I went from rags to riches. To rags again. More.
This Is Why I Built Invest Daily.
Hey there, my name is Drew. I'm 30 years old and I'm from the small town of Belleville, IL, born and raised. I want to tell you the truth about how I got here - because it didn't go quite exaxtly the way I thought (or hoped) it would
Drew Stegman
Founder, Invest Daily
I grew up like any other late millennial in the early 2000s - riding bikes, hanging out with friends, and living life to the fullest.
Born and raised in Belleville, IL. My dad was an attorney who made a comfortable living, but they kept it modest - a 3-bedroom ranch home in the suburbs. I never knew what he made, but he made enough that my mom didn't have to work, and we got to take a vacation or two every year, which I always thought was the American dream, and something I wanted to build for my own kids someday.
When I was younger I always loved doing yard jobs and various things where I could get paid for my the work of my hands - only to go out with my neighborhood friends later and blow it on something stupid the same evening. We raised hell through elementary school. As I got to middle school, I began taking more of an interest in money and how things actually worked. That's right, I began watching Pawn Stars and learning from the pros, Rick, Chumlee & the "Old Man." It was truly my inspiration fo what led me forward, along with my new found sunday school, childlike faith in Jesus Christ and the belief that He died for my sins.
By high school, that drive had intensified. I started my first business - "how2gainmusclefast.com" - along with my first YouTube channel, which was actually surprisingly successful for a kid in high school. I remember days making $100 or even $200 in affiliate commissions while working as a dishwasher at the local Chuck Wagon restaurant. It was the best feeling in the world.
That business is long gone. I gave up on it and tried dropshipping and everything else under the sun after that. But the point is - I always had that entrepreneurial drive. I always wanted to build, create, and work on something I felt passionate about. Which brings us to today, but believe me, it is a long story. So strap in.
When I turned 19, I began messing around in the stock market - no mentor, no roadmap, just a deep and almost obsessive curiosity about how money actually worked. One of my first penny stocks was Mondial Ventures at .0001 - supposedly an oil and gas company on the "cutting edge" of something or another. You can probably guess how that ended. Then came THCZ, which is when I made my first real profit with a buddy in college. We celebrated by immediately buying another .0001 play because - and I quote - "we can buy 20 million shares and become a millionaire, dude."
It was that exact mentality that carried me forward into my early 20s - including into my marriage to my soon-to-be wife Rachel. Neither of us were really ready, but by 23 I had a daughter on the way, then two sons after that. Life and markets were both moving faster than I could process.
Around this time the market did something that felt like it had only happened once in 100 years - it tanked and then rebounded like there was no tomorrow, as the Federal Reserve pumped nearly $5 trillion into the economy at record speed. Those who saw the writing on the wall positioned themselves into riskier bets because they knew retail money would pour into speculative assets. For context, I was not one of those calculated people. I simply found myself back in the penny stock world - after swearing it off numerous times - caught up in an unprecedented moment in market history. As Steely Dan would say: Do It Again.
I had studied Corporate Finance and Investments for my undergraduate degree, went on to earn my MBA, and spent years working inside financial services - banking, wealth management, client-facing advisory roles. I thought I was building toward something. And in some ways, I was. Just not in the way I expected. The real education? That happened in the markets. And it cost me more than I ever anticipated.
Background
From $45,000 to $1.2 million. I thought I had figured something out.
Believe it or not, I actually began by putting in a bit of excess emergency fund savings I had, along with the fresh stimulus check I had received (the portion my ex-wife let me have). All said and done, between December 2020 and the beginning of the new year, I had probably a portfolio worth about $7500 at the time. After a few rapid and successful trades in the insane market that was in 2021, I ended up with the snapshot below, which was taken approximately in early March of 2021. The entire thing was unlike anything I had ever seen - or that most people had ever seen. Small-cap and OTC names were exploding by hundreds of percent in days. Retail was moving markets. It was chaotic, electric, and for a brief window of time, extraordinarily profitable if you were positioned right.
I had been building a position in a tiny OTC stock called GOFF - Goff Corp. I had loaded up. I mean really loaded up. At my cost basis of roughly $0.07, I held over a million shares across multiple accounts. I was running a finance YouTube channel at the time and sharing what I was seeing in real time. The portfolio was growing fast.
This is where it started. A screenshot I'll never forget - my account sitting at $45,578, up 5.77% on the day, with GOFF just beginning to make its move.
