We wanted to find talented traders, find investors who understood the value of diversification, and connect the two.

It turned out to be a surprisingly good business because traders and investors didn’t speak the same language. Not literally. They spoke the same native language, but they described the same world in completely different ways. Most traders couldn’t explain their edge in a way investors understood, and most investors had no idea how to evaluate trading performance or risk.

So we became translators.

We found traders. Mostly discretionary traders. Many had impressive track records, often longer than three years. They managed relatively small amounts of capital, but their performance was excellent.

Before introducing outside investors, we allocated our own capital to them for about six months.

The results stayed strong. We thought we had found a gold mine that everyone else had overlooked. So we started raising capital. Within the first week, €500,000 landed in one trader’s account. Performance remained stable, so more money followed. Soon the account was managing over €1 million. In one case, it reached €3 million within a few months.

Then came a 5% drawdown. Five percent had never seemed particularly dramatic. But 5% of €3 million was €150,000.

The traders who had handled small drawdowns for years suddenly experienced them very differently. Many felt they had to recover the losses immediately. They increased position sizes. And the spiral began.

We thought we understood the problem. The capital had simply grown too quickly. So we tried again with another trader.

The same story.

We came up with another explanation. Tried again.

The same story.

I’m not going to repeat every case because by now you already know how they ended.

But there was one exception. One strategy kept working year after year. More capital didn’t seem to change it. It was the one case that didn’t fit the pattern.

And for a long time, I was looking in the wrong place for the reason why.

The People I Trusted the Most

Back then, I thought I knew what a professional trader looked like.

Discretionary traders were incredibly confident. I honestly don’t remember meeting one who wasn’t. They always seemed to know what was happening, what the market would do next, how central bank decisions would affect prices, why something had just happened and what would happen after that.

Investors loved that confidence. So did I.

We were looking for leaders. People who seemed to know the future and could navigate it with certainty.

Then I met systematic traders. They were confident too, but in a completely different way. When I asked where the market was heading, they often answered with uncertainty.

• “It depends.”

• “There are several possible outcomes.”

• “We’ll see what happens.”

At the time, that sounded weak. They didn’t sound like the traders I had learned to trust. And they didn’t look like them either.

Twenty Screens

The discretionary trading setups looked exactly as I expected them to. Some traders had desks that looked like NASA mission control. Screens everywhere. I once met a trader who had more than twenty monitors.

He looked exactly like my idea of a professional trader. But he had also forgotten to place stop-loss orders several times in the past and had nearly wiped out his account because of it. Somehow, all I noticed were the screens.

Systematic traders were almost disappointing. Most had a laptop. Some had a second monitor. That was it. Nothing looked impressive. They didn’t confidently tell me where the market was going. They didn’t have twenty screens surrounding them.

At the time, I thought they simply didn’t look like successful traders.

Yet there was still that one strategy we had allocated capital to. The one that kept working year after year. It wasn’t managed by a discretionary trader. It was fully systematic. We licensed the code and ran it without changing a single line.

A handful of examples isn’t enough to prove anything. But it completely changed the way I looked at traders.

I Was Looking for the Wrong Signals

This isn’t an article about discretionary trading versus systematic trading.

I’ve met exceptional traders in both groups, and I’ve met poor ones in both as well. That’s not the point.

The point is that I had built an image in my head of what a successful trader should look and sound like.

Confident. Certain. Always ready with an answer. Surrounded by screens. Able to predict what would happen next. The people who matched that image earned my trust much faster.

I wasn’t evaluating competence. I was evaluating appearance.

Today, I’m much more careful. Confidence can be performed. Sophisticated language can be learned. Expensive trading desks can be bought. None of those things tell you whether someone has an edge.

The traders I trust the most today rarely tell me what the market will do. They talk about probabilities. They talk about scenarios. They talk about risk.

To an inexperienced trader, that can sound like uncertainty.

To me, it sounds like preparation.

For years, I thought I was investing in the best traders. But I was often investing in the people who looked the most like my idea of a successful trader.

Those turned out to be two very different things.

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The trader I wanted to become at 25 is not the trader I’d advise a 25-year-old to become today.

It was 2016. I was a 25-year-old with a dream of becoming a full-time trader. I had no idea what that actually meant, but I wanted it more than anything.

I imagined myself sitting in front of a computer, my finger hovering over the buy button just seconds before the price exploded. I’d close the position seconds or minutes later, pocket a few hundred euros, and wait for the next opportunity.

I spoke to traders and investors every day. It was my job at a forex broker. I connected traders with investors, and I watched some of them live that dream—trading millions and enjoying what looked like a great life. I also watched their assets under management grow. Their accounts grew to €2 million.

They traded amounts of money I could only dream of.

And then…

They started losing money. At first, I thought it was just one unfortunate story. A talented trader who couldn’t handle that much capital. Being in a €200,000 drawdown must have been emotionally devastating.

Then I saw the same pattern again. First at the forex broker, then later in my previous business where we raised capital for traders.

Two million euros almost seemed like a magic number where discretionary retail traders started to struggle.

Watching them lose money was the first time I questioned the picture of success I had built in my head.

The Moment Everything Changed

A few years later, I was on a call with my business partner. It was around 10 p.m., about an hour before the markets closed. One of our traders had a great idea. We were down around 5%, and he decided he was going to make it all back before the close.

Thirty minutes before the market closed, he wasn’t far from getting there. He needed only another 17% to break even. I was watching exactly the kind of situation I had seen before. Except this time, it was our business.

And then it was over. We lost 30% of the capital in that single hour. I still remember that moment.

That was when I decided I didn’t want to work with amateurs anymore. I wanted to systematize my own trading so we would never have to deal with situations like that again.

That hour changed the direction of our business. Risk management became the foundation of everything we did. We stopped obsessing over entries, exits, and how a strategy made money. We cared about never experiencing an hour like that again.

But there was another thing happening at the same time that made me question trading even more.

The Simplicity I Was Missing

While all of this was happening, I was regularly investing money into stock index ETFs. I checked my portfolio once a month when I made a new deposit. I had no emotional attachment to it. I simply bought the same amount every month. When markets fell, I invested even more. I felt zero stress and had zero expectations.

My trading business looked completely different.

Two years into our business of allocating capital to traders, our portfolio was still down. We were constantly under stress. There were nights we couldn’t sleep. We had countless discussions with traders about following rules. It was an enormous amount of work with very little to show for it.

And then there was my ETF portfolio. Over those same two years, it was up. I barely did any work besides buying ETFs once a month. Yes, it was a bull market. I know that’s not a perfect comparison.

But the feeling stayed with me.

On one side, I had professional traders, constant work, discussions, stress, and sleepless nights. On the other, I was buying stock indexes once a month and barely thinking about them.

I knew I didn’t want trading to be that stressful.

But simply buying ETFs wasn’t the answer either. I wanted to build a business around trading. I couldn’t charge anyone for copying an index. I needed something better. Ideally, I needed to outperform the stock market while taking significantly less risk. That was the only way to create real value.

The question was how to do that without going back to the kind of trading I was trying to escape.

I Spent More Than a Decade Trying to Be Clever

I used to read trading blogs where everything sounded like rocket science. Complicated terminology. Complicated concepts. Yet I was never sure whether the people writing them were actually making money.

For years, I thought becoming a better trader meant getting better at trading. More analysis. Better entries. Better exits. More decisions.

But eventually I started moving in the opposite direction.

I spent more than a decade trying to be clever.

When I finally switched to weekly charts on U.S. stock indexes, I started making money almost immediately. That experience changed how I thought about the problem.

The biggest lesson I learned was that trading can be simple. Something as simple as buying an index, holding it while it’s rising, and selling it when it’s falling. And it made me realize something else.

The goal isn’t trading. The goal is making money. It sounds obvious, but when I talk to traders who aren’t professionals, many of them still don’t see the difference.

Money is made by owning assets while they appreciate. Constantly jumping in and out of positions creates the feeling that something important is happening. It feels exciting. It feels like real trading. Most traders optimize for that feeling.

