Alex Temiz: From Selling His Car Rims to $16M in Verified Trading Profits
Alex Temiz funded his first trading account by selling the rims off his car for $2,000 while working as a Starbucks barista. He's now one of the most documented short-side small-cap traders in the U.S., with over $16 million in verified broker-statement profits, an interview track record with SMB Capital, and a co-founder role at My Investing Club — one of the larger trading education communities operating today.
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The Snapshot
Alex Temiz is one of the more credentialed short-side small-cap traders working in retail today, and his career arc is the kind of thing that sounds too clean to be true until you check the verification. Starbucks barista in 2015, with a finance degree from Ramapo College of New Jersey and no real trading background. Took four years of grinding through losses before his first million-dollar year. Invited to SMB Capital's New York City office in 2018 for a documented interview. Co-founded My Investing Club (MIC) with Bao Nguyen and Tosh Bradley to build a no-nonsense trading education community. Currently sits on over $16 million in cumulative verified profits, with broker statements published publicly. MIC profile
For day traders evaluating modern retail short-side records, Temiz is one of the most rigorously documented examples available. He's a short-biased small-cap pattern day trader from New York City, specializing in fading pump-and-dump stocks rather than chasing breakouts, which puts him in a different stylistic camp from the Sykes-alumni long-biased momentum traders we cover in our broader retail trader survey. The short-side approach is structurally harder for retail (requires locate borrows, faces unlimited theoretical loss potential, gets stopped out by short squeezes) but tends to produce higher edge per trade when executed well. Ippei (MIC review)
Starbucks and the $2,000 Rims
The Temiz origin story is one of the more striking pieces of modern retail trading lore. He was working as a Starbucks barista in 2015 — either a high-school senior or college freshman, by his own telling — partly to help his father through a period of financial struggle. His motivation to start trading was, candidly, that his girlfriend had recently dumped him and he wanted to get rich. The frankness about the motivation is part of why people take his other claims seriously; it's the kind of detail a manufactured-origin-story trader wouldn't include. The starting capital came from selling the rims off his car for approximately $2,000. MIC (SMB Capital interview writeup)
He had a finance degree from Ramapo College of New Jersey, which gave him conceptual grounding but no practical trading skill. The early phase of his career mirrored what happens to almost every new retail trader: he found the online trading-guru ecosystem, fell into the typical traps (alert chasing, oversized positions, no risk management), and lost money for an extended period before figuring out the methodology that actually worked. The four-year gap between his trading start and his first million-dollar year is one of the more honest numbers in modern retail trading — most guru marketing implies dramatically faster timelines, and Temiz's willingness to publicly state the actual timeline is meaningful. Trading Reviewers
The Early Loss Years
Temiz has been explicit in interviews that the early losses were the foundational lesson. Without an actual risk-management plan, his early account got chipped down repeatedly by the standard retail mistakes: trading without a defined entry thesis, sizing positions too large relative to the account, refusing to honor stop levels, and revenge-trading after losses. The improvement curve started only when he committed to mechanical risk-management rules — defined stop levels at technical resistance, position sizes calibrated to the stop distance rather than to gut feel, and a hard rule about not adding to losing positions. MIC writeup
Meeting Bao Nguyen
The inflection point in Temiz's career was meeting Bao Nguyen — a day trader known for, among other things, making $1.4 million in a single day on Fannie Mae stock ($FNMA). Bao became Temiz's mentor and eventually his business partner at MIC. The mentorship was meaningful in two ways: it gave Temiz access to a verified seven-figure trader's actual methodology rather than the watered-down version that gets sold to course buyers, and it provided the kind of direct accountability that's essentially impossible to find in a paid guru relationship. Bao's trading sits in a different style camp (more concentrated, more event-driven) but the underlying discipline transferred. MIC profile
SMB Capital and the NYSE Visit
In 2018, Temiz was invited to SMB Capital's New York City office for an extended interview that was eventually published as a documented case study. SMB Capital is one of the more respected proprietary trading firms in the U.S., and they don't typically host extended interviews with anonymous-online traders or rented-Lambo gurus — the invitation itself was a credibility marker that distinguished Temiz from the broader retail-trading-influencer pool. The interview covered his methodology, his risk management, and his verified track record at that point. MIC (SMB interview)
After years of publishing verified P&L and building a public track record, Temiz was eventually invited to visit the New York Stock Exchange floor — the kind of invitation that doesn't get extended to anonymous online traders. The NYSE visit isn't directly relevant to his trading methodology, but it's another data point in the credibility picture that distinguishes him from the broader Twitter-trader ecosystem. MIC profile
The Short-Side Small-Cap Strategy
Temiz's bread-and-butter strategy is shorting pump-and-dump small-cap stocks — the kind of low-float, low-quality companies that get coordinated promotion campaigns running on Twitter, Discord, and various paid newsletter ecosystems. The structural setup that creates the short opportunity: a low-quality stock gets pumped to artificially high prices through promotional activity, retail FOMO buyers pile in chasing the momentum, the promotion ends or fundamentals reassert themselves, and the stock then proceeds to drop catastrophically as the promotional buying disappears. Temiz positions short into the late-stage pump and rides the deflation. Ippei review
The Risk Management Layer
The risk management that makes the strategy survivable is meticulous. Stops are placed at technical resistance levels (typically just above the daily high or a key intraday level), position sizes are calibrated such that the maximum loss on any single trade is bounded to a small fraction of account equity, and the trader never adds to losing positions — a discipline that's particularly important on the short side, where adding to losers can produce account-destroying losses during short squeezes. The mechanical structure is more important than the specific setup, because the specific setup varies with market regime but the structure has to hold across regimes. Trading Reviewers
