Twenty five years.
One question.

I was very good at this,
right up until I wasn't.

I started trading in 2000. For anyone old enough to remember, those years were not kind to buy and hold. The Nasdaq fell 78%. The S&P 500 fell 49%. Three straight down years, the first run like that since 1939.

So I traded instead. The rule was simple and I met it every session: short one or two new names a day. The way down worked. I made a lot of money, and I decided that meant I was very good at this.

Then the market bottomed and I did not.

I stayed short. Month after month, into a market that had stopped going down. Every trade came back at me. Three years of gains came off the account in a fraction of that time, and then the account came off too. I was wrecked financially. The psychological part took longer to fix than the money did.

What actually destroyed me was not a bad read. It was the quota. A rule that says trade every day does not care whether there is a trade available. It just wants to be met.

He handed me charts
with the price stripped out.

I stopped trading and went looking for someone who actually knew what they were doing. I found him in Copenhagen, where I was living. He agreed to meet, but he set the terms first. He would decide whether to help me, and it rested on one thing: whether I could let go of what I already did.

Given that I had just lost everything doing it my way, that should have been an easy yes. It was not.

He gave me charts to memorise. Not candlestick charts. Volume profiling charts. No open, no close, no wicks, no patterns. Just where volume had traded and how much of it sat at each level. For the first weeks I could not read them at all. I was hunting for a shape and there was no shape to find.

Then it came, and I could not unsee it.

Levels where large volume traded are levels where real participants hold real cost basis. People defend their cost basis. When they stop defending it, that tells you something. Three years of shorting stocks every day, and I had never once asked where the volume was.

Then I paper traded for six months. No income, straight after losing my account, taking trades that could not pay me. It is the most expensive thing I have ever bought and the only reason I still have a career. Trying to get it back fast was the instinct that blew me up in the first place.

I could have gone full time.
I turned it down.

I went live again in the middle of 2003 and traded the ES for the rest of that year, with one rule I never broke: take profit at the high volume nodes. Most traders treat those levels as places to push through. I treated them as places to get paid. It went well enough that trading full time was genuinely on the table.

I said no, and moved up to the four hour chart instead. I wanted to finish my studies and find out what a real job was like.

That is the best decision I have made in this business. There are only so many four hour bars in a week. You cannot overtrade a chart that updates six times a day. The timeframe was doing the discipline for me at a point in my life when I could not be trusted to do it myself. My results got better, not worse.

It also bought me everything else. I finished my studies. I held jobs, started businesses, and ended up teaching economics and stock market knowledge for a living, which is where the writing on this site comes from. Explaining a regime to a room of seventeen year olds every week is very good training for explaining one to a subscriber.

Same bones.
Better instruments.

What has not changed since Copenhagen is the question. Where did volume actually trade, and who is holding cost basis there. Everything added since is a better way of answering it.

The volume principle came from Copenhagen. Anchored VWAP did not. It was built into a system called MIDAS by a physicist, Paul Levine, somewhere around 1995, years before I placed my first trade, and it sat mostly ignored until Brian Shannon started writing about it around 2017. Market Profile was live at the Chicago Board of Trade in 1984. Both of the ideas my career rests on were finished before I started. I found them late, like almost everybody else.

Which tells you the edge was never the information. The edge is that almost nobody looks at it, because it does not arrive in a format that flatters you.

Today that framework runs as the Institutional Volume Terminal: anchored VWAP with deviation bands, delta weighted volume profile, cumulative volume delta, a volatility compression layer, and a macro regime overlay built on the Cantillon Effect, which is the Austrian observation that new money does not reach everyone at once. It reaches bonds, then equities, then risk. Position accordingly.

Things you can check
without paying me.

A trading site asking for money should be checkable. These are open.

What this is not.

It is not financial advice, and it is not a signal service. The terminal identifies structure and regime. It does not decide anything for you, and there is no version of this where you copy a level and skip the risk decision.

The record is real and it is also short. A win rate on a small sample is close to meaningless, which is why the brief now reports expectancy in R and prints the sample size next to every percentage. I would rather show you a thin number honestly than a thick one that flatters me.

And I have been wrong loudly. Staying short through 2003 cost me an account. Losers get published here with the same weight as winners, because a track record that only remembers the good ones is not a record.