It wasn’t a complete disaster. There were periods of good results, where it felt like I had ‘cracked it’. But it never lasted. Some months I lost tens of thousands of dollars. After six months I had made precisely nothing.

Worse, my failure had created a huge hole of shame and frustration I couldn’t seem to fill.

By then, I had become completely obsessed with trading. The idea of quitting was unimaginable. I began studying for an MBA in finance, so I could understand how the markets actually worked. One day, I was in a corporate finance class when it hit me:

When I traded, I thought I was following the methods of the smartest, most successful traders around. But I had really been following the loudest traders.

As my eyes opened to how the markets really worked, it became obvious that truly successful traders are on an entirely different level.

During my studies I learned the same financial analysis strategies that hedge fund managers and institutions use to evaluate high stakes deals and investments. I learned the mathematical models of hypothesis testing, that analysts use to validate financial claims and ideas.

Under these models, the trading methods I had been using fell apart. In most cases, I couldn’t find enough data to even build a model, or any evidence that someone else had. It was nothing but spreadsheets full of winning trades, and faceless success stories.

And yet, there ARE enormous flows of money in the stock market. Take a look at the daily trading values of the NASDAQ, and you’ll find anywhere between 100 to over 200 BILLION dollars of trading activity, EVERY day. If ferrari-driving internet gurus aren’t behind this flow of money, who is?

Well, this probably won’t surprise you.

The most successful traders in the market are almost all professionals. They work for enormous hedge funds and elite financial institutions, and take home pay checks of hundreds of thousands of dollars (plus bonuses).

It’s only logical that these traders are the best of the best. Who else could be trusted to manage millions of dollars in corporate assets and client portfolios?

Now imagine knowing exactly what THESE traders are doing…

Forget about ‘millionaire’ stock tips from some online guru.

Imagine knowing the exact stocks that elite, institutional traders are ACTIVELY staking millions of dollars on… or AGAINST…

What would you do with that information?

23 year-old me knew EXACTLY what I would do with it.

So I paid a financial institution access to their trading activity (legally), so I could see what the most successful traders were doing. There were BILLIONS of rows of data, so I wrote algorithms that would interpret it. I started modelling strategies using this data. I ran hundreds of models on different strategies, looking for any that stood up to institutional standards of analysis that the professionals were using. I even taught myself how to code, so I could create my own software that automated most of my work.

After several months, I had a prototype of my very own trading system. 

Underneath each chart within the software I created was a visual representation of the flow of professional money. I would trade alongside this flow of money, with a handful the best-performing strategies from my testing.