Chapter 3. How Gil Morales Made Over 11,000 Percent in the Stock Market

Do not be concerned with the fruit of your action—just give attention to the action itself. The fruit will come of its own accord. This is a powerful spiritual practice.

—Eckhard Tolle, Practicing the Power of Now

I didn't get into the investment business until June of 1991, when I got a job as a Financial Consultant trainee at Merrill Lynch's Beverly Hills branch. At the time I was making $2,000 a month, which wasn't enough to live anywhere in Los Angeles where you didn't risk getting hit by stray bullets. So I had to suck it up and live with my parents while I gave my nascent brokerage career a chance to gain traction. In the end it wasn't so bad. Living with my parents as an adult was not much different from living with other adult housemates, which I had done many times before during my post-college existence, except that these housemates didn't stay up all night partying and they didn't stick you with the phone bill.

Beverly Hills is also a surreal place to work. Where else can you, while driving your 1991 Dodge Colt, almost end up running over the actress Jamie Lee Curtis as she jaywalks across Rodeo Drive? Even better, the Beverly Hills Merrill Lynch office occupied the top two floors of a building that housed a Sharper Image store on the ground floor. One afternoon I headed down six floors to the third and bottom level of the building's underground parking garage only to find my car blocked by a large limousine. I went up to the limo door, which was ajar, to ask the occupant(s) if they could move only to find that the occupant was Michael Jackson, who had sent a small entourage up to the Sharper Image to buy some items. He could not move the limo, he said in his trademark soft, plaintive tone. I went back upstairs, a bit disgruntled that I couldn't get my car free, whereupon my assistant inquired, "I thought you were leaving."

I said, "I would, but Michael Jackson's limo is blocking my car." At that point, a gaggle of office assistants ran screaming downstairs to harass Mr. Jackson, which did not help my cause with respect to getting my car out of the parking garage. In any case, such was life working in Beverly Hills, and it added an entertaining aspect to my early days as a stockbroker. I could not complain however, as I found the business fascinating and I was having fun, despite the grueling task of enduring life as a rookie broker trying to drum up new accounts and obtain a foothold in the business. Most trainees didn't survive their first two years, but fortunately I was not going to be one of them.

In 1991 I didn't have any money to invest myself, but I remember having some initial success with the O'Neil methodologies when I bought stocks like Solectron (SLR) in 1991 and Pyxis (PYXS) in 1993 for some of my clients. At that time, I was just getting my feet wet, and I was so green that I can remember my hands shaking when I wrote out my first buy ticket for a client order of 200 shares of SLR stock at the market. It wasn't until 1993, when my maternal grandmother passed on and left me $3,000, that I finally had my grub stake. Over the next couple of years I grew it a little bit, and added to it through savings and bonuses I made as a broker when I moved over to PaineWebber, Inc. in mid-1994. By 1995 I had a few more thousands to play with, and I began investing when the market began to turn in late 1994, specifically when it staged a textbook O'Neil "follow-through" day to confirm a new market uptrend on December 14, 1994.