In 2015 I lost about 60% of a $4,000 account in nine days. Not on one catastrophic trade, which at least would have made a decent story. I lost it in eleven small pieces, each one a reasonable-looking decision made while I was still annoyed about the previous one.
I kept the journal from that stretch. I still reread it once a year. The entries are not stupid, and that is the uncomfortable part. Every single one contains a defensible reason.
This site exists because of what that journal eventually taught me. The distance between traders who are still here in five years and traders who are not has very little to do with market knowledge. Both groups can explain a moving average. One group has a process that survives contact with its own emotions.
The idea underneath everything here
Trading is a game of skill played against uncertainty. Not a battlefield, and not a slot machine.
That distinction sounds like branding until you watch what it does to behavior. People who treat markets as combat end up exhausted, defensive, and convinced that someone is out to get them personally. People who treat markets as a lottery donate steadily and call it bad luck. People who treat markets as a game of skill do the thing that actually works: they study the rules, size their bets to survive variance, fold often, and accept that a correct decision can produce a bad result.
Chess players understand this. Poker players understand it in their bones. Traders are somehow the last group to hear about it.
What you will and won’t find
| You will find | You will not find |
|---|---|
| Position sizing and expectancy math worked through in full | Signals, calls, or price targets |
| Case studies of blowups, including my own | Screenshots of winning trades |
| Probability explained slowly, with the arithmetic visible | Guaranteed win rates or backtested miracles |
| Arguments for doing nothing on most days | Urgency, countdowns, or fear of missing out |
If you are looking for the strategy that finally works, this will be a frustrating website. There isn’t one. There is a set of habits that make you hard to eliminate, and there is a way of thinking about odds that makes those habits feel less like punishment.
Who writes this
Miles Renner. I grew up outside Cincinnati and taught statistics at a public high school for six years, which is where I first watched intelligent people refuse to believe true things about probability. Teenagers will argue with a coin flip. So will adults with leverage.
I paid part of my way through college at $1/$2 poker tables, badly at first. Poker gave me the two ideas I later brought to currency markets: your edge is small and slow, and the fastest way to lose it is to play more hands when you are behind. It took me another three years and one very educational account balance to learn that the same rule applies at 3 a.m. on a EUR/USD chart.
I trade my own capital. That’s the whole disclosure.
I am not licensed, I don’t manage anyone else’s money, I don’t run a signal service, and I don’t have a Discord where the real information lives. I have no interest in any of that. Writing forces me to be precise about things I would otherwise let stay fuzzy, which is a selfish reason to run a website, but an honest one.
I live in Asheville, North Carolina. When I’m not writing I’m usually losing at chess to people much younger than me, which keeps the central metaphor of this site uncomfortably fresh.
How the work gets made
Every article starts from a specific question I couldn’t answer cleanly. If I can’t show the mechanics, I don’t publish the piece. Where a claim rests on numbers, the numbers appear in the article so you can check them rather than trust me.
I correct errors rather than quietly deleting them. Articles that have been revised carry an update date. Historical case studies are built from public records, and sources are listed at the bottom.
The necessary part
Nothing here is investment advice. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell anything. Trading currencies and crypto assets involves substantial risk, and most retail accounts lose money. That statistic is not a marketing hook to overcome. It is the base rate you are working against, and the honest goal of this site is to help you understand why it exists rather than to promise you an exemption from it.
You should be 18 or older to be here.
If something on this site is wrong, tell me. That’s the fastest way I learn anything.