Meet the Playboy ‘Playmate of the Year’ Who Now Makes Up to $600 a Day Trading Stocks

February 1, 2016

Playboy’s 2014 Playmate of the Year is a day trader and an aspiring doctor who is also penning a book on finance for women.

Kennedy Summers, 28, is both beauty and brains as proven by her rather atypical direction in career choices. Summers, who first appeared in Playboy as Miss December 2013, holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, a master’s in health administration and was more than halfway through medical school before she was chosen as Playboy’s 2014 Playmate of the Year.

After graduating from Mary Baldwin College, an all-female liberal-arts college in Staunton, Virginia, Summers enrolled in medical school on the Caribbean island of Curaçao and was on the path to pursuing a career as a plastic surgeon. Summers, who was born in Berlin, Germany, and raised in Hampton, Virginia, described her medical school experience to Nextshark:

“It’s pretty fun and a lot of studying. When you’re there all your friends are studying too. It’s not that bad. It becomes a social thing, a study group. I learned a lot; I did all the classroom stuff. I got a couple clinical rotations.”

She began modeling at 14 and traveled extensively for her career to places in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. After retiring at the age of 24, she sought stability and chose to pursue a path in medicine.

Partway through and as a last huzzah, she decided to do a final shoot for Playboy. She recalled:

“One last job and then finish school and have that job just as something cool that I did. It sounded really fun. Just for the heck of it I did, and it went a little further than I thought. I won Playmate of the Year and Playboy asked me to move to Los Angeles and so I did.

“It’s like a once-in-a-lifetime thing. My school will wait.”

Earning the title of Playmate of the Year entailed a one-year lease on a Mini Cooper and a check for $100,000 before taxes. While taking time off from school to re-establish herself in the modeling industry, Summers also found a passion for day trading.

In April of last year, Summers was invited to speak at financial website Equities.com’s Small Cap Stars Spring Conference in New York in June. In preparation for the event, Summers was given free training in day trading for three months through an online program with Long Island-based Cyber Trading University. She told Business Insider:

“I love trading. I can wake up and make sure I can make money and still pay my rent.”

She was a fast learner and quickly found trading to be fun and exciting. However, Summers recalled to Business Insider how terrifying her first day of training was and how she thought to herself:

“I don’t know what any of these words mean?”

On whether trading is a lot like gambling, Summers acknowledged that the comparison gets made quite often. She explained to Nextshark:

“It could be if you don’t know how to read the tape; I do tape readings. So, it’s a little more predictable because you can see where the numbers are going to go before they actually get there. It’s like a second head start, but there’s risk with everything.”

Tape reading is an investing technique used by traders to analyze the price and volume of a specific stock by examining the size of stock orders and order speed. Aside from identifying trends in trading behavior, Summers explains that she prefers to trade active stocks because of their volume and volatility.

Since she began last year, her routine and preference has remained the same. Summers said:

“That’s definitely the way I prefer to do it — volume and volatility. The more it moves, the more money you can make.

“I don’t do long-term investing — I just do the top movers of the day.”

According to Business Insider, Summers said she makes around $600 on a good day but can lose up to $1,300 on a bad day. The Playboy Playmate explained that she is motivated to work even harder on the tougher days.

Summer’s daily routine involves waking up at 5 a.m. PT and trading at home, usually in her pajamas. Though she revealed that a big part of her income still comes from modeling, Summers told Business Insider of her trading hobby:

“It’s a good supplement to earn some extra money.”

Waking up early to trade leaves Summers time later in the day to do modeling jobs and work on her finance book for women. She believes young people will find the book useful when navigating the financial responsibilities of the adult world. Summers explained to Nextshark:

“I feel like growing up my grandparents were really big into finances and stock, and they taught me a lot so I feel like it’s something a grandparent would buy their kid. Schools don’t teach you practical life skills. You learning science and history is good, but how about balancing a checkbook, budget, building credit? You really need someone to explain to you in a simple way when you’re young.”

Summers has finished a couple of chapters of the book so far and explains that her writing will be targeted towards women. She recognizes the shifting gender roles in society and hopes to prepare young working women with the tools necessary to succeed in life. Summers noted:

“It’s important too because before it was always men doing the finances and even when my grandparents were teaching me, it was more my grandfather’s thing. It’s just like women coming up in the workplace; times are changing and they haven’t had the same skills that guys get. They don’t get exposed to it as much.”

As for the future, Summer, who is currently dating Jazz basketball player Jeffree Withey, plans to finish her book and wrap up medical school in the next couple of years to pursue a career in psychiatry.

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