First I tried to become a trader
I paid for the education. Options, properly taught. Then I paper traded, because putting real money down before you can do it on paper is how people lose it.
What I found was not that trading is impossible. It is that it is a job. Hours in front of charts. Fundamental data on companies I had no particular reason to have an opinion about. Reading a market I had already read twice. And at the end of all of it, sitting there at the moment of the trade, still hesitating. Yes or no.
I have a business to run. The honest conclusion was not that I was bad at this. It was that doing it properly takes time I do not have, and doing it improperly is just an expensive way to be wrong.
So I did what a careful person does
I looked for a system that already worked, and I checked it. Seventeen years of verified track record, optimized for swing trading, targeting a fraction of a percent a day. I asked every intelligent question I could think of. I connected my own brokerage account, so I could see my money and reach it at any time. That felt like control.
I started with €20,000, because you start small. It went well. Over the following months I added to it, and by the time I was comfortable I had more than €115,000 in that account. Nothing about that was reckless. It was evidence-led, and the evidence was good.
Then, in February 2022, the first Russian missile hit Ukrainian soil. The open positions had not reached their targets, so they did not close. They went deeply red instead.
I paid €35,000 to understand one thing: the entire time, my capital had carried a 100% risk of loss. Not because the software was a fraud, and not because it malfunctioned. Because of where the money sat. A seventeen-year track record became irrelevant in a single morning, and across the community using that system the losses ran to roughly €1.6 million.
I decided I would never touch an automated trading system again.
Then someone showed me the part I had missed
A year later I met the man who is now my business partner, our lead trader and AI developer, and my closest friend. When he said he worked in trading I nearly ended the conversation. One habit stopped me: hear a concept out before dismissing it.
What he described was not another system. It was funded accounts. A proprietary trading firm puts up the capital, sets the risk rules, and the trading happens on their balance sheet rather than yours. Only a handful of those firms can be relied on to actually pay out, and fewer still permit automated AI trading. There is a reason for that: it is genuinely hard to do inside someone else's rulebook.
But the implication was immediate, and it was the question I had never asked. If your capital is not in the account, it cannot be the thing that is lost.
One handshake, then three years
We shook hands on building the fairest trading business we could, and then spent three years building before we sold anything, without knowing whether we would get there.
We have kept rebuilding it since, which is unusual for a reason worth stating plainly: most of this industry sells you one bot, and when that bot stops working a few weeks or months later, the company has already been paid.
So look at who is risking whose money. That single question separates almost everything in this industry, and it is the question this company was built to answer.