| Temiz approach | Detail |
|---|---|
| Primary instrument | Small-cap stocks ($1-$10 range, pump targets) |
| Bias | Short-side dominant; long large-caps occasionally |
| Setup focus | Late-stage pumps, parabolic exhaustion, failed breakouts |
| Entry method | Short into resistance with defined stop |
| Stop discipline | Hard stops just above resistance — no exceptions |
| Position sizing | Calibrated to stop distance, not gut feel |
| Time focus | 9:30 AM to ~10:30 AM EST primary window |
| Verification | Public broker statements at myinvestingclub.com/statements |
The Pump-and-Dump Short Setup
Parabolic late-stage pump → exhaustion at resistance → short entry with stop above high → deflation
Founding My Investing Club
My Investing Club was co-founded by Temiz, Bao Nguyen, and Tosh Bradley as the trading education community they wished they had when they were starting out — real mentorship from verified traders rather than the curated highlight reels and anonymous Twitter flexes that dominate the broader trading-education space. The structural difference between MIC and most competitors is that members can watch the head mentors trade live on Zoom with no delay every trading day, executing real positions in real accounts. The transparency cuts against the typical guru playbook of selling theory while practicing something different. MIC homepage
MIC has grown into one of the larger paid trading communities operating today, with a Trustpilot rating in the high 4s and multiple tiers of membership (chat room access, course library, live trading sessions, one-on-one mentorship). The pricing is meaningfully higher than the typical penny-stock-guru subscription, which has drawn criticism from some experienced traders who say the basic-course material is overpriced for traders who already have a foundation. The flip side is that the live mentorship is harder to replicate, and the community has produced multiple documented examples of members reaching consistent profitability — including some who have been recruited away by hedge funds and prop firms. Ippei review
The $16M+ Verified Statements
The verification piece is where Temiz separates from the broader retail-trading-influencer pool. He publishes broker statements at myinvestingclub.com/statements showing the cumulative profit figure above $16 million across his trading career. The verification standard isn't equivalent to a regulatory audit — broker statements themselves can in principle be manipulated — but it's substantially stronger than the "trust me, look at my Lamborghini" verification offered by most trading influencers, and the documented evolution of the statements over years makes the kind of large-scale fraud that would be required to fake them increasingly implausible. MIC statements page
The publication of verified statements is also a deliberate competitive positioning. Most trading educators don't show their statements because they don't trade actively at the scale they imply in their marketing. Temiz's willingness to publish, combined with the SMB Capital interview and the NYSE visit, creates a credibility profile that most direct competitors can't match. Whether the MIC course content itself is worth the price is a separate question — the methodology is built on principles available in any decent technical-analysis education — but the underlying claim that the lead mentor is an actual verified-profitable trader is one of the more solidly documented in modern retail trading. MIC profile
What Traders Can Actually Learn From This
The first lesson from Temiz's career is the value of mechanical risk management. The single biggest change between his early loss years and his profitable years was committing to defined stops, calibrated position sizes, and a hard rule against adding to losers. None of these ideas is novel; they appear in every serious trading book ever written. What changed was applying them mechanically rather than discretionarily. The pattern is consistent across long-tenured profitable traders covered in our broader trading education resources — the rules are publicly known; the constraint is execution.
The second lesson is the timeline. Four years from start to first million-dollar year. The number is unusual not because it's particularly long but because Temiz is willing to publicly state it. Most trading-education marketing implies dramatically compressed timelines, and aspiring traders who internalize those implied timelines then either give up before the actual learning curve completes or take excessive risk trying to force a result. The realistic expectation, based on the documented trajectories of nearly every named successful retail trader, is multi-year — typically three to five years of grinding before the methodology produces consistent results. Going in with that expectation is the difference between adequate persistence and premature surrender.
The third lesson is the value of short-side competence. Most retail traders are long-biased by default — they grow up in financial markets that mostly trend up over decades, and the cognitive frame of "buying things that go up" is more intuitive than "selling things that will go down." Temiz's career is a long argument that short-side competence is one of the higher-edge skills available to a small-cap retail trader, because the structural inefficiency in pump-and-dump small caps is enormous and the population of skilled short-side traders is small. The cost is the structural difficulty (locate borrows, short-squeeze risk, hard-to-borrow fees), but for traders willing to do the additional work, the edge is materially larger than the equivalent long-side momentum strategy.
Frequently Asked Questions
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What is My Investing Club (MIC)?
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Disclosure: This article is editorial and contains no affiliate links. Trading involves substantial risk of loss, and most day traders lose money. Alex Temiz's documented performance is based on publicly published broker statements; these statements have not been independently audited in the regulatory sense, though the multi-year publication history and corroborating third-party credibility markers (SMB Capital interview, NYSE visit) make the underlying claims substantially better-supported than is typical for retail trading influencers. Individual results vary significantly and Temiz's results are not representative of typical trader outcomes.
