Tyler Bollhorn’s vanity plate – DAYTRDR – tells the story of his life.

His new $180,000 red Ferrari sports car boldly proclaims it’s a success story.

But Bollhorn, president and founder of Stockscores.com, is no flash-in-the-pan day-trading wonder who cashed in on a single raging bull market run.

For the youthful Calgary entrepreneur, success is the culmination of years of being a vigilant student of the day-trading game.

Shannon Oatway photo, Business Edge
Tyler Bollhorn says his Stockhouse program goes from technical analysis to recognizing stock chart patterns.

The 33-year-old Bollhorn has taken day trading to a new level by developing a unique and sophisticated technical analysis system that essentially simplifies chart patterns and captures market sentiment to determine short-term trends.

Bollhorn’s Stockscores trading system is not only the basis of his personal day trading – which has netted him as much as $250,000 per month – but is also marketed to one of the world’s most popular investment sites, Stockhouse, sold to customers, taught in his day-trading school and promoted on his Stockscores website.

The plate may scream vanity, but who’s to argue that Bollhorn hasn’t earned the sobriquet? 1. What was your boyhood dream?

“I wanted to be a race-car driver. I’ve done a little car racing and I own a pretty nice car right now. I have a Ferrari 255 Spider.”

2. What was your first job?

“My very first job was working at K-Mart Sunday afternoons stacking shelves in the toy section while I was in high school. Then, I worked for Calgary Co-op for about seven years and that was my last job. I started out as a gas jockey and later I was a supervisor in a gas bar.”

3. What initially sparked your interest in the stock market?

“While I was a student at the University of Calgary, I thought I should learn something about the stock market since I was a business major. I entered an investment game challenge and I had friends who would give me stock tips. I did what most people do in the beginning, listening to tips. It certainly got me intrigued about this whole idea.”

4. What inspired you to create the Stockscores system?

“I started studying market activity as a way to predict what the so- called smart money was doing. Early on, I realized that the stock market isn’t fair and that trusting public information isn’t going to get you anywhere, because that’s already priced into the stock. To succeed, I had to know what the insiders were doing. Since I didn’t know any insiders, I sort of figured out that market activity told me a lot about what the smart money was doing and that stocks behaved abnormally before they made a move. Five years ago I took that concept and defined it mathematically, creating the Stockscore models. The company I’m in partnership with, Stockgroup Media (owner of the Stockhouse investing website), built it for me and it has been a great tool for myself and traders. It took about eight years for me to learn the concept behind Stockscores and about four or five days to create the model.”

5. What sets Stockscores apart from other technical analysis systems?

“We’ve taken technical analysis and simplified it into an indicator that recognizes chart patterns. Ultimately, I think chart patterns tell us more about where a stock is going than anything else. The difficulty is that chart patterns are hard to define mathematically and so the scoring system really looks at the different aspects of a good chart system. I think we’re the only company that seeks out statistically significant abnormal activity as a cue that something is going on. It takes some fairly sophisticated computer technology to do that. I always stress that you can have the best company in the world, but if the market doesn’t think so, then the stock’s not going to go anywhere. Stockscores tries to measure whether the market is optimistic or pessimistic about a company.”

6. How did you initially hook up with Stockhouse?

“The president of Stockhouse, Marcus New, is originally from Calgary and we knew each other from similar circles. Stockhouse was looking for someone to help them design the technical analysis aspects. I brought my experience to them and they brought the programming to me.”

7. What’s your approach to teaching the trading game in your trading school?

“We’re teaching people how to trade and we’re not teaching things they can get out of a book at Chapters. We’re teaching things that I’ve learned from real experience. I trade stocks just about every day. You can’t teach someone how to make money in the market if you haven’t done it yourself. Most of the educational systems I’ve seen are American and I think most of them are teachers first and traders second. I think we’re the opposite of that.”

8. Have you sold many of your complete Stockscores educational packages at $2,495?

“We’ve sold a big amount although I’d rather not say the number. I could probably sell a lot more if I made it more of a business than I do. I would call it more of a hobby than anything.”

9. How do you see Stockscores evolving?

“I think that I want to make it a tool that is available to more people. We’re going to launch some new products in the next few months so that you won’t have to incur the $2,495 cost. We’re going to expand the product offering and redesign the website (www.stockscores.com) to make it simpler and nicer to look at. My motivation with Stockscores mostly was in creating tools for myself to use and I’m always looking for tools that can make me more money as a trader. The problem is that some of these tools cost me tens of thousands of dollars, so it makes sense to distribute that cost over to my membership rather than incur it all on myself. I’m working on some new tools for swing trading the market, which is holding stocks for one to three days. Hopefully, we’ll launch that in the new year.”

10. But your main job is day trading. How much time does that take?

“I’m in front of the computer screen virtually all day. Trading doesn’t require that you’re watching the market minute by minute, so I answer e-mail and stuff like that. An ideal day for me would be getting up at 7:29 so I can be in front of the screen at 7:30 (opening bell). My website is such a powerful tool that it finds things for me. It’s not a lot of work. I run certain market scans on our website that generates a list of stocks that are worth considering. Stock trading isn’t a 100-per-cent, black-and-white type game. It’s a probability game. I’m looking for things where I’m going to be right 70 per cent of the time. When I’m wrong, I take a small loss. When I’m right, hopefully my gains are significant.”

