David Bird

When did you first start investing? Take us back to the beginning

I first had exposure to markets when I was younger, but the real turning point came after I moved back from England in 2011. I came home with very little to my name and even some debt. Around that time I got into fantasy sports. I did not know the players particularly well, so I approached it through data rather than emotion and ended up winning the league in back-to-back years.

My brother said to me, ‘You should apply that same process to the stock market.’ That clicked. I realised I had a knack for analysing information, looking for patterns and making decisions without getting too emotionally attached. In a way, it was a bit like the Moneyball story. That was really the beginning of taking markets seriously..

Who or what got you interested in the market?

My dad planted the seed long before I realised it. I grew up around markets because of him. As a kid, I remember playing around the bottom of the ASX building while he was checking stocks back before the internet made all of that easy. At the time I thought it was boring.

As you get older, your perspective changes. You realise you do not want to spend your whole life living paycheque to paycheque and relying only on a salary. My dad was able to retire in his late 40s through good investments in shares and property, so I had seen firsthand what it looked like when money started working for you rather than the other way around.

Later, my brother helped bring me back to markets by encouraging me to apply the same data-driven approach I was using in fantasy sports.

What's currently in your portfolio?

I am very diversified. I have exposure to property, shares, commodities, crypto, alternative investments and private companies. I do not want my financial future relying on one asset class or one type of opportunity. Different assets serve different purposes, and I like having that diversification across both liquid markets and longer-term investments.

What's on your watchlist?

The main areas I am interested in right now are commodities and energy. That can mean broad commodity exposure, but it can also mean more targeted areas such as gold, silver, copper, industrial metals and soft commodities. 

I am also watching the energy sector closely, including energy-focused ETFs such as $FUEL. I am interested in areas where the bigger cycle, the macro picture and the technical structure are all starting to line up.

You were a teacher before you became a trader. How did you go from the classroom to building a career around markets?

I was a primary school teacher for a long time, and no one goes into teaching for the money. You do it because you enjoy helping people understand something they could not understand before. 

Once I had become successful in my own trading and investing, people naturally started asking me, ‘How did you do that?’ and ‘Can you teach me?’ I realised I had two things I genuinely loved: financial markets and education. Combining those two passions was the natural next step, and that is how Mastering the Markets was born.

How has teaching influenced the way you approach the markets?

Teaching has made me much more evidence-based. If I put an opinion out on social media, in mainstream media or on stage at a financial event, I do not want to just say, ‘This is what I think.’ I want to show the data and explain why. 

I love educating in real time. I would much rather say, ‘This is what I think is happening, and this is the evidence,’ then come back months later and show how the idea played out. 

Property has been a good recent example. At the end of 2025 I was writing and speaking about the risk of the cycle turning while sentiment was still euphoric. I was looking at the interest-rate cycle, policy settings, market behaviour and the broader data. Months later, as the data changed and sentiment followed, people could go back and see the learning process as it happened. That accountability absolutely makes you more disciplined.

What are you investing or trading towards?

I have already achieved a lot of the financial success I originally wanted from markets. These days, a big part of it is simply allowing my capital to keep compounding in the background. What motivates me now is education. 

I enjoy taking people who are sceptical of technical analysis and showing them, in real time, how a disciplined process can identify opportunities, manage risk and, when done well, outperform. It is not about getting every call right. It is about showing that market timing and technical analysis can be applied successfully when there is a repeatable process behind them.

How would you describe your approach to the market today?

Every Sunday night I do what I call the Weekly Outlook. I go through the major indices, sectors and commodities and look for confluence, where multiple charts are telling the same story. I always say the market tells a story and nothing moves in isolation. Markets have relationships. When several independent pieces of evidence point in the same direction, that gives me much more confidence than looking at one chart or one indicator in isolation. 

A good example was commodities in early 2024. I was looking at the U.S. dollar, bond yields, gold, silver, platinum, gold miners, silver miners and relative-strength relationships. The evidence was lining up around the same theme, which helped me position near the beginning of that cycle. Then, at the beginning of 2026, many of those signals started saying the opposite on the shorter time frames, so I took profits in shorter-term accounts while still holding longer-term exposure because the bigger cycle remained intact. For me, it is about building the evidence.

What stock or trade has been your biggest winner?

One of the biggest recent examples has been silver. I started positioning for that move in April 2024. At the time, almost no one believed the thesis. I then wrote multiple articles through News Corp in early 2025 explaining why I believed silver was setting up for a major move, and the common reaction was that silver was like watching paint dry. 

Then it took off. What made the trade especially meaningful for me was not just getting the early part of the move. Near the eventual top, I was also posting publicly that I believed we were at the top of the wave while sentiment had flipped the other way and people were focused on physical shortages and supply-demand narratives. 

Being able to show both the entry thesis and the exit thesis in real time made it a very complete example of how I like to teach markets.

What stock or trade has been your biggest loser?

The biggest lesson was not one single stock. It came from the 2017 crypto bull market. I turned roughly $20,000 into more than $200,000 after only a couple of years in markets. Then I made the classic mistake of doubting my own work and listening to the crowd. 

I was seeing weakness in the charts, but social media was full of people saying the move had only just begun, with things like CME futures being used as reasons the bull market could keep going. I thought, ‘These people probably know more than me.’ I gave back all of those unrealised gains and ended up around $14,000. 