And then GOFF started running. Hard. I watched it go from fractions of a cent to 2,419% year-to-date. My TD Ameritrade account with 1,000,000 shares at a cost of $0.074 hit $450,000 - up 508% - in a single account. My Charles Schwab PCRA Trust account with 540,000 shares was showing $248,837 with a gain of +550%. And my combined balances had crossed $107,937 in a single Fidelity account alone, up 24.91% on one day.
Then came the rebrand. GOFF became WNFT - Worldwide NFT, Inc., complete with a 3-for-1 stock split, a new ticker, and promises of a pending merger. The narrative was shifting. The hype was real. NFTs were everywhere in 2021 and this thing had all the ingredients of what retail investors were chasing. I was deep in. Essentially all in.
And then my combined portfolio across all accounts hit the number I still think about: $1,216,233.00.
I want to be honest about how that felt. It didn't feel like luck. It felt like skill. It felt like I had cracked something. I was 25 years old, I had a million-dollar portfolio, and I genuinely believed I had earned it. That is the most dangerous place an investor can find themselves - and I had arrived there completely.
I had not figured anything out. I had been in the right place at the right time - in one of the most euphoric, speculative markets in a generation. And I was about to find out what that actually meant.
One press release. One morning. $455,274 gone in a single trading day.
By the time July 2022 rolled around, we had reached peack mania. WNFT - formerly GOFF - had been slowly grinding lower as the merger narrative stalled following the 3:1 forward split. I had stayed in. I kept telling myself the story was still intact, that the catalysts (news) was still coming, that the thesis was just taking a few days longer than expected to play out.
That's what hope masquerading as strategy looks like in real life. You don't recognize it in the moment. You convince yourself you're being patient, not stubborn. That you're a long-term investor, not someone who can't accept any possibility of the expected deal not going through.
Then came the morning of July 8, 2022. At 9:00 a.m. ET, Globe Newswire pushed a headline I will never forget: "Worldwide NFT, Inc. Provides Shareholder Update."
I remember exactly where I was when I saw that notification. A "shareholder update" sounds innocuous. It is not always a bad thing. But something in my gut knew. And when I read it, the floor dropped out.
The update was not the catalyst bulls had been waiting for. It was the opposite. And the market responded immediately and brutally. WNFT collapsed. And because I was essentially all in - across multiple accounts, after having held through months of prior deterioration - the damage was catastrophic.
My TD Ameritrade combined account balance, which had been well over $600,000 just a week earlier, closed the day at $238,329.47 - down $455,274.42 in a single trading session. That's a 65.64% loss in one day.
And here is the part that still hits me: that single day wasn't even the full story. A week before that, my combined accounts had peaked at $1.2 million. By the close of July 8th, after the roller coaster of the prior months, I had effectively lost about 80% from the peak. Nearly a million dollars. Gone.
I remember sitting there after the market closed. Just staring at the screen. There's a specific kind of silence that follows a loss like that - not peaceful, not quiet. Just empty. Your brain can't really process the number. It's too big. So you just sit there, and you feel nothing and everything at the same time.
I didn't handle it perfectly. I don't think anyone could. What I can tell you is that the loss itself wasn't even the hardest part. The hardest part was looking in the mirror and understanding my own role in what had happened. Not just the position sizing. Not just the concentration risk. But the emotional decisions, the hope I had let drive the bus, the moments where I had known I should trim and didn't.
Fear and greed are not abstract concepts. I have felt both of them - viscerally, physically - in ways that no textbook or classroom could ever teach. I know what it feels like to hold a losing position too long because you can't emotionally accept that you were wrong. I know what it feels like to let hope masquerade as strategy. And I know exactly what it costs.
Those experiences are the foundation of everything I have built since.
My son was diagnosed with Leukemia. And then I lost my career.
The portfolio was already decimated. I was trying to find my footing. And then I received the news that my son had been diagnosed with Leukemia.
If you have ever sat in a hospital with your child - if you have ever watched a little face look up at you with trust that you will make everything okay, while you silently carry the weight of not knowing if you can - then you understand why financial loss becomes very small, very quickly. And yet the pressures of life don't pause for grief. Bills don't stop. Obligations don't disappear.
Around the same time, my career in financial services came to an abrupt and involuntary end. I was approached in connection with a FINRA regulatory inquiry related to my YouTube channel. I was asked to participate in a testimony process. I refused - not because I had done anything I was ashamed of, but because of my principles, and because I was not willing to let external pressure dictate what I said or did not say. The cost of that decision was my career.