I would optimize for making money.

What I Would Do Differently

If I were starting again today, I would start much further away from the trader I wanted to become at 25. I’d focus first on monthly and weekly charts.

High timeframes are where making money becomes much easier. You don’t need extraordinary analytical skills. You simply need to hold a good asset for weeks or months while it’s trending higher.

I’m not saying it’s the only way to trade. But I do believe it’s the easiest place to start.

Once I had something that consistently worked on monthly and weekly charts, I’d move to daily charts, and only then to H4. That is effectively what eventually worked for me.

I started making money on weekly charts on U.S. stock indexes. Only after that did I begin adding strategies on lower timeframes.

I’d also focus on keeping my drawdown below 10%. The psychological comfort alone is worth it. You can survive almost anything the market throws at you. I wouldn’t worry about maximizing performance in the beginning. Performance comes later, as you gradually add more robust strategies.

At 25, I imagined successful trading as sitting in front of a computer, waiting for the right moment to click the buy button seconds before the price exploded.

I spent more than a decade trying to become good at that game.

Today, if a 25-year-old asked me where to start, I’d tell him almost the opposite. Start with monthly and weekly charts. Make trading as simple as possible. Learn how to make money without needing constant action.

Then add complexity only when you have a reason to.

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I knew I wanted to write about trading, investing, and my own thoughts. But I also knew I didn’t know where to start. What should my first article be? How could I write it in a way that people would actually want to read until the end? Those doubts seem silly to me today, but back then they were strong enough to stop me from pursuing my dream. I even remember writing a few articles and never hitting the publish button because I didn’t like what I had written.

Instead of publishing on Substack, I wrote posts on LinkedIn. They were terrible at the beginning, but at least I kept writing and they gradually improved. Today, my best posts reach tens of thousands of readers. So I didn’t completely give up on my dream, but it wasn’t exactly the dream I had imagined.

Two months ago, I came back to Substack and finally started writing full-length articles. My goal was simple. I wanted to attract more investors, and the only way I could do that at scale was by writing about what I’m building. I also discovered that I love writing longer articles because they force me to think more deeply and pay closer attention to my own thoughts and experiences.

A few articles later, I reached my first 300 subscribers. And it made me wonder: what would my writing and my business look like today if I hadn’t postponed that decision? And how many other decisions had I postponed in exactly the same way?

I had done this before

Then I realised I had already done the same thing once before.

I’ve been trading for almost 20 years. For most of that time, I was just playing around.

Around ten years ago, I decided I wanted to become a full-time trader. And then… I postponed it. I didn’t give up at all. I simply didn’t do what was necessary to transform myself from a hobby trader into a professional one. I knew I needed proper backtests and a portfolio of multiple systems. But it all sounded like a huge amount of work with no guarantee of success. So I stayed a hobby trader who was too lazy to do it properly.

Three years ago, I came back to the promise I had made to myself. No more playing around. I was going to put my own money on the line, build a track record, raise capital, and do whatever it took to make it work.

Three years later, I’m writing this article from home. I can spend the day with my family, raise my children, and work on something I genuinely enjoy.

None of that happened because I suddenly became more talented. It happened because I finally acted on a decision I had already made years earlier.

The same story, just a different dream

I’m doing exactly the same thing with writing.

I have no idea where this Substack will take me. I only know that writing has been pulling me towards it for years. I always imagined myself sitting in a café, writing something people enjoy reading, just as I enjoyed reading the work of others. Maybe that’s enough of a reason to keep going.

I also knew that becoming a good writer would require a lot of work. I would have to learn how to articulate ideas clearly, think deeply about what I write, and put in the effort required to produce one good article after another. I was lazy to do that too—not just in trading, but in writing as well.

The impossible number

A few days ago, someone replied to one of my LinkedIn comments. I said that one day I’d like to trade $1 billion. The reply was simple. It would take many years, and it’s more than 200 times the amount I trade today. They were right.

But I could have said exactly the same thing a few years ago about trading €5 million. Back then, that goal felt just as unrealistic. Today, it doesn’t. Maybe that’s how every meaningful goal works. It feels impossible until enough time passes.

The real cost of waiting

Honestly, I don’t regret the decisions I postponed. I like my life, and I’m grateful that I eventually acted on them. I just wonder how many years we lose because we wait for the right moment instead of accepting that the beginning will probably feel uncomfortable.

Maybe the biggest cost isn’t making the wrong decision.

Maybe it’s spending years not acting on the right one.

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The problem was that we had absolutely no experience. We didn’t know who those institutions really were, how to find them, or how to approach them. We only knew that managing money for smaller investors was a good start, but it wasn’t where we wanted to stop.

My business partner thought we should use our existing network, ask for introductions and wait until we had a longer track record. It was similar to the advice we got from a large family office.

To me, that felt like waiting all over again.

We had already spent two years building a track record. I couldn’t accept the idea that we now needed to wait another year before even starting conversations with institutions.

That feeling stayed with me for several days.

Eventually I opened LinkedIn and sent a direct message to someone I had been following for a while. He was managing serious money. I had no idea whether he would reply or whether I would just sound like another random trader asking for an opportunity.

To my surprise, the reply came eight minutes later.

He asked for more information about our trading. I sent everything immediately. Shortly afterwards he replied that he had forwarded it to the relevant people.

And they actually got in touch.

Today we’re going through institutional due diligence. We’re preparing documentation, improving our internal processes, changing our execution from CFDs to futures and moving from MT5 to Interactive Brokers. We’re getting questions nobody had ever asked us before. Some of them we had never even thought about ourselves.

It’s a completely different world.

But we’re in it.

Since then we’ve started conversations with other institutions as well.

Looking back, it’s interesting how much changed because of one decision that felt uncomfortable at the time. Sending a message to someone I assumed would probably ignore it.

That experience changed the way I think about reaching out to people.

We often assume we’re not ready enough. Not experienced enough. That we need another year, another certification or another milestone before we deserve someone’s attention.

What I’ve learned is almost the opposite. You become ready by entering the game, not before it.

I once read a sentence that stayed with me:

“You’re ready six months after you start, not before.”

At the time it sounded strange.

Today I completely understand it.

We’ve now been talking to institutions for around eight months. There are still many things we don’t know. But that has never been the problem. They ask a question. We find the answer. Next time we already know it. That’s how progress actually happens.

My point is simple.

If there’s someone you’d like to work with, send the message. They might ignore you. They might say no. Or they might open a door you didn’t even know existed.

As traders, we often say we don’t predict markets.

Yet many of us predict people’s answers before we’ve even asked the question.

Maybe the opportunity you’re looking for is just one message away.

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Thank you for reading, and have a great weekend!

At that point I didn’t have a clear long-term vision. I simply wanted higher returns, faster account growth and, eventually, enough credibility to raise capital. Then I found a trader whose track record looked much better than mine. His returns were higher, his drawdowns were lower and he had been trading successfully for much longer than I had. I assumed he had already solved problems I was still trying to solve.

Looking back, joining the mentorship wasn’t the mistake. The mistake was assuming that someone else’s track record was enough evidence.

The strategy worked… until it didn’t

I started trading the strategy exactly as it was taught. It never occurred to me to backtest it first. Today that sounds obvious, but at the time I trusted the mentor far more than my own ability to evaluate the system.

The first losing trades didn’t worry me. Every strategy has drawdowns and I understood that. Whenever I asked why something didn’t work, there was always an explanation. The market conditions weren’t ideal. The setup wasn’t clean enough. With more experience I would develop a better feel for these situations.

The strange part was that the strategy was supposed to be mechanical.

Over time I noticed something else. The rules themselves started changing. The explanation was that students couldn’t trade the strategy the same way the mentor could, so the system had to evolve. That didn’t make much sense to me. If a mechanical strategy depends on discretion every time conditions become difficult, is it really mechanical?

For the first time, I started questioning the strategy instead of questioning myself.

Lake Brienzersee decision

I still remember the day I decided to stop trading it.

