Introduction

Let me start by introducing myself. I'm 52 (I can't understand how that happened - I still feel 30 something!) and I live in Oxford, England with my wife and three children (20, 18 and 9). My background was in academia: I studied Physics at Oxford and did a doctorate in Theoretical Atomic Physics as well as a few years post-doctoral research. However, after a while the funding ran out and I started to look at the financial markets as naively, I was thinking that if I could "crack" them then I could continue to fund my research. Obviously that didn't happen but I got really interested in the markets and combined it with my programming skills (C++, Easy Language & Metatrader) I set up as a free-lancer doing programming and research for traders. This was a good 20 years ago and I've been doing it ever since in one form or another. When my programming work started to run out a few years ago I took some contracting work at Barclays Capital (a large UK city firm) which paid well but was horrendous in terms of work/life balance. After that I teamed up with someone here in Oxford who was developing trading strategies for a large fund. This partnership worked really well and we've been licensing out strategies to a large fund (one of the top five in the world) for getting on for ten years now with at best over $800 mio allocated to our strategies. However, sadly this relationship with the fund is now coming to an end and I'm starting to think about new opportunities. All this time I have continued to work with traders offering them programming and research services and I always enjoy getting to know my clients and learning how they approach the fascinating subject of trading.

During all this time I've dabbled on and off with trading for my own account though in the last few years I've started to take it more seriously and I'm now starting to move towards trading for a living. I also invest on a crowd funding platform where I make a steady 7%+ per year. As this is working well and is consistent I've invested quite heavily in this.

One other aspect that I'm very interested in is the psychological aspect of trading. I am a fully qualified hypnotherapist and I see a small number of clients at my home for both trading (and non-trading) issues.

So what's the point of this blog? Well, it's where I can write thoughts on trading, post tips and trick for Metatrader and Tradestation, upload some Mt4 and EasyLanguage code, write broker reviews and generally post stuff that might be of interest to traders. I'm also planning on having guest authors so if you'd like to write something then please let me know. Let's see how it evolves!