I'm Chad.

Spent over ten years in the trade. Sparky by training, toolbelt by default. The work was steady and the money was alright, but by year five I'd already clocked I didn't want to be pulling cable at fifty.

Spent a lot of those years looking for the next thing. Property, small business, every side hustle mates pitched at the pub. Nothing stuck. I was just another tradie trying to figure out an exit.

Didn't touch crypto until 2024. Late to the party, didn't care — I was looking for the exit, not a cycle top. Put in a modest stake, got a few trades right in the run, and watched the account climb to around $70k.

First real money I'd ever made outside a pay slip. Felt like I'd finally found the thing.

Never took a dollar off the table. Every green candle was confirmation, every red one was a buy-the-dip. I told myself I was being patient. I wasn't — I was being greedy and calling it conviction.

The lot round-tripped back to where I started. Wasn't one clean blowup either, just a slow bleed of averaging down and holding through drawdowns I should have cut. The money stung. The realisation that every rule I broke was a rule I'd written down stung more.

Read everything I could find on systematic approaches — Carver, Meagher, the usual. Didn't agree with every chapter, but one idea landed: my edge wasn't better intuition. My edge was removing me from decisions.

Started writing rules in a notebook. Then turned them into code. Then turned the code into a bot that could run while I slept.

First bot took three weeks to ship. Python on a Hetzner VPS, pushing orders to Hyperliquid, logging to Grafana. Small size, boring edge, no drama.

Fourteen months on I'm running seven bots with a real risk layer. Current results are what they are — some weeks green, some red — and I publish case studies rather than rolling performance claims, because performance representations are what get people in trouble here. What matters for the story is that the process is boring, and I've come to appreciate that.