I was sitting by Lake Brienzersee in Switzerland. Instead of enjoying the view, I was thinking about my open positions. At some point I realised something that made me far more uncomfortable than the drawdown itself.

I didn’t actually know whether the strategy had an edge.

That afternoon I closed every position. Not because I knew the system didn’t work, but because I realised I had never verified that it did.

When I came home, I hired a programmer. At that time I couldn’t code and AI didn’t exist to help build trading software. We recreated the strategy and tested it over a long history.

When I saw the results, I didn’t believe them.

My first reaction wasn’t that the strategy had no edge. My first reaction was that I must have made a mistake. We checked everything again. Then again.

Eventually it became clear that the backtest was correct.

The strategy actually worked very well. In some periods it produced hundreds of percent of return while keeping drawdowns below 20%.

The problem was that it only worked in a specific market environment.

It performed exceptionally well during long periods of sideways markets. Those years also happened to make up most of the track record that convinced me to join the mentorship. Once markets became strongly directional, the behaviour of the strategy changed completely.

That was the first time I understood that every track record tells two stories. One is about the strategy itself. The other is about the market conditions in which that track record was built.

What changed afterwards

The biggest change wasn’t that I started backtesting.

The biggest change was that I stopped accepting claims without evidence.

I became more sceptical because I realised how easy it is to draw the wrong conclusion from incomplete information.

I deleted Twitter. I deleted Instagram. I stopped following traders who mostly shared perfect equity curves, luxury cars and extraordinary returns. Instead, I started paying attention to people who openly talked about their process. How they tested ideas. How they measured risk. How they changed their minds when the data proved them wrong.

I also stopped expecting perfection.

Before that experience I believed a good strategy should work most of the time. Today I know that every strategy has great periods, average periods and bad periods. Every single one.

The important question is no longer whether a strategy works.

The important question is when it stops working.

One lesson I still follow today

If I could go back and give my younger self one piece of advice, I wouldn’t tell him not to buy the mentorship. The experience was expensive, but it fundamentally changed the way I think.

I would simply tell him this:

Verify everything with data.

Stories can be misleading.

Data can be misleading too.

That’s why you need to understand your own data.

I still learn from other traders almost every day. The difference is that I no longer borrow conviction. I borrow ideas. Then I test them myself.

If you’ve found value in my writing, becoming a Supporter is the best way to help me continue creating it.

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Your time, energy, and attention are some of your most valuable assets.

When you focus on something that does not matter to you, you are not only wasting the present. You are also giving away part of your future.

Scrolling through Instagram is an obvious example. But the same problem can exist with content that looks educational. An article may be thoughtful and useful, yet still be a waste of your time if it does not move you toward your goals.

This post should help you decide whether my writing is worth your attention.

If it is, I’ll be happy that I can help.

If it isn’t, I’ll be equally happy that you can stop reading and spend your time on something more relevant.

Who am I writing for?

I write for myself and for an earlier version of myself.

The version who wanted to build a proper trading portfolio but had no idea where to begin.

There were endless options and very little practical guidance. Most trading content focused on one specific strategy, often without explaining whether it had any real edge or how it should fit into a broader portfolio.

Other content treated every failure as a psychological problem, even when the real issue was a lack of process, risk management, or a valid trading edge.

I learned mostly from books, blogs, podcasts, and conversations with people further ahead than me.

I gathered small pieces of information from many different sources and slowly connected them into something useful.

I was fortunate because I enjoy reading, learning, building, and testing ideas. I also do not mind looking stupid while I figure things out.

That combination allowed me to build something I genuinely enjoy.

It is still a work in progress, and it probably always will be.

Good information is a shortcut

There were many points along the way where I lacked the right information. I usually found it eventually, but it often took months or years.

Learning how to build portfolios that could survive different environments and still remain attractive to investors took me years. Later, I shared what I had learned with other traders. Some of them built profitable portfolios and started developing live track records within six months.

They still had to do the work. But they did not have to explore every dead end I had already explored. That is what good information can do. It does not remove the work. It helps you spend your time on better problems.

I have already seen that sharing my process can help individuals. Writing allows me to do the same thing at scale.

One of those individuals might be you.

Where am I today?

To know whether I can help you, you need to understand where I currently stand.

My entire history is not especially important here. It explains how I arrived at this point, but what matters more is whether I am currently heading in the same direction as you.

I build systematic portfolios of trading strategies designed to make money over the long term.

And I am building a business around them.

That includes much more than trading:

• raising capital,

• managing cash flow,

• hiring the right people,

• building scalable processes,

• improving infrastructure,

• communicating with investors,

• and making the entire operation more robust.

I currently run a portfolio of nine strategies trading gold and the Nasdaq across multiple accounts with approximately €5 million in combined capital. I am therefore not at the very beginning. But I am certainly not an elite portfolio manager running billions either.

That distinction matters.

I cannot teach you how to build a billion-euro fund because I have never done it.

I can share what it looks like to move from being a part-time discretionary trader to running a systematic trading business full-time.

I had to build it from scratch

When I started, I had a full-time job, a newborn child at home, and a goal of becoming a professional trader. I worked during the day, helped take care of our baby, and built the trading business at night when I was already exhausted. I needed it to work.

I did not have an existing fund, an institutional network, or a team of researchers behind me.

I started with €20,000 in my personal trading account, bought a few prop firm accounts, developed a portfolio, built a live track record, and gradually raised the first few million euros.

It was not easy. For a period, it took all of my free time. I deleted nearly every social network except LinkedIn, where I posted regularly because I wanted to attract investors.

While walking the dog, I listened to interviews with traders and portfolio managers. I tried to understand how they had built their businesses and what lessons I could apply to my own situation. Their stories were often very different from mine. Many had been in the industry for decades. I was only getting started. But I extracted what was useful and adapted it to where I was.

What I know, and what I don’t

I do not have decades of institutional fundraising experience. I am speaking with institutions now and learning how that world works. It is still unfamiliar territory, but I am getting better at it. So if you are trying to learn how to raise billions, I am not the right person to learn from.

But if you are trying to:

• start talking to investors,

• attract the attention of allocators,

• build a portfolio that looks investable,

• create your first live track record,

• or turn trading into a real business,

then my experience may be useful to you.

This is now my full-time job. I do not make an extraordinary amount of money. On average, I currently earn roughly what I made in my previous job. It is enough to cover my family’s expenses.

During drawdowns, I still wonder what the future will look like. If things do not develop as planned, I may eventually need to sell some assets to cover our costs. That is the reality.

I am not a trader who is permanently confident, endlessly profitable, and certain about every decision. I still have doubts. I still make mistakes. And I am still building.

What I will share

I will describe the process.

I have no interest in publishing my exact systems or handing out specific trading strategies. I do not believe that copying someone else’s system is the best way to become a trader. Many people sell that promise. But I do not think it creates independence and is true.

I want to share how I think about:

• trading,

• portfolio construction,

• risk,

• automation,

• raising capital,

• and building a trading business.

The goal is not to make you dependent on my knowledge. The goal is to help you build something on your own terms.

If you want to leave your job one day and make a living from trading, my writing may help. It may also inspire you to build something larger, more robust, and more scalable than you initially imagined. But if you are looking for an easy strategy that works every time, you are in the wrong place.

The right fit matters

Attracting the right readers is similar to attracting the right investors.

More is not always better.

What matters is alignment.

I want to write for people who are genuinely trying to build something: a portfolio, a track record, a trading business, and eventually a more independent life.

Only when there is a good fit does the relationship work.

And now you should have enough information to decide whether there is one.

If you’ve found value in my writing, becoming a Supporter is the best way to help me continue creating it.

Every article will always remain free.

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Not financially.

Mentally.

She wasn’t a large investor. She described herself as a professional trader who actively invested in other traders. Her background sounded exactly like the kind of investor we wanted. We even called the broker we were using and asked whether they could make an exception to their minimum investment requirement. It felt like a no-brainer.

Then the portfolio entered a drawdown. Nothing dramatic. Three percent.

The phone calls started.

Then came the emails.

Then legal threats.

