From Losses to $1.2 Million

Of all the success stories I’ve seen with the formula, Adam’s is my favourite.

Not because his numbers are the biggest. Because of where he started.

Who is Adam?

A relaxed Aussie with a free spirit. No fancy education. No technical or engineering background — which is unusual in algorithmic trading, where half the room has a physics degree.

He learned EasyLanguage coding from scratch, alongside his day job.

His day job was firefighter.

He found the formula in 2018, when he was a failing trader cycling through approaches. Since then he’s gone from a $50k account to $1.2M.

And with the first money he made using the formula, he bought a jet ski. I like that about him almost as much as the equity curves.

What did his trading look like before?

In his own words, “a dog’s breakfast.”

His first stock purchase was an Australian pharmaceutical penny stock called Probiotec — a $500 position. Then came a tip from a friend about a broke mining company pivoting into medical marijuana, and he fell head over heels for the narrative.

Battery revolution. Lithium in the outback. Uranium. Powdered milk to China.

He knew everything about the penny stock scene except how to make money out of it.

He tried fundamentals, read pattern books, subscribed to a tip sheet. His research method was scraping online forums for tips. On a 20k AUD account he wore several 50-60% drawdowns and clawed each one back — through luck and bull market timing, not skill.

Then he realised: if he wanted to trade long-term, he couldn’t trade like this.

What changed?

He started listening to Andrew Swanscott’s Better System Trader podcast and got interested in systematic trading. He spent a long while building simple strategies in Excel with manual data entry.

That took 2-3 weeks to test one strategy on maybe one year of data.

Hold that number in your head. It’s the reason the formula matters.

He signed up to Better Trader Academy the day after Andrew mentioned it, did every course as fast as he could, and three years later was trading a USD$1.2M account.

It wasn’t smooth. Long hours and blinding hard work made up for the prerequisite skills he didn’t have.

What does his portfolio look like now?

55 breakout strategies, across all futures market sectors.

The markets: Euro Currency (EC), Australian Dollar (AD), Corn (C), Cocoa (CC), Canadian Dollar (CD), Crude Oil (CL), Cotton (CT), E-mini S&P 500 (ES), Feeder Cattle (FC), Euro Bunds (FGBL), Gold (GC), High-Grade Copper (HG), Heating Oil (HO), Japanese Yen (JY), Coffee (KC), Live Cattle (LC), Lean Hogs (LH), E-mini NASDAQ (NQ), Platinum (PL), E-mini Crude Oil (QM), RBOB Gasoline (RB), E-mini Russell 2000 (RTY), Soybeans (S), US Bonds (US), Wheat (W), E-mini Dow Jones (YM).

Split: roughly 85% swing, 15% day trading. He prefers swing.

He uses my system sizing approach with a small fixed fractional overlay to normalise the strategies. And here’s the line I appreciate most: all his strategies are “pretty stock standard straight out of the course material.” He’s not a research guy. He stayed loyal to the framework.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

How does he build new strategies now?

His criteria have narrowed to one thing: finding strategies uncorrelated to the rest of the portfolio, because those are the only ones he needs. Harder when you already trade 55, but not impossible.

He starts by identifying what would logically fit — a new symbol, sector, session, interval or exit. Then he runs what he calls “fishing expeditions”: Step 1 tests interval, session, fitness function. Step 2 takes that information into POIs, filters and exits.

Some of his named strategies: Crude Boy (day trading), Golden Boy (day trading on a longer session, his star player in the Feb/March 2020 Covid crash), Yentastic (swing, long session, consistently profitable for years with virtually no drawdown), and ES Glider (swing, long-only, dollar stop-loss and profit target — a very old strategy).

His portfolio is publicly tracked on Striker’s website under the name Mothership, at 1 contract per strategy.

What about the psychology?

He’s blunt: trading psychology is easily the hardest part, and he hasn’t mastered it.

His firefighting work exposed him to harrowing experiences that taxed him mentally. While those were at their peak, trading was an escape rather than a burden. Now, at peace with them, he uses the same techniques he learned dealing with PTSD to regulate his trading psychology.

Meditation and mindfulness lead the pack. Breathing exercises. Half his waking hours in the ocean.

And one rule that costs nothing: he checks his trading account once a day, unless there’s a reason to check again.

What would he tell a beginner?

Think micros and minis. They’re widely available now, which makes a first portfolio genuinely attainable. Nobody was recommending micro portfolios three years ago when he started — if former students managed with full contracts, micros should be a piece of cake.

Be practical. Information overload is real, and successful trading fuses about 100 different skills. Every time you meet the newest hottest research, ask: how can I practically apply this to my personal trading? If it’s above your skill level or irrelevant, move on.

The road is littered with rabbit holes.

Start with the easier symbols. Gold and Crude day trading. A Soybeans swing strategy. A NASDAQ strategy on micro — NQ is a widowmaker at the start of your journey. Maybe a Japanese Yen swing strategy.

All of them have micros. Get those working, then go exotic.