I’m Nathan Elms. I was there for the SOES Bandits — the original day traders, back when an online broker was a novelty. The tech boom, I made a fortune. The tech crash, I gave most of it back. I’d read A Random Walk Down Wall Street too — twice — and was sure there was a way around it anyway.
Since then I’ve started seven businesses, across financial services, property development, and commercial construction. Two worked. Three were fine. Two were a waste of everybody’s time, mine included. So I know what a good idea and a bad one both feel like from the inside — and I’d rather hand you the scoreboard than the highlight reel.
The whole time, markets stayed the hobby — nights and weekends, the way other people do crosswords or yell at a football game. But I did one thing differently: I coded and tested every idea instead of just believing it. Hundreds of systems. I’d have bet they’d print.
Alas.
Here’s what years of it actually bought me: one edge. One. Thing. Works. Yeah — I was disappointed too. But it’s real, it’s the only thing I’ll stake my own money on, and it’s the thing I trade.
And to be clear — I’m not saying nobody else ever found something that works. Plenty of sharp people have. I just try to test the ideas that reach me — or at least hold them up to an honest ruler — 257 indicators, 67 gurus, 160 market-timing signals, 161 famous systems, funds and option trades so far — and I report what held up, win or lose. Then I show exactly how I trade the best of those ideas myself — the test that came before the trade, and the ones that flunked. No fund I’m pumping, no kickbacks, nothing I’m paid to promote — I charge for the work itself, and that’s the whole business.
When I’m not nerding on markets, I’m on a church’s pastoral staff — which is, ironically, what I went to school for. I’m also a cancer survivor, which is most of why “don’t blow up the years you have left” isn’t an abstraction to me.