes money from the dream, not from the markets.

Six people. One dream. And the sorting mechanism turned out to be, more than anything, the ability to be honest early — about whether it was working, about whether you had the temperament, about whether the exciting version was ever real. Marcus was honest in year one. Priya was forced into honesty by a blowup. Tobias was honest about needing to be boring. The rest of us paid, in years or dollars or both, for the honesty we deferred.

If you're at the beginning of your own version of this — a group chat, a shared dream, the electric certainty that you've found the door — I can't tell you which of the six you'll be. But I can tell you the question that would have saved most of us the most: not "is this working?" but "if this isn't working in a year, will I be honest enough to admit it?"

Because the trading was never really the hard part. The honesty was. It always is.