Nothing extraordinary had happened in the portfolio. But something extraordinary had happened in our business.

I stopped focusing on trading. My business partner stopped focusing on raising capital. We spent more time managing one investor than managing the portfolio itself. It took several months before the relationship finally ended.

By then, the drawdown had reached an unbelievable…

5%.

That experience changed the way I think about fundraising forever.

Later, we had another investor.

This time, he invested more than €500,000.

Whenever open positions showed large unrealised profits, he called asking whether we should close them. And when those profits disappeared during normal market fluctuations, another call followed:

“I told you so. This is unacceptable.”

Eventually, we terminated that relationship as well.

The investor was not a bad person. But he was the wrong investor for systematic trading with 100% transparency.

That was another lesson.

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Today, I no longer believe fundraising is about convincing every investor.

I believe it is about finding the investors who will still be there when things become uncomfortable.

Some investors expect positive returns every month. Some become nervous after a small drawdown. Some simply don’t understand that trading is a business built on probabilities, not certainty. Those investors almost always leave at exactly the wrong moment. I’d rather they decide not to invest.

The investors we’re looking for think differently. They understand drawdowns. They understand probabilities. Some of them even add capital during difficult periods because they know expected future returns are often higher after a drawdown.

Those are the relationships we want to build.

That is also why we don’t write investor updates to make our portfolio look attractive.

We write them to help investors decide whether we’re the right fit.

If someone reads our update and decides not to invest, that’s perfectly fine.

I’d much rather lose an opportunity than lose my peace of mind again.

Below is an adapted version of our Q2 update that we recently shared with institutional investors.

If you’re an emerging manager, perhaps it will give you an idea of how we communicate with allocators. One of the biggest mistakes we made was accepting investors simply because they wanted to invest. Sometimes there is no easy legal way to end that relationship, and you really don’t want to spend weeks talking to lawyers instead of spending time with your family.

And if you’re an allocator yourself, consider this an open letter.

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Q2 Portfolio Update

We have now completed the first quarter of fully automated trading.

From my perspective, this has been one of the biggest milestones since launching the portfolio. Automation has freed both my time and mental capacity, allowing me to focus much more on portfolio development, research and risk management instead of execution.

Some questions that we previously answered mostly through intuition or limited historical data can now be answered with much greater confidence. We have significantly improved our stress-testing framework, developed better internal tools and gained a much clearer understanding of where the portfolio is strong and where it is still vulnerable.

Current Portfolio

The live portfolio currently consists of nine independent trading systems.

Two additional strategies are already developed but remain outside the live portfolio for approximately another six months while we collect more live data before making the final deployment decision.

As new strategies have been added, we have also adjusted the weights of existing systems to preserve the overall portfolio risk profile. Our objective has never been simply to increase the number of strategies. Instead, we continuously improve the portfolio as a whole.

One of the biggest improvements over the last quarter has been our stress-testing framework.

Today we analyse individual strategies, groups of strategies and the portfolio as a whole. This allows us to identify weaknesses that may never have appeared in the historical backtest but could become important in future market environments.

How We Analyse the Portfolio Today

Rather than treating the portfolio as one block, we divide it into several functional groups.

We currently analyse pullback strategies, mean-reversion strategies, trend-following strategies, long and short systems, Nasdaq and Gold strategies, as well as different market regimes such as risk-on and risk-off.

Each group is stress-tested independently before evaluating the behaviour of the portfolio as a whole.

The objective is no longer to understand what happened historically.

The objective is to understand what could happen if future market conditions become materially different from anything we have seen before.

Based on these stress tests, we currently target a portfolio profile of approximately 20%+ CAGR with a maximum drawdown around 20%.

Importantly, this target is no longer based on a single historical backtest. It is based on multiple stress scenarios that intentionally assume conditions significantly worse than those observed historically.

Until recently, most of our portfolio decisions were based primarily on the metrics shown in the backtest.

Today, I consider those metrics necessary—but far from sufficient.

What Changed After Stress Testing

Stress testing revealed that if our pullback strategies experience a significantly worse period than they did historically, both expected drawdown and expected CAGR deteriorate much more than we were comfortable with.

As a result, we reduced the allocation to our pullback strategies by approximately 30–40%.

That change has already been implemented in the live portfolio.

Another important finding was related to our short exposure.

Stress testing showed that our downside diversification was weaker than expected, mainly because we lacked an independent short strategy on Gold.

Addressing that immediately became one of our highest priorities.

We have since completed our first Gold short strategy, which is currently being tested on our own accounts. Assuming the live behaviour remains consistent with our expectations, it should become part of the portfolio within the next few months.

The simulations below show the expected portfolio profile after incorporating this additional strategy.

Based on our current analysis, we believe this version of the portfolio has a high probability of remaining close to our target profile of approximately 20% CAGR with a maximum drawdown around 20%, even under significantly more challenging scenarios than those observed historically.

Where We Still See Weaknesses

I still wouldn’t describe the portfolio as finished.

Probably because I no longer believe portfolios are ever truly finished.

The difference today is that we understand our remaining weaknesses much better than we did a year ago.

The main areas we continue to improve are:

• Higher intraday volatility.

• Insufficient downside protection during certain market sell-offs.

• Limited diversification across traded instruments.

Some of these weaknesses have already been partially addressed.

Reducing pullback exposure and adding mean-reversion systems has improved the portfolio’s behaviour during volatile, non-trending markets.

Our upcoming Gold short strategy should further strengthen downside diversification.

The remaining weaknesses will be addressed gradually through additional independent systems and continued improvements to our risk management framework.

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Final Thoughts

The biggest improvement over the last quarter wasn’t performance.

It was understanding the portfolio better. The better we understand where the portfolio could fail, the better prepared we are when those situations eventually occur.

Stress testing doesn’t eliminate uncertainty. It simply allows us to prepare for it more intelligently. That leads to better portfolio decisions, better risk management and, perhaps most importantly, more realistic expectations.

In my opinion, realistic expectations are one of the most valuable things we can offer our investors.

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Years ago, I thought a good backtest was enough.

If a portfolio had a smooth equity curve, acceptable drawdown and attractive returns, I considered it ready for live trading. I believed I understood the risk because I had seen what happened over the last ten or twenty years.

Today, I don’t think that anymore.

A backtest tells me what happened under one specific sequence of events. It says very little about all the different ways the future could unfold. And since I have no idea what the future will look like, I no longer build my expectations around a single historical path.

Today, a backtest is just the beginning of my research.

One Metric Guides Almost Every Decision

People often ask me which metric I care about the most.

Sharpe ratio?
Calmar?
CAGR?

The answer is much simpler.

Maximum drawdown.

Everything else comes after that.

My goal is not to build the portfolio with the highest possible return. My goal is to build a portfolio that can survive almost anything the market throws at it. If drawdown becomes too large, returns stop mattering. Investors lose confidence, capital leaves, and the entire business becomes much harder to manage.

That is why almost every decision I make starts with one simple question:

What happens to drawdown if reality turns out to be much worse than the backtest?

The Backtest Is Only the Starting Point

Every portfolio starts with a standard backtest.

The goal is simple. I want to see how individual strategies behave together and whether they create something better as a portfolio than they do individually.

Years ago, this would have been the final result.

Today, it is simply the first step.

The backtest gives me a rough idea of the portfolio, but it is nowhere near enough to decide how much capital I want to allocate or how much risk I am willing to take.

When I first started trading systematically, I used a very simple rule.

If a backtest showed an 8% drawdown, I assumed 16% was completely realistic in live trading.

If it showed 20%, I mentally prepared for 40%.

It was far from scientific, but surprisingly useful. It forced me to acknowledge that the future rarely looks as clean as historical simulations.

Today, I no longer need that approximation.

Stress Testing Begins

Once the backtest is finished, I run a series of stress tests.

My goal is not to predict the future. That is impossible.

My goal is to understand how the portfolio behaves when reality becomes much less friendly than the historical data.

Over time, I built a dashboard that summarizes the results I care about the most. Almost every metric revolves around one thing:

Drawdown. Not because I expect every stress scenario to happen. But I want to know what happens if it does.

