We began where most traders do: we were anchored by our flawed reasoning, baseless candlestick formations, and fancy indicators. We held beliefs rooted in narrative-led faith rather than raw market function.
We had a constant stream of “setups” but no consistent way to tell whether what we were doing had any real edge. Winning weeks felt like proof we were on the right track, and losing days felt like we were derailing.
Our old process lived mostly in our heads instead of in structures we could test. We did this for years before snapping out of it in 2019, but we were still backtesting overfitted indicators. It took us more than 12 months to break out of that.
What we realised in this phase:
We realised how hollow most of what we had been taught actually was. After we learnt what overfitting was, it was the final time we listened to a standard trading educator for insight. We opted for isolated study between us, grounding our work in peer-reviewed papers and market microstructure books.
How We Started
The real shift began in late 2020. After years of failure, we were backed into a corner, and we decided we would rather be profitable on purpose than by accident.
We stopped thinking “what is the market doing today?” and started asking “why should an edge exist here at all?”
The discovery of monthly seasonality in the S&P 500 and other well-established statistics piqued our curiosity to research further, from individual tick movements to sustained moves.
That pushed us to think in terms of market participants and their roles, constraints, and genuine behaviour. Instead of vague ideas like “markets trend”, we forced ourselves to acknowledge market microstructure from peer-reviewed sources and apply the same principles with the simpler tools we had available.
Our first profitable strategy was riding the positive drift the S&P 500 provides consistently month after month when favourable, and that was it. After all those years of struggling, that was it.
The entry’s basis was not the most important thing, it was the market regime and statistics that mattered. Everything clicked for us.
Our shift in perspective:
We saw that there were many real peer-reviewed statistics, studies, and write-ups on genuine market behaviour with empirical evidence that was available to the public, yet we did not consider using them until we were compelled to find a solution.
No educator cited them because they were too busy teaching us to chase baseless approaches.
The first person we ever spoke to who traded full-time with a large trading account on a regulated broker turned up live on a video call in WallStreetBets, and it rattled our minds. This made us realise how far from real capital we had been.
The real ones pop up with P&L, not rental supercars. That is not something you forget easily when struggling.
The Turning Point
From there, our work morphed into something that resembled engineering instead of chart-art. Every piece of market logic had to map to something acknowledged in research first and data second.
Every move turned into something measurable, with thresholds and realistic time windows. We successfully separated signal, risk, and deployment: when to trade, how much to risk, which markets to use for what, and how to apply objective rules to eradicate intuitive decisions in real time.
This exposed everything, which was uncomfortable at first but necessary. The ideas that survived rigorous testing and stress tests became candidates for tradable systems, and the ones that did not survive were disposed of.
We had almost given up, believing the market was close to 100% efficient, a random walk. We were humbled that much before any sustained success.
What this period taught us:
We learnt that the market does not need to be generous all the time, it only needs to be generous once while you are positioned correctly. One favourable regime, with risk kept safe, isolated and concentrated, was enough.
Turning Logic Into Tradable Rules
Having one golden system was not the finish line. It briefly felt like one, because having four-figure account swings on a weekly basis as a working-class nineteen-year-old is not normal. Our average profit per trade was 7.3R after costs with a 22% win rate.
Our worst peak-to-trough drawdown exceeded 17R before costs. Small starter capital, still a big deal. The system bet on positive drift persisting from the 2010s and 2020s rebound where seasonality supported it.
After reality hit and I spoke with practitioners, it felt like the start of a new role. We stopped thinking of ourselves as retail traders with some tools and started thinking of ourselves as managers of a portfolio of edges.
We briefly lost empathy and saw everyone as hopeless but in 2025 we calmed down and realised some people genuinely want to level up. Each system we have developed since then has a set of expectations and a job to do. When the performance deviated over large real-time samples, we went back to the drawing board.
We always kept each other in check, and after 2021 it was no longer a hobby. To this day, this energy remains, and it keeps both of us grounded.
What changed for us here:
We stopped pretending edges were permanent. We knew edges decay as the market changes, so we defined thresholds in advance.
Reproducible equity curve simulations had shown us that each strategy has its own path and that risk should be isolated.
Markets are an averaging machine. It's all numbers, statistics, and the laws that come with it. It permanently changed how we look at systems and risk.
From Single Systems To A Portfolio Of Edges
Today, our journey is still an ongoing loop: new ideas, market logic, tests to validate, system design, optimisation, review, and deployment.
We still care about strategy design, but only as a starting point for strategy design that must survive rigorous translation into rules and data. No intuition is used in real time. Strategy building relies heavily on deductive reasoning, not inductive generalisations.
Over time, this removed hindsight with a custom collection of structured, testable systems that are unique to us and reflect how we believe markets actually work.
The work is never finished, but the path is now clear and repeatable.