In 1986 I was running a business in the motor trade, buying company cars through Shearson Lehman in the City of London. I’d visit their trading floor regularly and something about it captivated me completely. The pace, the discipline, the idea that you could read a market and act on it with a calm, structured approach rather than gut instinct.
One trader took an interest and gave me a basic education and a reading list. No YouTube, no on-demand courses. Just books. I read everything I could find. In 1989 I attended a three-day course in Porlock, Somerset with market expert Peter Hall, who filled in the gaps the books had left. Shortly after, I opened my first account with Redmayne Bentley in Henley-on-Thames and started trading options using simple trend-following strategies. I was also one of IG Index’s earliest customers, and I still trade with them today, nearly 40 years later.
The foundations I built back then (trend following, price action, structured thinking) are the same foundations that underpin everything at Markets Mastered today. Not the latest indicator. Not a strategy that appeared on YouTube six months ago. The real thing, tested over a very long time.
Between 1990 and 1994, I blew seven trading accounts.
Not recklessly. Each one was carefully saved up to around £5,000 from my regular income. And each one was gone within months. Built up, then destroyed. Then I’d save up and do it again. Seven times.
I’m telling you this because most people in this industry won’t. They’ll show you the winning trades and the profitable months. They’ll talk about systems and strategies without ever mentioning the years it took to get there, or the money lost along the way. That version of events doesn’t help you.
Losing £5,000 when you’ve saved it carefully, on a real family budget, hurts in a way that’s difficult to describe. If you’ve ever been there, or you’re worried about going there, I understand it better than most. And that understanding is built into every decision we make about what Markets Mastered sends you and how we send it.
Around 1995, after the seventh account, I made a decision. Something had to change drastically or I was finished as a trader.
I stripped everything back. Removed every complicated chart and indicator I’d been relying on. Went back to basics. Pure price action, clean trend following, and a ruthless focus on removing emotion from every decision. I started setting orders and stop losses in advance. No sitting watching charts. No impulsive decisions made in the heat of the moment. The system either worked or it didn’t, and I’d find out calmly at the end of the session.
That shift, from complicated to simple, from reactive to structured, is the philosophy behind everything we do at Markets Mastered. Less complexity. Clearer signals. Fewer instruments watched more carefully. You don’t need more charts. You need better information on the right instruments, and the discipline to act on it without second-guessing yourself. That’s what we’re here to give you.
For fifteen years I traded on my own and quietly taught a handful of friends along the way. When I realised that people found my systems genuinely straightforward to use, and profitable, I started Markets Mastered in 2008. My first product was called Trade With A Day Job, sold on eBay. It traded the S&P 500 for a few hours each evening in UK hours. Built entirely around people who couldn’t watch markets during the working day.
That wasn’t accidental. It was personal. I was mostly self-taught, with very little guidance when I needed it most. The road to consistent, profitable trading was long, expensive and lonelier than it needed to be.
The ordinary working person does not have money to burn. Most of my subscribers are on real family budgets with real financial responsibilities. Losing capital hurts them in a way it doesn’t hurt someone with deep pockets. The whole point of Markets Mastered is to compress that learning curve. To get you to profitable, structured trading in months rather than the years it took me, without the expensive detours I had to take to get there.
The day starts at Markets Mastered Towers at around 5:30am. I’m at my desk checking 60 charts for price breakout opportunities before most people are awake. Between 7am and 8am the European session opens, and that’s regularly where the cleanest breakouts form.
After that I’m writing the morning briefings, running my own four trading strategies across the morning and evening sessions, designing and testing new ideas, and keeping in contact with trading friends at banks and brokers in London, New York and Frankfurt.
This is what I do every day. Markets Mastered is not a course I put together over a weekend. It’s a working trading operation, and everything we share with subscribers comes directly from what I’m doing myself, on the same instruments, at the same time, with real money. When you receive a trend alert or a morning briefing, the intelligence is real because the trading is real.