Start Here

I have a full-time job, a family, a mortgage, and a trading account I look at before work and again after the house goes quiet. This site is where I share the journey: my trades, my thoughts on the market, my faith, and what it has actually taken to get to where I am. I'm writing it for the people going through what I went through.

Trading looks easy from the outside. Social media is full of traders posting screenshots of massive profits, the cars, the big houses. Very few of them talk about the process, or what it takes to get there. That's what this site is about.

So, up front: I've lost more money trading than most people who write about trading will ever admit to. That's not why this site exists. But it's part of the story, and I'm not going to leave it out.

How it started

In 2004 I started university in South Africa and did what my parents' financial advisor told me to do. I put money into an annuity every month and didn't think about it.

Fourteen years later, in 2018, we started the process of emigrating to Canada, and I sat down to look at that account properly for the first time. It was my only investment apart from our house. Adjusted for inflation, it had gone backwards.

I was mortified. I remember thinking: this is not the way. I am never blindly handing money to someone again. If I'm going to invest, I'm going to learn to do it myself.

Finding gold. Literally.

That search led me to a platform selling physical gold in small denominations I could actually afford, and through it, to crypto. By mid-2019 I was buying Bitcoin, teaching myself technical analysis, and following a subscription service's trades. By the end of that year our house was sold, we were living with my in-laws waiting on Canadian visas, and crypto took off. I was up substantially and convinced I knew exactly what I was doing.

Then the pre-COVID crash took almost all of it back.

I'd started playing with a margin account by then, and I came within a hair of being liquidated. I had to sell just to stay alive. Two weeks later the market ripped higher and I'd missed it. So I chased. In and out, in and out, bleeding capital on every emotional decision. The roller-coaster was horrible.

We landed in Canada in June 2020. The market came roaring back and my account with it, and by that fall we were up enough that I used some of the profits to settle us in this new country, including the down payment on a house. I told myself my analysis was getting good.

Looking back, it was luck. It pays to be on the right side of the market.

The line I still can't take back

By the fall of 2021 my account had grown to six figures. I told a friend there'd be one more leg up, and then I'd sell everything, because a bear market was coming.

The bear market came. The leg up didn't.

I watched all of it come down and decided not to sell, out of fear. The market always comes back, I said.

That was years ago. That account is four figures today. I still haven't sold.

I'm telling you that because every other trading site you've ever visited would have quietly left it out.

Trying everything except the thing that works

In 2023 I tried prop firms. I passed a couple of evaluations, got paid out a few hundred dollars, and the whole experiment cost more than it made.

In 2024 I opened a stock brokerage account and did what most people do: followed a few guys on X, subscribed to their services, traded their ideas. Months of frustration. No real results.

I liked trading. I thought I was good because I could read a chart. Nothing worked, and I was demoralized. I know now exactly why. I had no strategy, no plan, no risk management, and no idea who I was as a trader. I was gambling with a better vocabulary.

When it finally clicked

At the end of 2024 I stopped and committed to actually studying. Books, not tweets. I was never much of a reader, but the more I read, the more doors opened and the more the lights came on. It wasn't the technical analysis or the indicators or the market knowledge that had let me down. It was not having a process, and not knowing myself.

2025 was the year the understanding arrived, but the results didn't. I was in boom and bust: good gains, then given back through overtrading or taking on too much risk.

The real breakthrough came at the start of 2026, after a few books on trading mindset, when it finally landed. My biggest stumbling block was me.

Once I started treating my own head as the thing to manage, taking the emotion out, looking at everything objectively, and holding the process above the outcome, trading got simpler. I built my own strategy, with rules I can repeat and a process that's mine. I'm not dependent on anyone's picks anymore. And for the first time, I'm consistently profitable.

That's a recent thing. I say it carefully, and I publish my monthly results on this site so you don't have to take my word for it.

Where faith comes in

Figuring myself out as a trader has been the most humbling thing I've done. One of the things it taught me is how dangerous and all-consuming this pursuit can be. How easily it becomes the first thing you think about in the morning and the last thing at night. How easily a red day decides whether you're any good to your family that evening.

My faith in Jesus Christ is what keeps that in its place. I am not my own. My life isn't my own, and neither is my account. I'm a steward of it, not the owner, and that changes how I size a position, how I handle a loss, and what I'm willing to chase.

You'll see that woven through everything I write here. Not as a sermon, but because it's the actual framework I trade inside.

What this site is

Every Saturday morning, before the day starts, I write The Saturday Review: where I think the market stands, what I did in my own account that week, including the trades that didn't work, and what the week taught me. Once a month I publish a scorecard with my real returns. In between, I break down individual trades, the losers especially, and write about my mistakes with the numbers still attached.

I'm not the best trader you'll find online. I'm a guy with a full-time job and a family. A guy who paid a lot of "school fees", learned slowly, and is now doing this properly, part-time, with the goal of doing it full-time one day.

If that's where you are too, I think you'll find something useful here.

I don't know where this goes. Right now it feels like I'm being called to share the journey, so that's what I'm doing.

[Subscribe to The Saturday Review →]