Coder Trader

⚠️ Personal reflection — not financial advice. This post describes one trader's personal relocation and the time-zone consequences that reshaped a decade of habits. It is not investment advice, a recommendation, or a claim that any market session is superior to another. Trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for every investor. Please consult a licensed financial advisor before making trading decisions. See full Disclaimer . "The market did not move when I moved. I moved by eight hours, and the market kept running on New York time — which meant everything I had built around the Seoul evening was now happening while I was asleep." I started trading on a Kiwoom Securities account in Seoul in 2016. For the first six years, my trading day was structured around Korean market hours in the morning and US futures in the evening — Seoul-time evening, which mapped onto New York morning without much thought. In 2022 I moved to Ingolstadt, Germany, a...

⚠️ Personal reflection — not financial advice. This post describes personal habits and mental frameworks from one engineer's decade of trading. It is not investment advice, a recommendation, or a claim that engineering training makes anyone a better trader. Trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for every investor. Please consult a licensed financial advisor before making trading decisions. See full Disclaimer . "After enough years of debugging embedded firmware, you stop believing in things that 'usually work.' Trading has the same shape — the thing that usually works is exactly the thing that gets you wiped out on the day it does not." The name of this blog is not accidental. I have spent fifteen years writing code for embedded systems in the automotive and defense industries, and about ten years trading Korean equities, US options, MNQ futures, and crypto. The two disciplines share more mental architecture than most trading wri...

⚠️ Personal reflection — not financial advice. This post describes five specific losing trades from one person's decade of experience. It is not investment advice, a recommendation, or a warning that applies universally. Trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for every investor. Please consult a licensed financial advisor before making trading decisions. See full Disclaimer . "The most expensive lessons are not the ones where you did something obviously wrong. They are the ones where you did most things right and got exactly one thing wrong, and that one thing turned out to be structural. Those lessons are worth writing down." I wrote a broader decade-in-the-markets post a week ago that covers the arc of ten years of trading in one sitting. This one is narrower and more specific. It is five particular losing trades I actually took, in enough detail that you can see the shape of the mistake without me having to abstract it into a rule. ...

⚠️ Personal reflection — not financial advice. This post describes one person's ten-year trading journey. It is not investment advice, a recommendation, or a prediction of anyone else's outcomes. Trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for every investor. Please consult a licensed financial advisor before making trading decisions. See full Disclaimer . "Ten years is not a career, it is not a hobby, and it is not a story with a clean ending. It is just a long enough sample size to have some idea which of your mistakes are structural and which were bad luck." Every trading blog eventually gets around to writing the "here is my journey" post. I have been putting mine off for years, mostly because I did not want to write the version that lies. The clean arc where the naive twenty-something makes bad trades, discovers a framework, becomes profitable, and rides off into the sunset. That version reads well. It just is not what happe...