The unfiltered journey of a Gen Z investor.
I'm AzureLain — a 23-year-old Gen Z investor with one goal: financial freedom. My path to get there hasn't been clean or textbook. It's been messy, expensive, and honestly more educational than anything a classroom could ever teach.
I started where most cautious investors do — dividend stocks. Safe, steady, boring. Then ambition pulled me toward growth stocks, and from there into the deep end of penny stocks and OTC markets. I took every loss that comes with that territory and kept going.
Crypto was the next chapter — and for a moment, it looked like the shortcut I'd been chasing. Deep in a bull run, I watched my account cross $1,000,000 for the first time, nearly overnight. That feeling is hard to describe. Then, just as fast as it came, it was gone. The market took it back without warning, and I walked away down $40,000 from where I started. That kind of swing doesn't just hurt your portfolio — it rewires how you think about money, risk, and what's actually real. The seven-figure mark has been the target ever since. 2024 was my reset year: stepped back, saved, and rebuilt from the ground up.
Then came YieldMax on margin. Looked like a smart income play on paper. The leverage had other plans. Got shafted — another lesson added to the list.
As of June 2026, I'm back in the OTC markets — and honestly, call it fate. A string of events tied together by the kind of coincidence that makes you believe this was always the path.
A short tangent: back in my early days, I ran a YouTube channel. Posted OTC videos to an audience of practically nobody — but I've always believed that one view can change your life. Audience size is irrelevant. One guy stumbled across my content. He never invested at the time, but somehow we became online friends — bonded over OTC stocks, then crypto, then whatever came next. Years of ventures together, just two people who found each other through a random video on the internet.
We lost money together — OTC, crypto, all of it. But if I end up at the highest point of my financial life, then every loss before it was required to get me there. You can't separate the outcome from the path that built it.
After the crypto losses, we both went quiet. 2024 came and went without much between us. Into 2025, I was picking myself back up — after the YieldMax margin blowup I moved into options, which went well, but progress was slow. Still grinding, still searching for the next real move. Then June comes, and the DM lands: "Hey — you got me into stocks, so I'm putting you on something. I know you don't do OTC anymore, but research $TXTM. The fundamentals are there. Just research it."
And the rest is history. Full port $TXTM — and if you've been following along, you already know how that went.