I didn't start out trying to build software. I started out trying to survive as a trader.
Three decades ago I sat down in front of a screen with real money and no safety net, trying to work out what actually moved price. Everyone around me was studying candles, patterns, indicators — the visible surface of the market. It took me years to realise I was asking the wrong question. Price isn't the thing that matters. Price is the last thing that happens, after thousands of traders have already changed their minds about what comes next.
In December 1999, Futures and Options World ran a feature on me titled "Beyond Belief." At the time it was about a trending-day call rate better than 8 out of 10. Looking back now, the title feels like it was waiting for me to catch up to it — because everything I've built since has been about exactly that: what traders believe, and how that belief moves through a market before price ever confirms it.
In 1999, I named what I was seeing the Market Maker Method — Accumulation, Manipulation, Distribution.
"I realised that the way in which traders' belief structures changed over time and price could be encapsulated in an algorithm."
Five years into trading my own account, it had done well enough that I could stop needing a job. I moved to Spain and kept trading — but I also started teaching, and I did it in a way almost nobody else in this industry is willing to do: live, with real money, in front of a room. No simulated accounts. No "here's what would have happened." Real positions, real risk, real screens, on the day, with people watching. I did that for ten years. If what I was teaching didn't work, everyone in that room would have known it immediately — including me. During those same years I wrote "How the Market Makers Extract Millions of Dollars a Day" — the same framework taught on paper. It's since picked up more than 560 reviews on Amazon, averaging 4.3 stars.
That's where the real education happened, on both sides of the room. Watching hundreds of serious traders try to apply what I knew taught me more about why people get stuck than any amount of solo screen time ever could. It's rarely a lack of effort or discipline. It's that almost every tool built for retail traders is built around price, when price was never the real signal.
PAT — the Professional Activity Tracker — is the tool I wished existed the entire time I was trading and teaching. It doesn't show you more indicators. It shows you belief: what's actually building beneath price, before the candle confirms it. The belief bar, PAT's signature chart, has no candles at all — because candles were never the point.
I get asked that a lot, and it's usually asked about people who deserve to be asked it. So here's my honest answer. I did trade it myself, for decades. Twelve, fourteen hours a day at screens, for years on end. It worked — but it also cost me. Real health problems, in my legs, from that many hours sitting in front of a monitor day after day. I see other traders heading down the same road right now, and I recognise exactly where it leads.
I'm 67. I've already done the version of this where you sacrifice your body for the account balance. What I love now is watching someone else finally see what I spent decades learning to see, and knowing they'll get there without paying the same physical price I did.
I still trade live when it matters most — sitting beside someone I'm teaching, showing them exactly how a setup plays out with real money on the line. I just don't need to be at a screen every single day anymore to prove any of this still works.