A 23-year-old options trader with over $1 million in profits shares his top tips for investors
Lander Schlessinger
- Retail trader Lander Schlessinger, 23, has found success in the market trading options.
- He got his start in high school and has since made millions in profit.
- Schlessinger says trading successfully requires intense focus and the ability to set aside emotions.
Lander Schlessinger made so much money trading options in high school that he says his father thought he was dealing drugs.
A native of New Jersey, Schlessinger started trading penny stocks before moving on to the higher-risk-higher-reward options market when he was 17.
According to screenshots of his brokerage account viewed by Business Insider, he's soared well past $1 million in profit just in 2025, but he says crossing a lower threshold stands out more as a memory of his trading journey.
"I would say the 100k mark was actually more significant to me, because that was the hardest to get to," he told Business Insider. "When I reached it, it felt like 'this is a real thing, and I could actually make some serious money doing this.' It just kept compounding from there."
Schlessinger's schedule attending a vocational high school allowed him to trade during the early morning hours while he was enrolled in his business and finance courses. He added that when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the world went into lockdown, it allowed him even more flexibility to trade during the day.
Now 23 years old, Schlessinger is still actively trading options, though he only spends a few hours a day doing it. His day starts at 9am to monitor premarket moves before he begins making trades between the key market hours of 9:30 and 11am.
Schlessinger isn't part of popular trading forums like r/WallStreetBets but his educational company Stock Method LLC includes an active Discord channel. Like other traders, he notes that the lifestyle can be lonely, which compelled him to build a community of traders.
Schlessinger, who recently spoke on a panel hosted by retail trading platform MooMoo and WallStreetBets, says he primarily trades options on the same four tickers—Tesla, Nvidia, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF and Invesco NASDAQ Future Gen 200 ETF.
His strategy centers around trading 0DTE (zero days to expiration) options contracts. The contracts are a particularly high-risk options play.
But Schlessinger's tips did not focus on explicit trading strategy around the options themselves. Rather, he emphasized that he believes success in options, as well as all other trading, comes from sticking to a plan and making moves without emotion.
"The reason people can't make money long term is because they just can't follow a plan for longer than a week, because they get too emotional," he said. "The reason why they get too emotional is because there's money involved."
Schlessinger acknowledged that he didn't enjoy immediate success. He said it took him between six and eight months of regular trading to be able to generate consistent profits.
Lander Schlessinger
During his early trading days, he kept detailed spreadsheets that helped him follow through with plans he made that ultimately led him to profitability. He shared examples of the sheets with Business Insider, highlighting the importance of using data to visualize what worked what didn't.
"It's a lot mentally," he said, adding that creating and executing on a plan requires intense focus, which is why it's often the hardest part of the equation for most traders.
Schlessinger credits a lot of his success to an obsession with trading and with markets. However, he also says that aspiring traders shouldn't fixate to the point where they grow to hate being in the market.
"Anything I do, I obsess over it. I don't know if that's a good thing or bad thing, but in the right areas, it definitely works," he said. "I actually just enjoy trading."
from Business Insider https://ift.tt/3P4O0Dl
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