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What If History Was Kinder Than Reality?

The first step is Monte Carlo analysis.

I reshuffle trades thousands of times and focus primarily on the 99% confidence interval. I’m not interested in the average outcome. I want to understand what happens when randomness works against me.

If the portfolio cannot survive that scenario, I reduce risk.

What If Bad Periods Become Even Worse?

Markets rarely behave randomly.

Bad periods tend to cluster together.Volatility rises. Correlations increase.

Everything suddenly feels much worse than it did in the backtest.

That is why I also run block bootstrap simulations. Instead of randomly mixing trades, I preserve losing periods and allow them to compound.

This gives me a much better idea of what happens when markets become genuinely uncomfortable.

What If Correlations Suddenly Spike?

This is one of the stress tests I care about the most.

Most portfolios look beautifully diversified when markets are calm.

The real question is what happens during panic.

When correlations spike, strategies that normally behave independently often begin moving together. Drawdowns suddenly become much larger than anyone expected.

I don’t want to know how the portfolio behaves on an average day.

I want to know what happens when everything starts going wrong at the same time.

What If The Worst Period Wasn’t Actually The Worst?

Another exercise I like is deliberately making history worse.

I take the largest drawdowns from the historical backtest and simply double their magnitude.

Nothing says the future cannot be more painful than the past.

If doubling the worst historical period completely breaks the portfolio, I know the sizing is too aggressive.

What If The Future Doesn’t Give Me The Same Winners?

Historical backtests assume every winning trade appears exactly as it did before.

Reality will not be that kind.

Sometimes the biggest winners simply never happen. So I remove part of the largest winning trades and ask a simple question:

Does the portfolio still make sense?

I also increase every losing trade by 10%, 20% or even 30%.

These scenarios are intentionally unrealistic.

The goal is not forecasting.

The goal is identifying where the portfolio becomes fragile.

What If One Strategy Stops Working?

One of my favourite stress tests is removing the edge from individual strategies.

Every strategy eventually goes through periods where it underperforms. Some may even stop working completely. I want to know which strategies the portfolio depends on the most.

One interesting discovery was my short strategy.

If it significantly underperforms, both drawdown and CAGR deteriorate much more than I would like. That immediately tells me something important.

I don’t necessarily need a better short strategy. I need more independent short strategies.

The solution is diversification, not optimisation.

What If Trading Gets More Expensive?

Finally, I test execution.

Higher slippage. Higher commissions. Worse fills.

Small execution problems accumulate over thousands of trades.

A strategy that survives those conditions gives me much more confidence than one that only works under perfect assumptions.

Stress Testing Is Really About Expectations

There are many more stress models I use, but these are the foundations.

Together they help me answer two questions:

Should I trade this portfolio at all?

And if the answer is yes:

How much risk should I allocate to it?

The biggest benefit of stress testing isn’t finding better strategies. It is setting better expectations. It allows me to communicate realistic scenarios to investors instead of showing them one beautiful backtest and hoping reality will look the same.

Final Thoughts

Years ago, I thought building a profitable trading system was the difficult part.

Today, I think the difficult part is building a portfolio that can survive situations that have never happened before. Because the future will eventually surprise all of us.

The question is not whether your backtest is good.

The question is whether your portfolio is prepared for a future that looks nothing like your backtest.

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I would love that to be true. But after years of trading and building businesses around it, I see it very differently.

Today, I think of trading as a real business in the classic sense. Trading itself is only the product. Every business needs a good product, but having one does not automatically mean you have a good business. Those are two completely different things.

A Good Product Is Only the Beginning

Most traders spend years trying to improve their edge. They test strategies, optimise entries and exits, work on psychology, study markets, and slowly build something they believe has an advantage. All of that matters. Without a profitable strategy, there is no trading business.

But something interesting happens once you finally have a product worth trading. Most people think the difficult part is over. In reality, it is only beginning.

Many traders expect investors to look at their track record and immediately become interested. That is rarely how it works. A good strategy is not enough. A good track record is not enough. Even excellent performance is often not enough.

You need something much harder to build. You need trust. And trust usually takes much longer to build than a trading strategy.

Nobody Wants to Be First

I learned this long before starting my current portfolio. In my previous business, raising capital was by far the hardest part of the entire journey.

I still remember one meeting very clearly. At the time, we were managing around €200,000. The moment I mentioned that number, the atmosphere in the room changed. We were just two guys with an idea, a vision, and very little proof.

Raising the first million was painful. We met countless people, heard many no’s, prepared endless presentations, and explained over and over again why someone should trust us with their capital.

Eventually we made it through. But that period taught me something I still believe today. The first money is usually not raised because your product is perfect. It is raised because someone starts trusting how you think, how you communicate, and how seriously you treat risk.

The First Investor Changes Something

I’m writing this article just after coming back from lunch with one of my first investors. He invested around €300,000 when I was still very early in this journey.

That investment obviously helped the business. But it also changed something inside me. Someone looked at what I was building, understood the risks, and still decided to trust me with meaningful capital.

That confidence mattered. The first investor is not just additional capital. It is proof that someone believed in you before there was much proof to believe. Looking back, I think that is one of the hardest moments in building any investment business.

Raising Capital Is Mostly About Trust

For a long time, I thought raising capital was mostly a sales process. Today, I think it is almost entirely a trust-building process.

Trust is built long before someone wires money. It is built through hundreds of small interactions over time: doing what you said you would do, being transparent when performance is weak, explaining risk honestly instead of making the opportunity look perfect, and showing how you think when markets become uncomfortable.

Structure matters as well. In my previous business, every part of the operation went through regulated brokers or financial institutions. We wanted investors to clearly understand where their money was held, how it moved, and who was responsible for each part of the process. That was intentional.

When someone gives you capital, they are not only evaluating your returns. They are asking a much bigger question: what happens when something goes wrong?

Because eventually something always goes wrong. Markets change. Drawdowns happen. Strategies stop working for periods of time. That is when trust matters most.

People Trust How You Think

A good track record opens conversations. Allocators see your performance and become interested. They agree to a meeting because the numbers deserve attention. But once the conversation starts, something interesting happens. They stop evaluating only your returns. They start evaluating you.

At the beginning, I didn’t understand that. I thought I needed to sound as professional as possible. I talked about alpha, systematic trading, diversification, portfolio construction and risk-adjusted returns. Everything I said was true, but very little of it actually built trust.

Over time I realised that people don’t trust you because you use the right terminology. They trust you when they understand how you think and why you make the decisions you make. It is easy to say that you care about risk management. Almost every trader says that. It is much more powerful to explain why.

Years ago, our company raised around €9 million and allocated that capital to traders. Some of them had outstanding track records. Some were incredibly confident. Many investors loved listening to them. But something changed once they started managing larger amounts of money.

A five percent drawdown on a small account is frustrating. A five percent drawdown on several million euros feels completely different. I watched traders who had been disciplined for years suddenly change their behaviour. They increased position sizes, overrode their own rules and tried to recover losses as quickly as possible. The strategy had not changed. The market had not changed. The psychology had.

Watching that happen changed me permanently. It made me realise that I never wanted to build a business around exciting returns followed by devastating drawdowns. I became obsessed with stability, not because stability sounds professional, but because I had seen what happened when risk stopped being the priority.

When I tell someone today that I prefer lower drawdowns, I could leave it there. Or I can tell them the story behind that decision. The second version tells people much more than my opinion. It tells them what shaped me, what I am trying to avoid, and how I make decisions when nobody is watching. That is what builds trust.

Your Story Explains Your Decisions

Looking back, I think this is something many traders underestimate. They spend years explaining what they do. Very few explain why. Why do you trade systematically? Why do you diversify? Why do you care so much about drawdown? Why do you ignore opportunities that other traders would happily take? Those answers matter much more than people realise.

Nobody can copy the experiences that shaped your thinking. Someone can copy your strategy. Someone can copy your presentation. Someone can even copy the words you use. But nobody can copy the experiences that changed your mind. Those experiences are what make your decisions believable.

