Chapter 1: The Origin Story — From Lifeguard to JP Morgan to FX Obsession

Before I ever placed a trade, I worked in the leisure industry — lifeguarding, personal training, doing everything I could to make ends meet. It paid the bills, but it never felt like it was building toward something bigger. Eventually, I transitioned into sales — mostly telesales jobs for insurance companies or selling personal training courses. The money was okay, but like many people, I often found myself scraping through the month with maybe £100 left over. Not struggling, but definitely not thriving.

Back then, I was always trying to find ways to make money work harder for me. I flipped items, resold products, looked for passive income opportunities. I didn’t know it at the time, but that hunger to find a better way was planting the seeds for something much bigger.

The Shift Toward Finance

I decided to go back to university to study Business and Economics. That decision alone started to change how I viewed the world — especially money. Not long after, I moved into a role at JP Morgan. It wasn’t a trading position, to be clear, but it was my first real taste of the financial industry. Ironically, it was also where my journey into trading really began.

The First Trade: Hooked for Life

A colleague at the time introduced me to someone he followed on Facebook — a trader offering an education program. We signed up together and that’s where this crazy journey really began.

From the very first lesson to the very first trade (a EURCAD sell — I made £3.40), I was completely hooked. I became obsessed. I installed MetaTrader on my work laptop and spent my days chart-watching when I was supposed to be working. This obsession followed me from my telesales job all the way into JP Morgan — the only difference was, I couldn’t legally trade FX under my contract. So, I found workarounds, setting up accounts in my partner’s name and occasionally wiping everything before audits.

Despite the early ups and downs, I had this mentality:

“If I’ve made money once doing this, I can do it again. And again. And again.”

That belief kept me going through the rough patches, the scams, the failed strategies — all of it.

Signals, Scams, and the Harsh Reality

Like most new traders, I went through the usual motions — signal services, binary options, over leveraging, losses. I lost money. A lot of it. But I also gained something more important: perspective.

I started attending webinars and leaning into the community groups I’d been added to. Those groups were a highlight — filled with people just like me, eager to learn, hungry for more. Many of them are still in my life today, nearly 9 years later.

The most disheartening part of that chapter? Realising the person I was learning from wasn’t actually a trader. He could talk the talk but couldn’t back it up with results. He repeated the same few slides every few weeks, and once I caught onto that, I knew I was on my own.

So I started consuming everything I could. Books. Webinars. Forums. YouTube. I stopped looking for a “holy grail” and started focusing on real, applicable skill.

The First Gut Punch

Confidence is a double-edged sword. After banking 12% in my second full month of trading, I thought I had cracked it. I believed I was about to walk away from the 9-5 and become a full-time trader. But the market humbled me — hard. Over the next three months, I went from +12% to -30%, loss after loss. My confidence took a hit, but that slap of reality was probably the most valuable thing that could’ve happened to me.

Then came the real stomach-turner:

I’d built my account from £3k to £7k and decided to trade a GBP interest rate decision. Everyone expected a rate cut, so I loaded a big position anticipating a sell-off. I watched the data come in on the big screens at JP Morgan, and just as expected, I was triggered into profit, £900 up in seconds. But then, it reversed just as quickly, slipped through my stop, and I closed out with a £4.2k loss. I had to walk back to my desk and pretend nothing had happened. I couldn’t tell a soul. My contract didn’t even allow me to trade.

That moment? Sickening. But also… unforgettable.

The Breakthrough

After that brutal run, I sought out advice from people in the trading community — and I received a piece of wisdom that changed everything:

“Journal every trade. Not just what you saw on the chart, but how you felt. What were you thinking? What was your mindset?”

That advice unlocked something in me. Patterns emerged. Behaviours became clearer. Confidence started to rebuild — not because I was winning trades, but because I finally understood why I was winning or losing. That’s when everything started to evolve.

Advice to My Beginner Self

If I could go back and speak to the version of me who was just starting out, I’d say one thing:

Keep it simple.

This industry thrives on complexity — new strategies, fancy indicators, reinvented wheels. But at the core, it’s all just variations of the same principles. Strip away the noise and focus on simplicity, consistency, and discipline.

Final Thoughts

This first chapter wasn’t about making money. It was about building the mindset that would carry me through everything that came after. The obsession, the early wins, the brutal losses — they were all part of the same lesson:

This is where the fire was lit. Nothing has been the same since.