I want to say this as plainly as I can: I do not regret that decision. I believe it was the right thing to do. But I would be dishonest if I pretended it wasn't painful. Losing a career, losing a portfolio, watching your child fight for his health - all of it, layered on top of each other - will test you in ways that I genuinely hope most people never have to experience.
But those experiences also taught me something that I carry with me every single day: the only thing you truly control is how you respond. Not to the market. Not to life. Not to the things that blindside you at your most vulnerable. Just your response.
The lessons I paid the highest price to learn.
These aren't lessons from a book. They came from real losses, real pain, and real moments of reckoning with my own psychology.
Greed is invisible until it's too late.
When you're winning, it doesn't feel like greed. It feels like confidence, like skill, like momentum. The market of 2021 taught me that the environment can manufacture that feeling - and when the environment changes, the feeling evaporates instantly. I learned to ask, every single time: is this analysis, or is this emotion?
Fear will cost you more than any single bad trade.
Holding a losing position because you can't emotionally accept the loss. Panic-selling at the bottom because the pain becomes unbearable. Refusing to re-enter because the trauma of the drawdown is still too fresh. I have done all of these things. And they all stem from one root: allowing fear to make decisions instead of process.
Patience is the rarest and most valuable edge in investing.
The investors who come out ahead over decades are not always the smartest in the room. They are almost always the most patient. I learned - the hard way - that waiting for genuine setups, holding through noise without reacting, and thinking in years rather than days is not passivity. It is discipline. And discipline is everything.
Being contrarian is not about being different. It's about being right when everyone else is not.
The herd moves fast in speculative markets. And following the herd in 2021 produced enormous short-term returns for a lot of people - until it didn't. The willingness to stand apart from consensus, to question the narrative, to ask what everyone is missing - that is a skill I had to develop through loss, not through success.
Process is the only thing that holds up under pressure.
When everything is going wrong - when the portfolio is bleeding, when life is hitting you from every angle, when the emotional pressure is at its peak - the only thing that keeps you grounded is a framework. Not a tip. Not a prediction. A framework. A process. A set of principles that you have decided in advance to hold to, regardless of how you feel in the moment.
I am 30 years old. I am out of the industry. And I have never been more sure of what I am building.
Starting over is a humbling experience. And I mean that in the most literal sense - it strips away everything you thought you knew about yourself and forces you to reckon with what's actually true. I lost a portfolio. I lost a career. My family faced a medical crisis that no parent is ever prepared for. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I had to decide who I was going to be on the other side.
I chose to build. Not out of arrogance - I have earned enough humility to last a lifetime. But because I genuinely believe that everything I went through gave me something rare: a first-hand understanding of what individual investors actually face when they are in the middle of fear, uncertainty, and high-stakes decisions. And an understanding of what would have actually helped.
The tools that professional investors use every day - scenario analysis, valuation frameworks, behavioral guardrails, structured decision processes - none of those were accessible to me when I needed them most. Not at a price point that made sense. Not in a format that spoke to how individuals actually invest. And not without a conflict of interest built into the model.
So I built Invest Daily to be all of those things. Not the platform I thought would make me money. The platform I genuinely wish had existed when I was sitting in front of a screen watching my portfolio fall apart in real time.
That is the entire motivation. There is no other agenda. I am sharing my story because I think honesty is worth more than a polished brand image. And because I believe the people who will benefit most from this platform deserve to know exactly who built it and why.
I built the platform I wish had existed.
Invest Daily is not a signal service. It is not a tips newsletter. It is not a trading platform. It is a structured thinking environment - built on the belief that better process produces better outcomes over time. Process beats reaction. Frameworks beat emotion. Clarity beats noise.
Every tool on this platform reflects what I have learned the hard way - through real losses, real pain, and a genuine commitment to understanding what actually works in investing over the long term. Not what works in a bull market. Not what works when everything is going up. What works when it's hard. When you're scared. When the data says one thing and your emotions say another.
The 13,300+ investors who have found their way into this community are here because they are serious. They are not looking for hype. They want tools that help them think more clearly - and a community of people who are trying to do the same thing they are. That is what I am building. Every single day.
If you've read this far, thank you. Truly. I don't take that lightly. You're in the right place.
- Drew Stegman, Founder
Join a community of serious investors.
Explore the full platform. See exactly what's included. And make an informed decision - the same way you should make every investment decision.
30-Day Money-Back Guarantee · Cancel Anytime · No Conflicts of Interest