Most first-time authors aren’t in their 80s. Then again, most stories don’t take 50 years to write.
Khosrow Motalaby has lived many lives: engineer-in-training, car dealership executive, real estate investor, blackjack hustler, nonprofit founder, and now, author of The High/Low, a genre-defying memoir that reads less like a financial manual and more like a high-stakes psychological drama.
At 81, Motalaby isn’t just telling his story—he’s exposing it.
“This book could’ve died with me,” he says. “But I knew it couldn’t. It’s not just about money. It’s about what money does to you.”
The High/Low chronicles Motalaby’s obsession with the stock market—an obsession that spans decades, fortunes, and identities. He arrived in the United States in 1966 from Iran to pursue an engineering degree, but quickly realized the dream wasn’t his own. “I was doing it because my parents wanted me to,” he recalls. “But I couldn’t picture myself behind a desk solving problems for other people.”
What he did see—what fascinated him from day one—was the movement of numbers. The Wall Street Journal, stock tickers, volume shifts. He didn’t just read them. He felt them. “If you know how to read volume,” he explains, “you can see the elephants jumping into the pool before anyone else hears the splash.”
His background in mathematics gave him an edge. But it wasn’t enough.
Over the years, Motalaby poured time and money into developing a personal trading system—what would eventually become the “High/Low” method outlined in his book. According to him, it’s a visual, momentum-based strategy that focuses on clean entry and exit signals using real-time chart data. He claims it has delivered up to 82.5% success in his simulations.
But what makes The High/Low unique isn’t the system. It’s the story around it.
This is not another finance book written by a sanitized Wall Street professional. It’s written by a man who lost millions—and more than once. A man who got high off his own trades, spiraled into compulsive gambling, and had to confront the uncomfortable truth: “I wasn’t a trader. I was a gambler who knew how to trade.”
And still, he kept going.
The book lays bare the emotional rollercoaster of trading with a level of candor rarely seen in the genre. It’s part memoir, part cautionary tale, and part confessional. Each chapter pulls the reader deeper into Motalaby’s mind—his ambition, his desperation, his hope. The market isn’t just a place to make money. It’s a character in the story. A seductive, abusive partner he can’t quit.
“You think you’re in control,” he writes. “But you’re not. The market lets you win—until it decides not to.”
What sets the book apart is that Motalaby never pretends to be invincible. In fact, his breakthrough came when he stopped pretending altogether. After a particularly devastating loss—one that saw his trading account plunge from $1.2 million to $100,000 in a matter of days—he walked away. Not from the market, but from the illusion of control.
He started over. Paper traded. Wrote everything down. Focused on discipline and patience. Two things, he says, most traders never master. “You don’t lose because the system’s bad,” he explains. “You lose because you couldn’t wait.”
The book doesn’t sell a dream. It sells the truth. And that’s what makes it powerful.
As for the writing itself, Motalaby’s voice is unpolished but unfiltered. He doesn’t hide behind jargon or over-intellectualize the trading process. Instead, he talks like a man who’s lived every single chapter he’s written. The reader feels every high, every crash, every self-inflicted wound.
It’s raw. Honest. And deeply human.
There’s already buzz that The High/Low has the makings of a documentary—possibly even a feature. “Have you seen those Netflix trading documentaries?” his interviewer asks. “This story fits right in—maybe even better.”
Motalaby agrees. Not out of arrogance, but out of conviction. He didn’t write the book to impress Wall Street. He wrote it to reach the people like him—those straddling the line between strategy and self-destruction. Those who see trading not just as a career or a side hustle, but as a test of their worth.
“I had to publish it,” he says. “If this helps even one person recognize they’re gambling, not trading—it’s worth it.”
So what’s next?
He still trades. One trade per day, maximum. Only five stocks. Only if the system tells him to. “I wake up at six,” he says. “I wait. I listen. And if it’s not there, I don’t touch it.”
There’s no bravado. No “crushing it” stories. Just discipline. And experience. Hard-earned and painfully honest.
In an industry flooded with get-rich-quick schemes and flashy gurus, Khosrow Motalaby offers something radically different: a cautionary voice from someone who’s been to the top, lost it all, and still shows up—eyes open, system ready, humility intact.
The High/Low isn’t just a book about trading.
It’s a book about what happens when trading becomes your identity—and how to reclaim yourself before it’s too late.