It was painful, but it was also incredibly valuable. It taught me not to outsource my decision-making and showed me what was possible if I actually developed a proper process. In the next crypto cycle, I was far better prepared to manage the whole cycle rather than just the exciting part of it.

What did you learn the hard way as a trader?

Psychology is one of the biggest parts of this game. Early on, you think success means being right all the time. It does not. It is about consistency and what your average looks like over a long period. I often compare it with elite sport. Michael Jordan did not score the same number of points every time he stepped on the court. 

Some games were below average, some were extraordinary, but across a long enough period he was an outperformer. Trading is the same. You will have good weeks and bad weeks, good months and bad months, even good years and bad years. The question is whether your process leaves you ahead over time and whether you are outperforming your benchmark. 

When you are a beginner, a losing period can feel permanent because you have never experienced the other side yet. Once you have become consistently profitable, you understand that drawdowns and rough patches are part of the process. The skill is being able to keep following the process and work your way through them.

Which company or position has stayed with you the longest?

There are several positions I bought around the COVID lows that I am still holding roughly six years later. The reason is simple: the data has not given me a reason to leave. That period represented a major cycle low, and although markets have naturally zigged and zagged since then, the larger uptrends in those positions have remained intact. 

When you look at how these cycles have played out over the last hundred-plus years, a low like that tells you a lot about where the next few years are likely to sit. I do not sell something just because I have owned it for a long time. If buyers keep stepping in at higher levels, sellers keep selling at higher levels and the trend remains healthy, it stays in the portfolio. When the data changes, I change.

Where did the idea of Mastering the Markets come from?

Mastering the Markets started from something very personal. When I turned 40, after losing Dad to suicide, I felt like doing something different and giving something back. I had already travelled the world and bought most of the things I wanted, so for my 40th I decided to take 40 people through the markets for 40 nights. 

I did not charge them. I simply asked each person to donate $250 to charity. By chance, my brother had just finished a job and had a few months before starting his next one, so he came in and helped with the technology and platform side. The feedback from that charity cohort was exceptional. People did not want it to end, and we could see the results and confidence they were getting from the education. 

My brother said, ‘These people want more. Why do we not give them more?’ We launched the first paid program at the beginning of the following year and it sold out within 72 hours. We immediately had people messaging saying they had missed out and did not want to wait another year. We opened another cohort and that sold out as well. 

At that point I realised there were only so many nights in a week, so the business had to become bigger than just me. I started bringing in other educators I respected, and that is how it evolved from a small charity project into Mastering the Markets.

What do people tend to misunderstand about becoming a trader?

People often treat trading differently from every other profession. They think they can do a short course and quickly become a professional trader. Yet if someone goes to university for four years, they graduate knowing they are still a beginner. If they do a trade or apprenticeship, they spend years learning and then keep learning on the job. 

Markets are no different. Becoming consistently good takes time, repetition, mistakes and experience. The biggest mistake is expecting to get rich within a year or two and then giving up when reality does not match that expectation. I often use the idea of thousands of hours of deliberate practice as an analogy. The exact number is not the point. The point is that mastery takes time, just like it does in any serious skill.

What are you ultimately trying to build with Mastering the Markets?

The big goal is financial agency. I do not want people simply following someone because that person has shown they can trade or invest. I want them to understand the where and the why. 

It is the old idea of giving someone a fish versus teaching them how to fish. If people understand the process, they can make decisions for themselves and then pass that knowledge on to their friends and family. That ripple effect is the most rewarding part. 

A large part of our growth has come through referrals, with roughly 70-80% coming from people who have had a strong experience and then wanted to tell someone close to them. At live events there is almost always someone who comes up and tells me how the education has changed what they can do financially or how they think about money. Those transformations are the bigger vision for me.

What advice would you give to a new investor or trader?

Just get started, and do not underestimate the power of time and compounding. You do not have to become a trader. You can simply be an investor and consistently put a portion of your income to work. 

I often use Monopoly as the analogy. Everyone understands that you do not win Monopoly by simply going around the board collecting $200. You win because you own assets that make money when it is somebody else’s turn. Yet in real life, many people rely entirely on collecting a salary and never build assets that can work for them. 

Start small if you need to. You are not supposed to be great at investing on day one. Treat it like anything else you have ever learned. It takes time, patience and discipline. Keep improving, keep learning and build something that can eventually support not only you, but the people closest to you as well.

If you could give your younger self one piece of market advice, what would it be?

Live within your means and invest as early and as often as possible. Make the small sacrifice early, even if it is only $50 a week, and let time do the heavy lifting. The earlier you start, the more opportunity you give compounding to work for you.

Go deeper with David

David has recorded a special session for Stake investors, Market Cycles Analysis: Understanding the Forces Shaping Markets, covering why multiple long-term cycles converged around 2026, what 100+ years of data says about similar periods, and how he approaches positioning sector by sector. Watch here.

Want to be featured in What I’m Trading? We’ll apply $100 of trading credit to featured customers. Click here to apply.

Mastering the Markets (MtM) is an independent third party and is not affiliated with Stake. Stake and MtM have previously collaborated on educational content, webinars and shared resources. References or links to MtM are provided for informational purposes only and should not be considered an endorsement or recommendation by Stake to join, purchase or use MtM's products or services.

Mental health support: This article may discuss experiences relating to suicide. If you or someone you know needs support, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14.

The personal views in this article do not reflect the views of Stake and do not constitute financial advice, nor a recommendation to invest in the securities listed. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance. As always, do your own research and consider seeking financial, legal and taxation advice before investing.