Hello, and welcome to the Stock Markets 101 course here on Haas Trade! I am Nathan Haas, the founder and CEO of Haas Trade.

I am sure you are excited to get started with your first course, so I will not take too much time talking about myself and our vision here at Haas Trade. I’ll just share enough for you to get to know me, what we want you to get out of these courses, and your Haas Trade membership.

If you would like to learn more about the company and our other team members, please check out our Why Haas Trade page!

About the Author

I have been investing in the stock market since I was 17 years old, and back then, we had the $10 trade fees per trade. The investing environment was not near as friendly for beginners as it is now.

You can thank Robinhood for that. They were the first to have 0 trade fees, and then the free market did its thing, so now basically everyone has 0 trade fees. You couldn’t be picking a better time to start learning about investing!

My journey through investing and the creation of Haas Trade actually started as a hobby. I have always been fascinated by the stock market and started investing when I was young. But I had other dreams career-wise.

College/Career

I love aviation and always wanted to be an airport civil engineer. I attended the University of Iowa (Go Hawks!) and graduated with my Bachelor of Science in Engineering. 

I can happily say I achieved my dream of being an airport civil engineer. This means I design airports, or any part of an airport, such as runways, taxiways, taxi lanes, aprons (where planes park), water systems, parking lots, roads, hangers, and much more! Then I go out into the field when they are being built and oversee the construction.

I can happily say I achieved my dream of being an airport civil engineer. This means I design airports, or any part of an airport, such as runways, taxiways, taxi lanes, aprons (where planes park), water systems, parking lots, roads, hangers, and much more! Then I go out into the field when they are being built and oversee the construction.

Crippling Student Loan Debt

But it came at a cost. When I graduated college, I had over $100,000 in student loan debt (I am sure some of you can relate). Yes, college costs are out of control nowadays, but this was partially my fault too.

I was not smart with my money when I was younger; I transferred schools, changed my major, and bought many things I didn’t need or things I couldn’t actually afford. So this all made me graduate later than the typical four years.

To help with my student loans, I decided to join the Army National Guard, but they ended up not even covering any of my student loans (not going to get into that here). I recommend joining the military in some form; it may suck at times, but it is a great life experience, and you will really learn a lot about yourself. Just make sure to always be careful when dealing with recruiters and get everything in writing!

Military Career

For those unfamiliar with the National Guard, it means I have a civilian job and life, but I train one weekend a month, and then an additional two weeks during the summer. We are commonly referred to as “weekend warriors.”

I attended Basic Combat Training (BCT) and Advanced Individual Training (AIT) (pretty much like college for the army) with active-duty members, and once I graduated, I returned home to civilian life.

Being a part of our military is a great way for me to serve my community and give back to the country that has provided me with so many opportunities. Being in the National Guard allows me to serve while also focusing on my civilian career.

In 2021 I switched to the Air National Guard and am now 2nd Lieutenant Civil Engineering Officer. I perform airport civil engineering work at air bases for the Air Force now. God truly is great!

But since the Army National Guard did not cover my loans like I was told, I decided to take them into my own hands and figure out how to pay them off as quickly as possible. That was how my investing hobby turned into an obsession.

Fell Prey to Investing Scammers

A few years ago, I saw some YouTubers making tens of thousands of dollars on YouTube by day trading. So I bought into the fantasy that it was super easy, and after only a few weeks, I could be doing the same thing.

Little did I know how complicated the stock market was. I was googling and watching every YouTube video out there for months, but I was getting nowhere. Every time I read or watched something, I was more confused than when I started.

This frustration of getting nowhere led me to throw thousands of dollars into my brokerage account, and I just started “trading.” I say “trading” because I had no idea what I was doing, so it was pretty much gambling at that point.

Since I had no idea what I was doing, I ended up blowing up my account and lost almost all of it. I lost over $1,000 in one week alone. I was desperate to learn how to do it, so I started doing online courses that promised to teach me all the secrets for a few hundred dollars (some even charge thousands).

I quickly found out that their “secrets” were nothing more than generic information, and I had wasted my money. All the information they were teaching was already online for free; you just had to do a little research to find it.

Back to the Drawing Board

At that point, I decided to go back to teaching myself, but I kept track of everything I was learning this time. I didn’t keep googling and going in circles. I would watch a video or read about a topic and write down what I had learned and what I didn’t understand from it. Then I would go onto those topics; this provided me with a structure and made my studying much more effective.

I started trading every day (with a much smaller amount) and made a trade journal in Excel to track all my trades. I was noting the prices I bought/sold, why I took the trade, what I thought would happen, what actually happened, and what I had learned.

All this, combined with my structured learning every night, really helped me accelerate my progress. I was finally starting to get it down and make money instead of just losing it.

One day, my buddy told me he had learned about day trading and started asking me questions about it. I noticed he was going through the same process I went through the year before, so I decided to send him the notes that I had been putting together for myself.

His exact response was, “This is amazing. You could easily put this into a course format someday and sell it online for a few hundred bucks.”

Help Others Avoid My Mistakes

I am glad my information was helpful to him, but I knew I didn’t want to become another guy selling an online course and promising newbies that they would start making millions in a month.

I wanted to help people avoid going through all the pain, headaches, and financial losses I had when I started out. All beginners will always make mistakes, but the learning curve can become much smaller and more manageable with direction and guidance, making it more likely that people will stick with it.

The stock market and investing, in general, is a very large beast that can take a while to understand, especially for complete beginners. That is why it is so hard for beginners to tell the difference between genuine, honest financial information and someone trying to manipulate them and get their money.

Seeing so much of this fraud happening online and beginners getting targeted with scam after scam, combined with my buddy’s comment and my desire to help people avoid what I went through, led me to create this course, and ultimately, Haas Trade.

I want to bring structure and quality content to people interested in learning about investing, trading, and personal finance. Most likely, if you are here, you do not have hundreds of dollars to throw away to some “trading wizard” to teach you their “secrets.”

The truth is that all the information (pretty much all the world’s information) is already on the internet; you just have to find it.

Schools nowadays do not teach the basic foundations in finance to be successful. That is why I made Haas Trade affordable (hopefully) for everyone. Our main goal is to help people, and the few dollars a month we charge are reinvested back into the company to better serve you.

Sorry for the annoying sound of my microphone rubbing on my necklace!! This is my first video I ever made so lesson learned!