My Origin Story

So how did I get here? The quick answer is compound interest; the far lengthier version goes as follows:

I had just finished my master's degree in aeronautical engineering and secured my first job outside of academia when I was asked whether I knew what investing was all about. My answer at the time was a disinterested 'no', but after a convincing discussion with a friend, I decided to take a deeper look for myself. What started off as a few pointers and helpful blogs led to me picking up a calculator, varying return rates and investment periods, and then watching numbers exponentially balloon. It's ironic that even with a mathematical background in engineering, one does not appreciate the true magic of exponential growth until they see it. I was hooked.

This started off a chain reaction as I consumed investing, personal finance, and financial independence content at an increasing rate in the following weeks. A few months later, I discovered the concept of trading and profiting off short-term moves in the market—a new worldview was born. I was trading in and out of local stocks on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, thinking, 'Surely this can't be that hard...' I could not have been more wrong. It was too late to look back; the itch had started, and the puzzle of the market had presented itself.

Fast forward a few more months, and I was knee-deep in CFDs (Contracts For Difference - a financial derivative that tracks the price of an underlying asset which traders use to capitalize on price movements), with the only item on the menu being the money being bled from my account. Thankfully, I was fortunate enough to pull the plug on how I was 'trading'—if you could call it trading at all—and emptied my account before I did something stupid. I was done, at least that's what I thought...

A few more months went by, and I was back. Had I changed? No. Was my trading still problematic? Very much so. But I could not give up; the beast had to be tamed. As the years went by, this cycle repeated itself many times—a test of my sanity, definitely, but it was a conquest of perseverance that I was not going to concede. Each iteration came with its own challenges, but there was light emerging from the darkness. I was not improving my actual trading, but I was improving how I viewed trading as a whole and what was required to make it work. I had arrived at a critical inflection point. I started taking things a little more seriously regarding how I traded, how I recorded my progress, and how I looked at the markets. But that was just the first of many, many steps that were required.

After many more on-and-off bouts of trading interest and subsequent denial, I always circled back. It was a journey of system hopping, too many ideas while being too lazy to backtest, and a constant stream of online content trying to convince me that they had the answer. On top of all of that, given I had a full-time job as a software engineer, I was stuck trading daily charts, and that infuriated me. Don't get me wrong—there are plenty of traders out there who swear by it and extract money from the markets regularly, but that is not for me (I'll get into why in a future post). Having forced myself to comply resulted in nothing but frustration, impatience, and a poor mental view of what I was trying to do. Something had to change. I had to find my trading edge—the niche where I belonged and the trading style that fit me.

After some consideration, I decided I needed some help and stepped into the unknown by reaching out to a trading coach. I could not have made a better decision. Through some work and discussions of prior experiences, we decided to focus my trading on smaller, more intense, and dedicated sessions. I would trade the smaller timeframes during live markets and after my working hours (I live in South Africa, which means that the end of my working day coincides with the middle few hours of the US markets). This is when I enter market mode, and this is where we are today—the beginning of the next step in my journey. The journey to find where I fit in the trading world and the quest to find my trading edge. This blog serves to be the accountability of the next chapter in my story—a site with the hopes that others like myself will find similarities, see the difficulties along the way, and gain some motivation to continue down their own path. So stick around for the ride.

~Alessandro