11. Who taught you the trading game?

“I didn’t really have a mentor or anything like that. This is kind of a solo game. I taught myself how to do this. There are lots of traders but they’re all hiding in their house and you don’t necessarily know what they do.

“Some of the people I’ve taught have actually evolved into better traders than me, I think.”

12. What separates good traders from bad traders?

“It’s the inability to control emotion. Most regular investors just make emotional decisions and there are so many psychological traps that are just part of human nature. That’s why most people can’t do well in the market. I would guess 90 per cent of day traders fail. The weird thing about the stock market is that it is the opposite of life. In life, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. In the stock market, when the market gets tough, you get lazy. When the market is hard and not working for you, sit on your hands and go play golf or something. But when the market is really going and it’s easy to make money, you need to work at it. You need to make hay when the sun is shining.”

13. What makes day traders fail?

“One, they don’t know how to manage their emotions. Two, they don’t go out and learn how to do it. I wouldn’t become a doctor in a day, but you can become a day trader in a day by just filling out some paperwork and opening up an account. I’ve heard of people who have wiped out an entire portfolio trying to learn how the market works. They blame it on day trading and how it’s evil and how it shouldn’t be allowed. The reality is that they just didn’t learn how to do it properly. You can make as much money as a hockey player or a doctor, but it’s no different than any other occupation in that you have to learn how to do it first.”

14. What’s the most important character trait of a successful trader?

“Discipline. I can teach someone everything they need to know about day trading in a weekend and it’ll take them a month to learn all the rules. But some people will never be able to succeed because they don’t know how to be disciplined. It’s the hardest thing to learn. It’s hard to manage your emotions, but I’m certainly a lot better at it today.”

15. What’s your best day or month at the trading game?

“I did about $55,000 in profit one day. One of my favourite strategies is to buy stocks late in the trading day and sell them the following morning. I call the first hour of trading ‘amateur hour’ because what tends to happen is that the retail investors all want to buy a stock and they don’t want to wait so they buy on the open. It was the strategy of buying in the last hour of the trading day and selling in the first hour the following day that made me the $55,000. I usually put $15,000 or $20,000 into one stock and try to make a $1,000 a trade. I might buy only $5,000 worth of a more volatile stock and then I might buy $100,000 of a very low-volatility stock because I need to buy more to make my $1,000. My best monthly profit was a quarter of a million dollars.”

16. How much money did you have when you started trading?

“I had $3,000, half of it borrowed from my Visa card, and I had to watch my pennies. I bought my first stock and lost.”

17. Did you ever take a serious bath in the market?

“No. In the years when I was trying to figure out the market, I certainly wasn’t as successful. I’ve never had a period where I wiped myself out.”

18. When you buy a stock, do you care whether the CEO is buying $8,000 shower curtains on the shareholders’ tab?

“I couldn’t care less. I’m not buying stocks because I like the company. I’m buying stocks because the market likes it at that moment. I’m not by any means a long-term investor. In fact, I go out of my way to ignore news and not read the business section of the newspaper.

“I don’t want to know the story because if you know the story, then you fall in love and you make mistakes.”

19. What’s your lifestyle like as a day trader?

“It’s fabulous. I probably take two months of holidays a year and I work out of my house. I make enough money doing it so I can have a pretty good lifestyle. I drive nice cars and go on a lot of vacations, but I’m not that much different. I still like to eat at McDonald’s. It gives you the freedom to do what the heck you want. Aside from my bad car habit, I’m by no means an extravagant person.”

20. So do you think trading the stock market is as much fun as your dream career of racing cars?

“It’s actually more fun. It’s a tremendous rush to buy and sell something and make quite a lot of money without really getting a sore back. I used to frame houses in the summer as a kid and those people work for a living. This I don’t really consider work. I like to trade. To me, it’s like a game and it’s fun every day. The days when you lose aren’t great, but I don’t have too many of those. I love trading and I’d be doing it whether I was making money or not. I imagine this is what I’ll do for the rest of my life.”

IN PROFILE: Tyler Bollhorn
* Born/raised/age: Calgary, 33.
* Title: President/founder, Stockscores.com.
* Education: University of Calgary, Bachelor of Commerce degree.
* Family: Wife Cindy, one daughter.
* Career: Bollhorn has been a professional day trader for six years and is president of his own private company, Stockscores.com. He markets the Stockscores trading system through his website, writes a free stock market newsletter and also teaches stock market trading. Prior to becoming a full-time trader, Bollhorn was a supervisor of a Calgary Co-op gas bar.
* Passions: Sports cars, golf, travel.

THE COMPANY: Stockscores.com
* Boss: Tyler Bollhorn, president.
* Profile: Stockscores.com is a private Calgary company that features a stock-market trading system based on a mathematical formula to measure trends and simplify chart patterns. Stockscores analysis is available free at investment site Stockhouse. Bollhorn also markets StockSchool, a package of stock trading educational tools that sells for $2,495, and writes a free newsletter.
* Recommended: Bollhorn’s five steps to investment success featured on his website.
* Websites/info: www.stockscores.com; www.stockhouse.ca
* Phone: 403-264-5098, 866-441-1999