When people understand where your thinking comes from, they stop seeing only a strategy. They start seeing the person behind it. And that is when trust begins to grow.

Why I Write

This newsletter is part of that trust-building process. You may not know me personally, but over time you can see how I think, how I approach risk, how I react to drawdowns, what I am trying to build and which experiences shaped my decisions. That matters, because trust is rarely built in one meeting. It is built through repeated exposure to how someone thinks.

Writing allows me to do that at scale. Instead of explaining my approach to one person over a two-hour meeting, I can share the same thinking with hundreds or eventually thousands of people. Not to sell harder, but to make my thinking visible.

That is why I started writing publicly. I want people to understand not only what I do, but why I do it. Why I care about risk. Why I prefer systematic trading. Why I think diversification matters. Why I am willing to sacrifice some upside for stability. Those things are not marketing angles. They are the result of experiences that shaped how I see trading.

The Real Business

A trading business is not only about trading. Trading is the product, but the business around it is built on trust, communication, structure, patience and consistency. Without those things, even a good product may never become a real business.

Results matter. A strong product matters. A good track record matters. But people invest when they believe that you understand what you are doing, that you can communicate honestly when things go wrong, and that you will still be there during difficult periods.

That is why I no longer think about raising capital as selling. I think about it as helping people understand how I think.

Because people do not invest only in performance. They invest when, over time, they start trusting the person behind it.

It was how to make enough money from trading for it to become a real business.

In every business activity, I try to start with the same question: why?

Why do I want to trade? What is the actual goal? What do I want this business to look like in a few years?

Those questions mattered because they would define my first years of trading. There is nothing more frustrating than realizing you have spent years moving in the wrong direction, only to end up back where you started.

At the beginning, I had a few clear goals in mind:

• I wanted to generate at least €5k per month within one year, enough to cover my living expenses.

• I wanted drawdown to stay below 10%, so I could trade prop accounts. That would give me a way to increase capital faster.

• I wanted to make at least 10% per year. That is broadly comparable to long-term equity-market returns, but with a different risk profile.

• A portfolio making around 10% per year with a 10% drawdown would offer a much better risk-adjusted profile than many alternatives available to me at the time.

• I wanted to trade CFDs because most prop firms use them.

• Our company was managing around €9M at the time, and the long-term goal was to scale to at least €100M. That meant the portfolio needed enough capacity to handle that level of capital.

• I wanted to start quickly and improve later. That is generally how I approach new projects.

• I wanted to build a track record as soon as possible, so I could raise more capital within two to five years.

Once those goals were clear, I knew the direction I needed to take.

Starting With What I Knew

At the time, I traded mostly gold and the S&P 500 (and then Nasdaq). I liked that combination because one of those markets was often trending, and I could focus on capturing momentum.

My approach was systematic, but it still involved a lot of discretion.

The first obvious step was to make it more systematic and less dependent on my day-to-day judgment.

That process was painful because I was doing everything in Excel. Backtesting roughly ten years of data could take two or three weeks. It was slow, repetitive, and honestly quite boring.

I will write about my backtesting process from the early Excel days to where it is today in a separate article. This article is about portfolio construction and how I gradually built the portfolio that mattered to me.

After a few weeks, I had my first system.

It worked on both the S&P 500 and gold. That gave me the first building block of the portfolio.

I opened a new trading account, deposited €20k, and started trading it live to build a track record.

Learning to Build Faster

This was the period when I got stuck for quite a while.

Backtesting in Excel was so slow that I decided to learn Pine Script. Within a few weeks, I could test ideas much faster. It was far from perfect, but I was moving forward, and at that stage, progress mattered more than perfection.

Then ChatGPT and other LLMs started generating useful code. At first, I still had to understand the code because it often did not work properly, and I had to fix it. But it accelerated the process dramatically.

For the first time, I had systems that I could test, understand, and execute manually.

I never missed a trade, and I felt good about the process.

I could also test small improvements, such as whether it was better to hold profitable positions longer. In Excel, that would have taken ages, and I had no desire to reopen another spreadsheet and spend days optimizing a single idea.

Those first systems are still in my portfolio today. I have not changed their core logic, and I consider them the foundation of the portfolio.

The First Portfolio

As LLMs improved, my testing became faster.

At that stage, my portfolio looked like this:

1. A long pullback system on Nasdaq

2. A long pullback system on gold using the same core rules and code

I was happy with it, but I had no proper way to stress-test the portfolio.

I simply looked at the worst historical drawdown of the two systems and decided to risk 0.5% per trade. Based on the backtests, I expected maximum drawdown to be around 10% over the previous ten years.

My thinking was simple: if future drawdown doubled, I should still survive.

That was my first live portfolio.

Today, I can combine strategies properly, test portfolio-level correlations, run stress tests, and model different weighting structures. Back then, I had none of that.

Here is what the first portfolio looked like:

Not great, not terrible.

But I was proud of it. I had built it in Excel, and it had taken me ages.

I knew I needed more systems because diversification would improve the portfolio dramatically.

Adding the Next Layer

The next system used similar logic on Nasdaq, but with a trailing stop-loss.

It also took me a long time to create, but again, I was moving forward. The portfolio looked a little better, although I still did not know how much risk each system should carry, so I kept using 0.5% risk per trade.

Here was the updated portfolio:

At this point, comparing drawdowns in Excel had become almost impossible.

I was relying more on hope than on data.

So I started building a proper portfolio tracker.

It took around two months. LLMs were still much less capable than they are today, so I had to check even basic calculations and explain why it could not simply add percentage gains together.

The first version was basic, but it was enough to let me see the portfolio more clearly. Today, the tool is much more sophisticated and can stress-test a portfolio in seconds.

At that point, I had:

1. A long pullback system on Nasdaq

2. A long pullback system on gold using the same rules

3. A long pullback system on Nasdaq with a trailing stop-loss

Building Protection for Downtrends

The next missing piece was obvious.

Most of my portfolio made money when markets moved higher. I needed something that could contribute when Nasdaq was falling and the rest of the portfolio was under pressure.

My first idea was to create a short system.

That took a long time. I think I spent another three months on it. I gave up twice.

As LLM-generated code improved, I could finally test ideas more effectively. Eventually, I built something that looked good enough to add to the portfolio.

At that point, I had more than I originally hoped for, and I was only around two years into the process. It felt great. I knew I could continue building toward the portfolio I had imagined.

Here was the portfolio with the Nasdaq short system added, still using 0.5% risk per trade:

Today, the weights and risk per trade are different. The point here is the logic, not the current allocation.

At the time, the portfolio had a Calmar ratio above 1. My original goal of around 10% per year with a 10% drawdown was starting to look possible. Or, more accurately, possible in simulation.

I had long and short trend-pullback systems, a growing track record, around €1M in trading accounts, and a strong willingness to learn.

But I was still missing something important.

Adding Systems for Choppy Markets

My portfolio still struggled in choppy markets, so I started developing mean-reversion systems.

I did not love them in isolation. They were not as exciting as trend systems, and they did not fit my natural preference for momentum. But they made sense at the portfolio level.

These systems were relatively simple to create. They entered after fast downward moves, used wide stop-losses, and targeted relatively small profits.

I built one system for very fast dips and another for slower, more extended corrections. Then I applied those ideas to Nasdaq and gold.

Here was the next version of the portfolio:

At that point, it was becoming a genuinely diversified portfolio of strategies rather than a collection of similar ideas.

The Last Missing Piece

Live trading revealed another weakness.

Sometimes the market made a huge move without giving a meaningful pullback. None of my pullback systems were activated, so I missed the move entirely.

That showed me I was missing classic trend-following systems.

Trend-following systems were much easier to build than some of the previous components. I added them to both gold and Nasdaq.

Here was the next version:

The whole process started with one basic idea that could work on both Nasdaq and gold.

The same ideas also worked on instruments such as the S&P 500 and DAX. From there, I gradually added components that were missing from the portfolio.

I traded it live while building it. Live feedback helped me understand where the portfolio was not behaving as I wanted it to.

