My painful journey to become a profitable Gann trader
I got lured into trading in late 2009.
My first forex seminar promised I’d be making $500-$1000 everyday, working 2 hours or less!
The euphoria of “discovering the markets”.
The potential of tens of millions of dollars at the simple click of a mouse.
Ahh, what a great feeling it was.
It was a short lived feeling though.
My first account was funded in under 4 weeks and evaporated practically overnight.
I lost everything I had AND half of the money was borrowed.
Then began my journey of “figuring out the formula”
I thought my background in finance and math would make it easy.
It doesn’t.
If anything, it hinders you.
I spent the next 6 months scanning all global trading forums.
Every last one of them.
All the sections, all the topics, all the pages, all the comments.
The key must be here somewhere!
Only to one day realize, why would anyone successful be here?
Here’s a key rule I learned in life.
The majority of people are wrong, always.
It’s a statistical fact.
It couldn’t be any truer in the markets.
So if you want to do something and don’t know how, look at what everyone is doing and do the opposite.
That’s a good start.
(And if you’re new to trading take that advice to heart!)
Anyways, having failed to find any reasonable answer in the forums.
I began studying indicators.
Again…
All of them.
Every indicator ever created.
The history, the creator and the math behind it.
And all the bloody settings and parameters.
There went another 8 months of my life.
One day it clicked, these are all lagging indicators!
The market makes the move, THEN these indicators get updated.
What a heart wrenching realization it was.
To think this would be common sense – huh?
Getting nervous about all this time spent and nothing to show for it. I figured I had to get a mentor, someone who could speed up the process for me.
My life was becoming a mess, my family and friends worried about me.
Little did they know what I was up to.
So then began my journey to find my mentor.
Wonder how I did it?
I googled every famous trading book and course EVER put out and made a monster excel sheet.
I was going to study everyone and narrow it down to the top 10.
Boy was that failure.
There is no list.
There’s just a bunch of hyped up marketing all around.
One dream after another – broken.
One lie after another.
I started working 2 jobs to pay for my trading “education”
I studied price action.
Candles.
Candle patterns.
Chart patterns.
Fibonacci.
Volume.
Order Flow.
Harmonic Patterns.
Macro trading
Fundamental trading
Back to technical analysis.
Nothing was working.
And I was burning a hole in my soul
My ego was being damaged severely
I felt handicapped and helpless.
I didn’t even want millions anymore, I was happy with a few pips a day…just $100 would be fine.
Every time I traded it felt like someone, RIGHT THEN AND THERE, was assigned to make me lose.
Then began the conspiracy theories.
The game is rigged.
The brokers, the banks, the governments….
Oh boy.
3 years in and $50,000 in education costs + trading losses + several thousands hours spent.
And I have to face my family as to what the heck I’m doing with my life.
The emotional and psychological beating was too much.
And I didn’t see an end in sight.
I threw in the towel.
I didn’t want to see a chart anymore.
I got a job and tried to go back to being normal.
Months later, sitting at a job I thoroughly hated, I came across an article about the best traders of all time.
I read the article and realized that these traders had made an absolute killing.
It reminded me of my days when I was passionately searching for the answers.
And it sparked something inside of me to revisit trading.
I never felt the same passion with any job because the potential was always limited.
I secretly began studying hedge funds and the best traders of all time.
I didn’t want anyone to know what I was doing in my spare time.
Shortly afterwards, I stumbled across W.D. Gann.
I was on the hook again.
92% win rate and having made $500M dollars.
This, I had to study!
I would just replicate what he did.
Soon realizing it had to do with astrology.
I quickly lost interest.
There’s no way this mumbo jumbo planetary stuff works.
Feeling lost and hopeless again and not knowing what to do.
I still kept skimming through his stuff even though I couldn’t make out most of it.
It’s at the same time when I did a lot of soul searching and started working on my mindset and self improvement.
Long story short, I had some money saved up and was swept by curiosity about this whole Gann thing.
I went to the seminar and found, for the first time, a strategy that half worked!
The back testing was decent and it sparked deep flame inside of me.
“I’ll do whatever it takes to be seriously profitable – if it’s planets, be it, I’m going to get to the bottom of this”
Guess how I approached studying Gann?
Yup, I googled EVERYONE AND ANYONE who was a Gann guru.
I went until the end of the google results.
I was going to be smart this time.
I made another excel sheet.
Whoever and wherever there is a real Gann trader, I will learn from them at all costs.
I was determined. (this was about 7 years ago)
Then began all the Gann scams.
The geometry.
The square of nine.
The angles.
Etc.
I had been suckered all over again.
It was sickening.
I’d been to so many seminars and bought so many books and indicators – AGAIN!
Which all wanted to solve Gann for me.
And everyone fell short.
I figured I’d just “combine” the missing pieces together.
Being so deep into this I just did not see a way out, except to see it through.
My career, my relationships, my health, my finances – all went to shit.
Despite all that I stuck it out.
Hopeful.
I’ve spent several thousands nights up reading and “connecting the dots”.
Testing one thing or the other.
Maybe it’s not the 52 year cycle maybe it’s the 17.3 year cycle.
Spending endless nights trying endless things.
Then I heard about “first principles”
To breakdown a problem to its simplest form, including the assumptions.
What was Gann most famous for?
Market Timing.
What was I doing?
I was someone trying to solve both time and price at the same time including short term and long term projections.
It’s not really smart looking back.
But I did not know any better.
Anyways, to cut a decade of research down to a few sentences, I listed every possibility of how something could be timed based on what I had learned from Gann.
And I manually tested it all.
I got a little smarter as I did more and more research, trying to come up with some “guidelines”.
Then, one day it just clicked in the shower.
Instead of looking at the heavens for the answer.
The end result is on the charts.
Why not work backwards?
Another 2 years of testing later.
I cracked ONE cycle.
I WAS SOOOOOOOOOOO HAPPY.
It wasn’t even dominant.
But still it could call out turns.
The problem was that it would fail 30% of the time.
And I figured there was something wrong.
Endless testing and research later I realized it’s not going to work 100% of the time.
I, by sheer persistence, cracked the code.
The “matrix” made sense.
Instead of working with my knowledge to decode the markets.
Let me work with the markets to decode the knowledge.
The purpose of me sharing my story first and foremost is to inspire you.
Gann is real.
Timing is possible.
And an idiot like me made it.
With bull like persistence.
The purpose of this website is to help people like me save some time to get to the end of the puzzle.
I have literally bought everything out there. I know all the players. I have their courses. I’ve been to everyone’s training.
Most of it will not help you.
It didn’t help me.
Time is the secret.
If they are not teaching you the H,L,H,L patterns – it’s not Gann.
Selling geometry is easy, that’s how they all make money.
Teaching timing concepts is not easy or profitable – but that’s where the keys lie.
I know the pain I went through to get to where I am.
I always told myself, if I ever make it, I will help others who are on the same path.
I remember one time I was so desperate I almost wrote a $100,000 check to a Gann guru.
I’m glad I didn’t. You shouldn’t too.
If you’re a dedicated, die-hard Gann enthusiast who is focused on trading and not just research.
Maybe I can help you along your path a little.
Trader B