Nathan Michaud: The Steadiest Hand in Day Trading Education
While most day trading gurus burn out, sell out, or pivot to crypto, Nathan Michaud has done the rarest thing in the space: he's still doing exactly the same thing in 2026 that he was doing in 2008. Investors Underground is the longest-running premium day trading community on the internet, and Michaud has been the chair at the head of the table since day one.
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The Snapshot
Nathan Michaud — better known across the trading internet as @InvestorsLive — has been a full-time day trader since 2007 and the founder of Investors Underground since 2008. While most of the names in retail trading have come, gone, gotten famous, gotten sued, or quietly disappeared during quiet markets, Michaud has done the unglamorous thing: shown up to the same chat room every morning for nearly two decades. Investors Underground is, by some margin, the longest continuously operating premium day trading community online, and that longevity is itself a credential in a category defined by churn. Day Trade Review
Michaud is a small-cap momentum trader who has built his reputation on adaptability rather than a single signature strategy. He's traded both long and short, breakouts and reversals, the dot-com aftermath and the meme-stock mania, and the through-line in his career has been a willingness to change tactics as market structure shifts while keeping the core risk framework consistent. He's also one of the few prominent figures in retail trading who has openly told stories about losing badly — including run-ins with the SEC — and who has used those stories as teaching material rather than burying them. He's a fixture in any honest list of renowned day traders, and the IU community he built is the source of many of the others. Chat With Traders
UNH and the InvestorsLive Blog
Michaud started trading in 2003 while studying for his finance degree at the University of New Hampshire's Whittemore School of Business. Like most retail traders, his early experience was an emotional rollercoaster — making decent money in the mornings, then over-trading in the afternoons and giving it all back, then doing the same thing the next day. In 2004, frustrated with his own pattern of self-sabotage, he started a blog called InvestorsLive.com where he documented his trades publicly, explained his reasoning, and analyzed what he was watching for the next session. The blog was originally an accountability tool, not a business. Trading Reviewers
The blog grew organically. By the time Michaud graduated in 2007 with a Bachelor's in Finance, his audience numbered in the hundreds, which doesn't sound like much by modern social media standards but was meaningful for a pre-Twitter-era trading blog. He went full-time as a trader immediately after graduation. Within a year, he'd approached several other small trading blogs and chat rooms with the proposal that they merge into a single, larger community — which became Investors Underground in 2008. Trading Skeptic
The SEC Sting and the Comeback
One of the more honest things Michaud has done in his career is openly tell the story of his early years — including a now-famous incident where he ran into trouble with the SEC. In a candid Chat With Traders podcast interview, he discussed getting stung by the regulator during his early-stage trading and losing a significant portion of his account in a single episode. The details have been told in his own words across multiple interviews; the relevant point for traders is that he didn't hide it. Most retail trading personalities present a curated highlight reel that suggests they were born profitable; Michaud has been explicit that his career involved an early near-blowout and that the comeback was the foundation of everything that worked afterward. Chat With Traders
Founding Investors Underground (2008)
Investors Underground launched in 2008 as a subscription-based, premium day trading chat room — a model that wasn't common at the time and that has since been copied repeatedly. The pitch was straightforward: pay a monthly fee, get access to a real-time chat room where experienced traders share setups, watchlists, and commentary throughout the session. The price point was deliberately positioned above the free Yahoo Finance message boards that were the dominant retail trading social space at the time, and below the institutional Bloomberg-style products that were out of reach for individuals. Trading Reviewers
What made IU survive when most competitors didn't was the editorial discipline of the room itself. Michaud actively moderated the chat to keep it focused on actionable trading content rather than pump-and-dump touting or random hype. The community structure that emerged became the template for nearly every modern premium trading chat — a head trader sharing trades in real time, secondary moderators providing supplementary commentary, members asking questions, and a curated nightly recap that captured the day's most important setups. The product hasn't fundamentally changed in seventeen-plus years; it's just gotten more polished. Day Trading Toolkit
The Adaptive Approach
Michaud's trading style is harder to pin to a single signature setup than someone like Sykes (short pump-and-dumps) or Grittani (specific pattern library). What characterizes Michaud's approach is adaptability — he trades small-cap momentum stocks both long and short depending on market conditions, with position sizing scaled to volatility and conviction rather than to a fixed framework. In interviews he's described his philosophy as fundamentally emotional rather than mechanical: he's looking for trades where the broader retail crowd is likely to panic, and his job is to take the opposite side of that panic. Chat With Traders