Why I Did Not Wait for Perfection

I did not start with ten systems.

I started with one.

It was not good enough, and you can see that in my public equity curve. But I did not care. I knew I could improve the portfolio along the way.

I could have waited two or three years until I had the portfolio I wanted before launching anything.

Or I could start building a live track record immediately, which is now almost three years old.

The portfolio was not perfect then. It is still not perfect today. I'm still building it.

But it was live, and it kept improving.

If I had waited, I might still be trading only my original €20k account today. Instead, I now trade around €5M in capital.

That is the difference between waiting until something is perfect and launching when it is good enough to learn from.

I would choose the same path again.

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My daily routine was not exactly what I had imagined when I first fell in love with trading. The dream was freedom and independence. I wanted to be able to work from anywhere, make my own decisions, and not depend on anyone else. The reality was less glamorous.

I spent almost all of my free time studying charts, building and testing systems, thinking about markets, and reading every book about trading I could find. My screen time often exceeded 10 hours a day. I was constantly making decisions, monitoring positions, looking for opportunities, and questioning whether I should do something differently. I did not sleep well because I was mentally exhausted.

But I do not want this to sound like a sacrifice. I loved it. It was an obsession. Some people love football, some people love cars, and I loved trading. It brought frustration and joy at the same time, and for many years I was completely immersed in it.

Moving Towards Systematic Trading

For years, I traded in a similar way. I kept trying new things, adjusting positions, changing rules, and interfering with systems before I had given them enough time to show their real long-term potential. I was always looking for the next improvement, the next piece of knowledge, or the next insight that would make me better.

Eventually, I started moving slowly towards systematic trading. It felt like the right direction because I could see that many of my best ideas worked better when they were turned into clear rules rather than left to my judgment in the moment.

Around three years ago, I fully committed to that shift. First, I removed most discretionary decisions from my trading. Later, I moved towards full automation.

When I became more systematic, my stress level dropped significantly. My screen time went down to around four or five hours a day. That was still too much, but it was much better than before. I slept better, made fewer decisions, and my job became much simpler: execute the rules and let the systems do what they were designed to do.

But even that was not enough.

The Painful 12% Difference

I was still checking markets too often. I was still tempted to interfere. Sometimes I did not follow my own rules, especially when a system was going through a difficult period or when I believed I could see something in the market that the system could not.

Then I compared the theoretical system results with my actual live execution.

The difference was around 12% per year.

In other words, I would have made roughly 12% per year more if I had not touched any buttons and had not checked what was happening. That is a huge difference. It could easily be the difference between raising €5 million and raising €15 million.

At that point, I had to face a painful conclusion: my decision-making was not as good as I wanted to believe.

The Real Problem Was My Ego

What hurt the most was not the number itself. It was what the number meant.

I had spent almost two decades developing my trading skills. I had gone through years of frustration, mistakes, self-doubt, learning, and improvement. I thought all those years were helping me become a better trader.

The data said otherwise.

I was the part of the process making trading worse. Not drawdowns. Not a system going through a bad streak. Not the market. My own decisions were reducing the performance.

I believed I could read the market better in real time than my own algorithms could. I believed my experience gave me an advantage when things became uncomfortable. But in reality, many of those decisions were driven by fear, overconfidence, impatience, or the need to feel in control.

That belief was expensive.

And honestly, it hurt.

Automating Myself Out of Execution

So I made a decision that initially felt wrong. I automated everything in a way that made it much harder for me to override my own rules.

It improved my trading and my life more than I expected.

I am more humble than ever, but that humility came at a cost. For almost two decades, part of my identity was built around being a trader who understood markets and could make good decisions under pressure. Then an Excel table showed me that simple algorithms were making around 12% per year more than I was.

That was a brutal experience, but also a freeing one.

What I Believe Now

Today, I do not want to be the trader who knows more or feels more confident in predictions. I want to be the trader who keeps improving systems, building better portfolios, and creating processes that can survive uncertainty.

I no longer want to fall into the trap of complexity or believe that there is some magical formula that will suddenly make me better. I had to accept a harsh truth: markets are uncertain.

No matter how hard we try, we are only building mechanisms that attempt to create a small statistical advantage inside that uncertainty. We are not making markets predictable, and we never will.

I spent almost 20 years trying to become a better trader. In the end, my biggest improvement came from accepting that I was not as good as I thought.

I stopped trying to outsmart my own systems. I stopped believing every feeling deserved an action. I stopped confusing confidence with skill.

Today, I do not measure success by how often I am right. I measure it by how consistently I can follow a process that has already proven itself.

The biggest edge I ever built was not another strategy.

It was removing myself from execution.

And that lesson changed much more than my returns. It changed who I am.

I will share how I decided to go full-time, and I will not get very technical.

The background

Before I decided to go full-time, I had co-founded a business that connected traders and investors for around three years. We raised more than €9 million and handled risk management. I also worked for an FX broker in a very similar role, and I had been trading for more than 15 years, although for most of that time I would still call it hobby trading.So I knew what to expect, and I had no naive expectations.

I also had an ETF portfolio and rental properties, which gave me a buffer. That was one of the main reasons I could afford a rough start. I know this is not the case for everyone, so please consider your situation carefully before making any financial decisions.

The decision

Now, back to the decision to become a full-time trader.

I’d been thinking about it a lot. I’d discussed it with my wife for months before making the decision.

Leaving a safe job is stressful. I am not just leaving a job. I am leaving my safety and comfort zone. No matter how much I have saved, once I quit, my income depends on me alone.

In a job, I got paid every month. No matter how much I worked, what my results were (I was in sales, so pay depended on results, but I still had a fixed base), or whether the company made money, I still got paid.

Leaving a job was a serious decision that affected how I lived, how I thought, my habits, and my income. I had to plan it without emotion.

Before going full-time

If you’re thinking about becoming a full-time trader, make sure you have two things: a system that can work over the long term, and enough savings to cover your expenses even if you make no money for the first year or two. That can happen even to the best traders. Luck plays a much bigger role in your first year than most people want to admit.

Also, make sure you have trading capital and some extra cash for investments like a prop account or a first-loss account. Those can accelerate your progress significantly.

What I would do differently

Let me share how I would approach the same path again.

The first phase would be building systems that work in the long term. Once I had them, I would do the following to speed up the process:

1. Start building a track record as soon as possible, ideally from day one. Time in the market attracts more investors than strong short-term performance. Move fast, improve later.

2. Focus on making money. It sounds obvious, but I have found that many traders don’t. You have no job and no stable income, so you need results quickly. Open a prop account with a reputable firm and size risk so your maximum drawdown is up to 7%. If your portfolio is solid, you might make 15% a year or more. Within a year, you should be funded. After that, your income may match your job income. If your goal is to quit, consider leaving your job once you reach this phase. Life gets a bit easier.

3. Rebuild your savings account. At this point, your funds may have shrunk, so you need to top it back up. This is important for emotional stability. I managed this by taking profits from my personal accounts and prop firms.

4. Once I had more than I needed in my savings account, I moved extra capital back into the trading account. I also started experimenting with first-loss models to increase capital efficiency.

These steps were focused on becoming financially stable as soon as possible. That meant having income in most months, like I did at my job, and accepting that there would be periods when I was not making new highs.

The emotional reality

To be honest, drawdowns still hurt because they can mean months with no income. Even if my portfolio is robust, it still stings because trading is my only active income.

That is one good argument for keeping a job while you build trading systems. Today it is much easier, because AI helps you build systems faster. When I started, it was not like that. AI could generate code, but the quality was nowhere near what it is now. My research was slow, and I spent a lot more time on development. Before AI, I did most of my backtesting in Excel. So I had to choose between quitting my job or giving up on becoming a professional trader. I chose to quit and go all in.

Today, I can imagine having a part-time job to feel more financially and emotionally stable.

At the same time, free time matters too, so everyone has to decide what they value more. In my case, taking care of my family and spending lots of time with them is worth the emotional roller coaster.

How I funded myself

What I found most effective for funding myself.

