I'm an electrical engineer with a graduate degree in computer science. I started as an entry-level systems developer, moved through systems engineering and project management, spent part of my career at Bell Labs, and finished in senior leadership running product development at global tech companies. Then I retired, traveled for a while, got bored, and went looking for the thing I'd always actually liked: problems and puzzles.
So I started reading, watching the business channels, and trading stocks and options. And I made an assumption I'm still slightly embarrassed by — options are just maths, and maths is my home turf, so how hard can this be.
Hard, it turns out. I lost a great deal of money before I really understood what was happening to me.
That shook my confidence enough that I did the sensible-sounding thing: I decided to learn from people who were good at it. The newsletter services. The options rooms. The names you already know, the ones with the track records and the testimonials. I subscribed and I copied their trades, and every one of them put me in a deeper hole than I was in before. Somewhere in there I also handed money to someone else to trade on my behalf, because he clearly knew more than I did. He didn't.
What actually broke wasn't the account. I had spent a career believing two things about myself: that I was good with technical problems, and that I was good at reading people. Both got shaken at the same time. I stopped talking about it. I pulled back from friends, because how do you explain this to anyone.
Stocks and options were going to take years to dig out of, so I moved to futures. There was a man on YouTube calling NQ trades live and it looked like a lot of money every single day. I learned everything I could about index and gold futures. And within a year I found the real problem, and it wasn't the market:
I was so afraid of losing that I took every small profit the moment it appeared, and let every loser run to the bitter end. I knew it was wrong while I was doing it. I did it anyway.
That is a psychology problem, and I couldn't fix it by trying harder. So I decided to take myself out of the loop and automate it. Building my own would take a long time, so — you can probably see this coming — I bought the gurus' algorithms instead. Most of them failed. Back to square one, with fees.
For the last two years I've been building my own. Badly at first: I swung for the fences the way I'd been taught, and I blew up account after account. Somewhere around fifty of them. Nobody who sold me a system ever mentioned blowing one up. I don't know whether they did. I only know I never saw it.
What changed was going back to what I actually know how to do. Be structured. Be disciplined. Don't move on until you understand the root cause and can show you've improved it. And stop optimizing for profit, because profit was never what was ending my accounts — drawdown was.
Since then I've passed six evaluations, including two $500K accounts with $30,000 profit targets, by focusing on almost nothing except drawdown.
Why I'm selling this at all
You might reasonably ask, given I don't need to. Two reasons, and I'll give you both rather than just the flattering one.
The first is that I have a soft heart and I know precisely what the other end of this feels like — sitting on your own with a number on a screen you can't say out loud to anybody. If I can keep someone out of that, I'd like to.
The second is that a side income doesn't hurt. I'd rather tell you that plainly than pretend I'm doing this purely out of goodwill, because you have been sold that line before and it wasn't true then either.
Which is why the site looks the way it does
Every backtest here is one continuous run with no optimization, losing months included. The forward test shows how these strategies are performing right now against their own history — and as I write this, most of them are having a bad month, which you can see in the forward test. I'll tell you which engine to start with and which ones not to run together, and I'll tell you to spend a month on a simulation account before you risk anything.
None of that is a marketing position. It's just what I wish somebody had done for me, about fifty accounts and a great deal of money ago.
If you want to ask me something, ask me. My email and phone number are on the contact page — you get me, not a support queue.