Long and Short, Day and Swing
One reason Michaud has outlasted most peers is that he doesn't fight the market. When low-float momentum runners are abundant (typically late-cycle bull markets and retail manias), he leans into pump-and-fade short setups. When the market is quieter and patterns appear less frequently, he scales down trade frequency and shifts toward longer holding periods on cleaner long setups. He also swing trades selectively — holding positions overnight or for multiple days when the chart structure favors it — which is something most pure intraday traders avoid. Trading Reviewers
| Element | Michaud's approach |
|---|---|
| Direction | Both long and short, situation-dependent |
| Time horizon | Intraday + selective swing positions |
| Universe | Small-cap momentum, mid-cap on occasion |
| Mental model | Reading and reacting to retail panic / FOMO |
| Risk framework | Position size scales to volatility & conviction |
| Setup variety | Wide — adapts to current market regime |
Tandem Trader and Textbook Trading
Beyond the chat room, Michaud has produced two foundational courses that are widely considered among the best in retail day trading education. Textbook Trading is the structured curriculum — it covers the technical analysis, setup library, risk management, and psychology that form the IU framework. Tandem Trader is the live-trade companion piece: hours of footage showing Michaud actually executing trades in real time with running commentary on why he's making each decision. The tandem format — see the textbook, then see the textbook applied — is unusually effective compared to most trading courses, which lean either heavily theoretical or heavily anecdotal. Trading Reviewers
The Morning Reversal Reclaim
Red open → washout low → reclaim of opening price → long entry on continuation
Traders4ACause
In 2013, Michaud co-founded Traders4ACause, a non-profit organization that channels donations from the day trading community toward selected charitable causes. The charity hosts an annual conference where prominent traders speak, and donations from members and sponsors fund the year's chosen causes. As of recent reporting, the organization has raised over $1 million across its operating years, supporting initiatives ranging from cancer research to disaster relief. The conference itself has become a meaningful community event in retail trading, drawing in many of the names featured in our broader day trading education coverage. A Smarter Choice
The IU Community Effect
Investors Underground's most under-appreciated contribution to retail trading isn't its course material or its chat room — it's the network effect. The IU community has produced or housed a remarkable number of traders who went on to become successful in their own right. Mark Croock, Eric Wood, Cameron Fous, and Cam from IU have all built notable trading careers; many of the verified Profit.ly millionaires (including Grittani at various points) have spent time inside the IU ecosystem. The community functions as a self-selecting filter: traders who are willing to pay for serious education tend to take the material seriously, which produces a higher density of profitable members than free Discord servers and message boards. Day Trading Toolkit
What Traders Can Actually Learn From This
The most useful lesson from Michaud's career is also the least exciting: longevity. The trading personalities who survive over decades, rather than flame out after a single hot market, tend to share a few traits — adaptability, conservative position sizing, willingness to publicly own losses, and an aversion to the lifestyle marketing that consumes most of the category. Michaud is unusually clean on all four counts. He's still trading the same general universe of small-cap momentum stocks he was trading in 2008, and he's still in the same chat room with the same fundamental business model.
The second lesson is community. Trading is a fundamentally solitary activity at execution, but the development of edge tends to compound much faster in environments where other serious traders are sharing setups, post-mortems, and counter-arguments. Michaud built that environment intentionally, and it's part of why IU has produced more successful traders per capita than most retail trading platforms. If you can find or build a small group of serious traders to learn alongside, the development arc tends to shorten.
The third lesson is humility about losses. Michaud's public discussion of his early SEC issue and near-blowout is not the standard guru playbook. The standard playbook is to suggest the trader was always profitable and the only question was what setup they used. Michaud's openness about failure is a feature of trader trust, not a bug — and it's a behavior worth imitating in your own trade journal, even if no one else will ever read it.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Disclosure: This article is editorial and contains no affiliate links. Trading involves substantial risk of loss. Michaud's status as a long-tenured trader does not guarantee that subscribers to his platform will become profitable; the base rate of profitable retail day traders is low regardless of educational materials.