1. Prop and funding firms are often disliked, but if you are starting with less than 200K in a trading account, it is almost impossible to make a living in Europe. To this day, prop remains my highest income source.

2. External capital, such as PAMM accounts at various brokers or a Darwinex account. These can be helpful. They may not generate much income for a long time, but they helped me build credibility and visibility. That matters because trading is only one part of the trading business. There is much more to it.

3. Trading my own account - the benefit was that I could risk more than I could on investors’ accounts and prop accounts. At the beginning, I took all profits to cover my expenses, and I did not worry as much about drawdowns. I sent money back to my trading account as I started taking profits from prop firms.

4. First-loss model: I contribute €10k and receive access to another €90k in trading capital, while covering the losses myself.. This is something I am starting to experiment with now that I have extra capital I can risk. It was not an option at the beginning. I will write more about it later, once I have more experience and something useful to share.

What I learned

My decision to become a full-time trader mostly came down to one question: would I be able to maintain financial stability?

Even today, I don’t always feel financially stable when I’m in drawdown for months, and I’m not sure that feeling ever fully goes away. Still, going full-time has taught me a lot about myself and what I truly value in life.

Even if I had to get a job again one day, these years with my family have been amazing. I’ve had time to think about my life, where I want to go, and what I want it to look like.

I consider it one of the best decisions of my life.

If I stay in drawdown for another year, that might be the point where I decide a stable job is the right path again. And I’m okay with that.

Thank you for reading about my decision-making process and the notes I found important.

If you enjoy this newsletter, I’d really appreciate it if you shared it.

I’ll keep working on my writing and do my best to show you not only what I do, but how I think. Hopefully, that gives you something useful to take, adjust, and apply in your own trading.

Have an amazing week ahead.

Cheers,
Adam

Being a full-time trader is a dream come true, but it looks very different from the original picture in my head.

The original idea, or rather the dream, was simple. I could earn a living from anywhere. No boss. No deadlines. No endless meetings, team-buildings, constant stress, or a calendar packed from morning to night.

Life would be simple, low-stress, with plenty of time for family and hobbies. That’s more or less how I imagined trading many years ago.

Anyone who actually steps into trading loses those illusions quickly. There’s no red-carpet path to easy success.

The first years are spent learning what trading really is and how to do it properly. The years after that, you start discovering what unresolved traumas, emotions, and internal blocks you still carry, and how much they hold you back. Trading has a brutal ability to pull all of that to the surface and force a decision: do you open those wounds and start healing them, or do you push them back under the rug and take the easier path of avoiding the problem?

I won’t go deep into that here because it deserves several articles on its own. I’m saying this for one reason only: if you’re seriously considering trading as a profession, you should know that trading itself is only a small part of the whole process. The transformation of your thinking can be demanding and painful. It will require serious work on your psychology. And for many people, it will likely involve a psychologist or coach to help identify deeply rooted beliefs and patterns that need to be rebuilt into something that supports you. Everyone starts from a different place, but for most people this is a multi-year project, and often an uncomfortable one.

Now back to the main point.

When I decided to go full-time, I defined a trading vision I would focus on for the next two years. Those two years passed, and it was time for reflection.

Let’s look at how I was thinking back then, with a bit of context.

I had already been involved in trading for about 16 years if I include the years before turning 18 on a demo account. I had partial successes and years of experience working for a broker, raising capital, managing risk, finding traders, and connecting them with investors. But I still wouldn’t call it full-time trading, because most of my income was independent of my own trading results.

My own trading was simply the next logical step in the business. Managing the risk of other people’s strategies is not easy, and for me it wasn’t fulfilling either. For our business that matched traders with capital, we needed a strategy with strong risk management. When you’re responsible for eight figures of client capital in EUR and have limited ways to protect it, your sleep quality suffers.

So it’s fair to say I didn’t step into full-time trading with naive expectations of what trading is.

I set a clear vision.

I wanted to build a strategy with long-term performance better than passive investing in equity indices, with clearly defined risk. Not risk defined by volatility, but by maximum drawdown. My initial goal was a max drawdown under 10%, which I later revised to 15%. I also wanted low correlation to equity indices.

The goal was to build at least a two-year live history so I could start approaching funds, family offices, and other qualified investors in a regulated environment. For these entities, I needed a minimum of two years of out-of-sample track record.

Over time, I wanted to automate the entire trading operation and build a portfolio of strategies capable of trading tens, ideally hundreds, of millions of euros, without burning out from daily decision-making.

That was the core of my vision. It also included other elements beyond trading itself.

This month, the two-year track-record condition was met, and I’m continuing with the next parts of the vision related to regulation and the business side.

Now for the two-year summary.

These two years were intense. I had to invest more time and energy than I expected at the beginning, and I found plenty of dead ends that led nowhere.

My original idea of how I would find new systems was naive. I thought I would hire a programmer, build and test a few strategies together, deploy them, and be done. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I spent months down that path and it didn’t work. I can imagine a version where it would work, but only if my budget was in the hundreds of thousands of euros and if I didn’t need results within months. I had neither of those luxuries, so I had to choose a different route.

I learned to code, at least enough to understand what was happening. Excel was my home territory, so the first strategies were built in Excel. Not ideal, but it worked.

Understanding programming languages became essential for further progress. I learned Pine Script so I could draft strategies and quickly decide whether an idea had any real chance. Testing moved to a new level. To my surprise, I couldn’t build profitable strategies quickly. But I started seeing patterns in what worked and what didn’t, and I could test those patterns relatively fast.

A major leap forward was the arrival of LLMs, which could generate code reasonably well. At first I had to fix a lot. Newer models started generating usable code without me spending hours debugging why something wasn’t behaving as expected. Honestly, I owe a big part of my progress to AI and its ability to generate solid code. Without it, I’d probably still be stuck in Excel. Nothing against Excel, but the speed of iteration with TradingView Pine Script and Python is on a different level.

The idea that I can now produce high-quality uncorrelated strategies like an assembly line has been shattered. Today I see it as systematic work where you make tiny steps every day, often without any visible progress.

And the frustration didn’t stop at research and design. It continued in live trading.

My strategies were, and still are, solid. But that didn’t mean my execution matched the quality of my models. In the beginning, I tended to interfere with the models, and it hurt results. Learning to trust something I built was difficult, and it became my biggest source of frustration. I realized a model is only as good as your ability to follow it.

If I have doubts, I have no chance of watching the model produce 10 losses in a row and calmly saying, “I just lost tens or hundreds of thousands of euros and I’m fine.” I wasn’t fine.

Every loss chipped away at my capital (and not only mine), and my mental calm was replaced by constant chart-watching and serious nerves. The stress was bigger than when we were responsible for eight figures of capital and watched drawdowns of hundreds of thousands of euros. This time it felt worse. Even writing about it now, I can feel it again, tightness in my chest and a faster heartbeat.

Those emotions were part of daily life. Every drawdown hurt. Every profitable period felt euphoric. These are the kind of emotions you associate with addictive substances, and they don’t belong in trading. But they were there. And more insecurities surfaced that I had to start working on.

When I thought I was finally where I wanted to be, I once again had to deal with my own mind instead of the markets. I couldn’t believe that after all these years, the same emotions from my early trading days would come back.

So I felt like I was back at the beginning, except now without the security of stable income and with the certainty of significant ongoing costs.

Still, after two years, I’m two years further down the road. I have a two-year track record and trading accounts in the low millions of euros.

My vision has remained almost unchanged, and I’m happy about every small step forward. I strongly hope the next two years will be less stressful than the first two.

They might be even harder. But I’m convinced I’ll be able to handle whatever trading obstacles show up.

Trading is a beautiful profession, but it’s not as simple as social media makes it look. There is no success without work. It’s a business where every euro is paid for with sweat and blood. At the same time, it’s a profession that lets you discover yourself like almost nothing else, and it gives you the chance to become your own superhero.

If I had to summarize this entire article in one sentence:

The vision has been fulfilled. From the outside it looks beautiful and simple, but it took a lot of work to get here.