Self-made millionaires are a rare commodity.
Plenty of men and women succeed in business after having studied economics, the stock market, or finance in college.
But then there are the folks who did it all themselves - who earned every penny of their 
impressive fortunes from scratch with little more than a stubborn disposition and a tiny supply of cash.
Here's a look at five self-made millionaires and how they transformed an idea, a talent, and a small pile of cash into millions...
Five Self-Made Millionaires
Self-Made Millionaire No. 1: Tim Grittani. Four years ago, young Tim Grittani started dipping into the stock market with his $1,500 life savings. The 25-year-old managed to turn that initial $1,500 into more than $1 million today. Grittani admits his trading strategy was a risky one, having invested primarily in penny stocks instead of larger, more established companies like Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) and General Motors Co. (NYSE: GM). Grittani took advantage of low stock prices of less than $1 to help him grow his fortune.
While penny stocks are speculative as a result of being thinly traded, Grittani profited because of the inefficient market. Grittani spent his early college years playing and winning poker games - experiences that undoubtedly helped him hone his wagering skills and "all-in" mentality.
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Self-Made Millionaire No. 2: Nick D'Aloisio. Nick D'Aloisio is a self-taught programmer who started out his education on the subject with a copy of "C for Dummies" and how-to videos on the Internet. Once he became proficient with programming, D'Aloisio launched his first app when he was only 12 years old. From there, he developed a new app every time school let out for the summer.
At only 15 years of age, D'Aloisio developed an app called Trimit that condenses lengthy articles into short summaries of 1,000, 500, or 140 characters. A Hong Kong billionaire saw the app's potential and gave Nick $300,000 in venture capital to perfect it. The re-worked app went on to be called Summly, which Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) paid $30 million for.
Self-Made Millionaire No. 3: Tim Sykes. This young self-taught stock investor turned his Bar Mitzvah gift money of $12,415 into $1.65 million in just four years trading penny stocks while in college. By his 21st birthday, Sykes was already worth $1.5 million.
Today, the 29-year-old runs his own website, TimothySykes.com, where he shares his information with other millionaire hopefuls. While still trading, Sykes spends much of his time teaching others his refined strategy of trading penny stocks, which has helped him reach nearly $4 million in assets since he first started.
Self-Made Millionaire No. 4: Gareth Soloway. Gareth Soloway has been trading stocks ever since high school. He spent as much time as he could studying charts and markets. In 2007, Soloway and fellow trader Nicholas Santiago started InTheMoneyStocks.com with only $500. They devised an investing strategy that helped turn their modest funds into massive profits. The strategy is known as the proprietary PPT Strategy, which stands for Price, Pattern, and Time.
Within a month of going live with their business, they became profitable. A few years after launching InTheMoneyStocks.com, the duo was generating more than $1 million in profits annually. Today, the 33-year-old stock market investor has managed to go from near-broke in college to president and CFO of his own multimillion-dollar enterprise.
Self-Made Millionaire No. 5: Jordan Maron. Jordan Maron started out his lucrative career online - on YouTube, in fact. He goes by the name "Captain Sparklez." Maron launched his Captain Sparklez YouTube channel when he was just 18 years old. His original YouTube channel, ProsDontTalkSh**, launched even earlier.
Maron started out posting videos pertaining to Call of Duty games. But things didn't take off until he launched the CaptainSparklez channel, where he became known for his Minecraft play videos and song parodies. He is one of the most profitable stars of YouTube, with millions of subscribers, billions of views, and a worth of $8.2 million.
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