Last night my phone buzzed: one of my systems had finished its day while I slept — checked the market, judged there was nothing worth doing, and reported it, honestly, to nobody awake. Eleven years ago I stood in a room full of sticky notes at Lean Startup Machine, surrounded by energized people, learning that most ideas deserve to die quickly. That weekend planted a seed: I wanted, someday, a product of my own that succeeded. It took me this long to apply the lesson to my own code.
Where I'm building from
I'm building this from Argentina, and that's not a footnote. The never-ending battle with dollars and inflation shapes you in the toughest way possible. Other people learn about volatility from textbooks; here it's waiting at the supermarket. You grow up doing risk management before you know the words for it. I used to think that was a disadvantage for someone who wanted to build in global markets. I now think it was the training.
Why this, why mine
I've been working for others my whole life. Every job got my full effort, responsibility, commitment, enthusiasm — all of it, always. At some point the question became unavoidable: what if I gave all of that to something of my own?
I discovered web3 and trading a long time ago. Most of my career was spent building systems for other people, and one day the two facts collided into a kind of epiphany: the things traders do manually, I could at least try to automate. I know how to build systems. Markets are systems that pay you for being right and charge you for being wrong. The overlap was sitting there my whole career, waiting.
What finally made it viable was the shift in AI tools — that changed everything for the good. A single person can now run what used to take a team: the research, the infrastructure, the monitoring, the honest bookkeeping. But the harder unlock wasn't technical. It took a lot of internal work to decide, and to be confident, that I could do this. Nobody talks about that part. The hardest system I've had to debug is still my own conviction.
Why in public
There are logical reasons. Documenting forces honesty — a claim with a number attached can't quietly rot. This space is poisoned by fake gurus selling win rates, and the antidote is showing losses in full. Published rules are harder to secretly bypass than private ones.
But my real reason is simpler: building in public forces me to show up. I have a graveyard of abandoned projects — twenty-five of them, I counted — and most didn't die because they were bad. They died because nobody was watching, including me. An audience, even a small one, even a hypothetical one, is a commitment device. This blog is me making it harder for future-me to quietly walk away.
On luck
A former boss once told me something that grew roots in how I think: there is no such thing as luck — what people call luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity. This whole project is that sentence, operationalized. The preparation is fifteen years of production systems, a decade of failed trading bots, and months of evidence gates. The opportunity is this exact moment in tooling, when one person can finally run the whole machine. I'm not hoping to get lucky. I'm preparing, on purpose, in public, and positioning myself where opportunities pass.
What success looks like
It's the hardest question, and my answer isn't a number. I want peace of mind. I want to keep working hard — because I genuinely love building things — but this time I want the passion to be what drives the work, not the invoice. A new chapter: developing software, creating a side hustle that pretends to be my retirement, and enjoying all of it along the way.
The systems will report every trade, fees included, losses included. The strategies that fail will get public burials with honest epitaphs. And if this works, there will be a record showing exactly how — not a story told afterwards, but a log written as it happened.
The wave is out there. You don't command it. You prepare, you position yourself, and you respect it. 🌊