History

2025 — The Professional Turn

The shift really began late in 2024, when it became clear that I needed a system that used market movement instead of trying to predict direction. That carried into early 2025, but the first few months were still dominated by adrenaline: too much 0DTE, too much screen-watching, and too many MES side trades. Things often worked, but nothing felt stable or repeatable. Reading Steven Bavaria’s The Income Factory turned that realization into a framework. The idea of building a machine — steady inputs, steady outputs, and no need to out-guess the market — clicked. Slowly, the focus shifted from excitement to structure. By mid-year the entire approach changed. I moved to one structured 7-DTE SPX condor per day, with 50% profit targets and 20-delta risk management treated as hard rules. Rolls (like the clean 6-DTE → 13-DTE put roll) became mechanical decisions rather than emotional ones. The TLT 14-DTE ladder added diversification, MES became a tactical tool instead of a hobby, and the overall book stayed near delta-neutral. Detailed logging tied everything together. 2025 is the year the trading stopped being reactive and became a system — disciplined, consistent, and genuinely professional

2024 — First Year With Real Money

2024 was the first year I traded with actual capital. Everything before this was paper trading, theory, and scattered experimentation. Moving to real money changed the mindset immediately — every decision suddenly mattered. By sheer luck, the year produced roughly a 4× return, far beyond anything reasonable or repeatable. It wasn’t the result of a system or an edge; it was a combination of a strong market, oversized bets, and the kind of risk you only take when you’re new. The outcome proved that money could be made, but it also highlighted how fragile that approach was. The real lesson of 2024 wasn’t the profit — it was the realization that a sustainable strategy couldn’t rely on luck, direction-calling, or adrenaline. That insight set the stage for 2025, when the focus shifted from guessing to building a disciplined, consistent process.

2023 — Learning the Mechanics

2023 was all about learning how to trade, not trying to make money. This was the year of opening the options account, opening the futures account, and discovering the real mechanics behind trading rather than just watching charts. It was the first exposure to things like pattern day trading rules, how trades actually settle, what margin requirements mean in practice, and how to place different types of orders — market, limit, stop-loss, OCO brackets, and all the variations. Everything was done in paper accounts, experimenting freely without real consequences. This wasn’t about building strategies yet. It was about understanding the machinery: how contracts behave, how positions move with price, how brokers calculate risk, and how quickly things can go wrong without rules. 2023 was the foundation year — all mechanics, no profits, but essential for everything that came afterward.