Trade For A Living

I spent about three years trading full time as my only income. I won't ever do it again.

I spent about three years trading full time as my only income. I won't ever do it again.

Those years taught me something that I never would've considered beforehand.

When trading is the only thing paying your bills, every drawdown stops feeling like "part of the process" and becomes a question about whether you can cover the month.

I have two young children. The pressure that "full-time" trading puts on your decision-making is corrosive in a way that you cannot prepare for. You start needing trades to work, and a trader who needs a trade to work has already lost.

So I swallowed my pride, removed my ego and rebuilt from the ground up.

The Structure I Built Instead

These days the structure has three parts that feed each other.

My job at Darwinex pays the bills, which means no single month of trading has to.

XAQP, my systematic book, generates performance fees I don't touch for lifestyle; they compound into a long-term investment portfolio that sits completely separate from the trading.

Finally, my long-term portfolio. The thing that's actually supposed to change our lives over the next decade.

Together, my three pillars let me run the systematic book the way it is supposed to be run: patiently, selectively, without my mortgage riding on this week's P&L.

Trade For A Living vs Depend On Trading To Live

The version of me at the bottom in 2022, who had just watched a year of crypto gains disappear into virtually nothing, would not have believed this was the goal. Back then the dream was to trade for a living and answer to nobody. I understand why that dream sells.

The trouble is that 'trade for a living' becomes 'depend on trading to live', and those are two very different jobs with very different incentives.

The second one makes you worse at the first.

What I would tell anyone earlier in this than me: protect the part of your life that has nothing to do with markets, because that is the part that lets you trade well. The school runs. The evenings not spent staring at your P&L. The income that arrives every month regardless of market volatility. Those are not distractions from the serious work. They are the foundation that makes the serious work survivable.

I didn't build a trading career at the expense of a life. I built it so the two hold each other up. Eight years of scars went into learning that the hard way, and it is the part of the whole journey I would least want to do over.