Track Record
18 years, and the mistakes that taught us more than the wins.
No performance figures appear on this page. What follows is how the desk came to trade the way it does — where it started, what changed it, and the rules that came out of that. If you want to interrogate the detail, ask at the meeting and bring someone who knows how to read a journal.
How it began
The first two years were the tuition fee.
The desk began trading in 2007 with personal capital and no plan worth the name — entering positions on conviction, sizing them on optimism, and holding losers because closing one made the mistake real. It was the way most retail accounts in this country start, and it ended the way most of them do.
What changed was not a better strategy. It was starting to write every trade down: the entry, the reason for it, the exit, and what actually happened. Within a year the journal made something visible that no chart ever had.
Three cycles
A full market cycle teaches things a bull run cannot. These are the periods that shaped how the desk sizes a position today.
Learning what leverage costs
The desk entered the market close to a peak and traded straight into the global financial crisis. Leverage that felt reasonable in a rising market turned out to be the only variable that mattered in a falling one. This period cost the account heavily and produced the first written rule: decide the loss before the entry.
The long grind
Years in which nothing trended for long and the temptation was to force trades out of boredom. This is where the journal habit hardened into routine, where position sizing stopped being a guess, and where the discipline of sitting out a market that had not set up was finally learned.
Adding the second and third book
Commodities and currencies were brought in alongside equities, deliberately, so that no single market could carry the account alone. The March 2020 drawdown was the first real test of whether the framework held under speed rather than under pressure. The rules were followed; positions were cut at the levels written down beforehand rather than at the levels that felt survivable at the time.
Same method, larger book
Nothing about the framework has changed with size. The rules that governed a small account govern a larger one, because they were written to be independent of how much is at stake — which is the entire reason for writing them down in the first place.
The method, in four rules
Written down after the first crisis and unchanged since. They are not clever. They are simply kept.
The loss is decided first
Before an order is placed, the maximum acceptable loss on that position is written down. It is never widened once the trade is live, for any reason.
Size follows volatility
Position size is a function of what the instrument is doing, not of how strongly anyone feels about it. When volatility doubles, size halves.
Every trade is written down
Entry, exit, reasoning and outcome — logged, then reviewed weekly. Memory edits itself in your favour. A journal does not.
Three books, never one
Equities, commodities and currencies are watched together so that no single market's mood decides the year's outcome.
Why no numbers on this page
Any trader can publish a return figure. Almost nobody can publish one that has been independently audited, computed on a consistent basis, and shown alongside the drawdowns it took to get there.
Rather than post a number you would have no way to verify, we would rather hand you the documents that secure your position and let you check those instead. A figure you cannot audit is a claim. A registered charge is a fact.
Ask the hard questions in person.
The journal, the framework and the security documents are all open at the meeting. Bring your advocate and bring your scepticism.