Charting Carnage: A Return to the Madness of Trading.

​It was a bitter, wind-shanked morning when the madness came clawing back. Walking the kids to school through the frost-bitten wastelands of commuter-ville — past the sullen faces of the sleep-deprived and the vaguely menacing thud of builder's radios pumping out brain-cell-murdering pop — I could feel the old itch creeping up the back of my skull.

Trading. Bloody trading. Like a half-sober dog gnawing its tail, there it was again.​

I'd been at the forex game before — swinging wildly between the highs of delusional grandeur and the lows of catastrophic, gut-wrenching losses that made a Wetherspoons breakfast look like a fine dining experience. Years of it: squinting at charts like a drunk pigeon, installing every shiny "holy grail" indicator some half-baked YouTuber had shoved down my throat with the dead-eyed enthusiasm of a pyramid scheme cultist.
And what did it earn me? Nothing but a string of red lines across my balance sheet, each one a little death, the financial equivalent of punching yourself repeatedly in the groin and paying for the privilege.
I did what any sane man would do. I quit. I walked away. Took up nobler pursuits: security shifts where the only action was a bloke pissing behind the bins and stock photos of soulless high streets that looked like rejected sets from EastEnders.

But the charts... they called to me—those chaotic, lying, seductive bastards.

So here I am, back again — but this time, with a vengeance.
See, I did some digging. I am not into the nonsense peddled by greasy salesmen in shiny suits. No, I did a full-on personality autopsy. I peeled back the layers of my malfunctioning brain to see what was driving me off the cliff every time. I don't operate like some mindless algorithm cranking out trades on an RSI cross or a MACD wiggle. No, mate. I'm a thinking man. A news junkie. A politics fiend. A connoisseur of human stupidity as expressed in economic trends.

And, of course, a typical Gen X misfit — raised on a diet of broken promises, bad sitcoms, and music that meant something — with a burning, unshakable hatred for hypocrisy, the petty games people play, and all the insufferable self-congratulatory drivel that passes for wisdom these days. We're the generation that sees through the glossy scams, the fake gurus, the virtue-signalling panto shows — and we're too stubborn to pretend otherwise.

I got bored stiff of the long, stuffy "official report" style of doing things, too—you know the type, death by spreadsheets and graphs until your eyeballs bleed. That really isn't me. I wanted to create content that actually reflected me—real, raw, a bit messy but full of life—something with general appeal for anyone who's had enough of the polished lie and just wants the truth, warts, bruises, cock-ups and all.

So, instead of jamming into another idiot's trading system like some financial contortionist, I built my own—one that makes sense to me, one that feeds on my love of history, geopolitics, and the grim, unfolding carnival of human events that sway the markets like a drunk on payday.

I decided to strip it all back and focus on a single beast: WTI Oil. One market. One mission. None of this "trade everything that moves" nonsense that turns your brain into soup. WTI is beautiful in its chaos—political instability, economic madness, OPEC tantrums—everything that makes the world wobble filters straight into that greasy black river. It's the perfect playground for a lunatic who reads the news and understands some history.

I'm testing it on a demo account for the next few months, not because I don't trust myself — far from it — but because I respect the battlefield. I trust my system and instincts, but I'm not arrogant enough to think the market owes me anything. Demo trading's the gym before the street fight. It's the sharpening of the sword before the first real clash.
And by some twisted miracle... it's working.

Not perfectly. There are no fairy tales here. I still take minor, sharp, controlled hits like an old boxer rolling with the punches. But the days of catastrophic losses, those bloodbaths where I felt like my laptop had mugged me, seem to be fading into the past.

I'm sticking with the demo account for the next few months, hammering away at it, pushing my system to the limit and beyond until I'm either a hardened gladiator of the charts or a smouldering ruin of a man. This is where the real journey begins — the long, strange march through the psychological minefield, armed with nothing but gut instinct, an unhealthy interest in current affairs, and an iron determination not to be the sucker at the table anymore. My observations start here, too: the good, the bad, and the utterly ridiculous will all be documented, chronicling the entire twisted dance in glorious, unfiltered colour.

Now, don't mistake this for some rags-to-riches snake oil story. I'm no trading messiah. I'm a bloke with a laptop, a working-class stubbornness, and a chronic addiction to coffee and cynicism. Mistakes still happen — glorious, boneheaded mistakes. I'm documenting them all: the cock-ups, the eureka moments, the days when I feel like Gordon Gekko's evil twin and the days when I'd get better returns betting on ferret racing.

Because that's the truth no one on YouTube or Instagram tells you: trading is a grind. It's a test of endurance, like a three-legged race across a minefield. It's not a fast-track ticket to a Lamborghini and an Insta-influencer girlfriend. It's a brutal war of attrition against your own worst instincts.

And here's the real kicker: anyone selling you a "guaranteed winning system" is more bent than a nine-quid note. If they had the secret sauce, they wouldn't be hawking it to you for the price of a week's groceries — they'd be holed up on a private island somewhere, drinking cocktails out of a coconut and laughing at the rest of us.

So here's the deal: I'll keep trading my way, sharing every grim, hilarious, educational moment of the journey. Warts and all. If you're a frustrated retail trader, who's ever looked at a chart and thought, "What fresh hell is this?" or just an academic who enjoys watching a man willingly wrestle a bear for pocket change, this might be your kind of circus.
Feel free to tag along. Subscribe, like, share, and yell insults from the cheap seats if it makes you feel better.

This is not a show for the faint-hearted. This is WTI Oil trading — my way — fuelled by caffeine, stubbornness, and an unshakeable belief that somehow, some bloody way, this madhouse may not be conquered, but I can somehow tame the beast.

Better battered and fighting than safe and snivelling.