I Turned Off the Tool That Was Supposed to Save Me
It stopped the trade. Then I stopped the tool.
The first version of Floaty did what it was supposed to do.
It stopped me.
Then I turned it off and took the trade anyway.
That moment changed the product more than any feature idea ever could. Because the problem wasn’t that I didn’t know my rules. It wasn’t that I needed a better journal, another reminder, or softer broker settings.
The problem was that, at the exact moment the rule mattered most, I could still get around it.
Floaty became the answer to that problem — one failure at a time.
Willpower failed.
My first system for not blowing up was just trying harder. Sticky notes, rules at the top of every journal page, a written promise every morning…
It failed for a reason that took me years to see: the person who writes the rule and the person who breaks it aren’t the same person. One is calm. The other is down money and wants it back now. By the time the rule is needed, the calm one has left the room. The rule had to live somewhere outside my head.
A person failed.
So I asked someone I lived with to pull me off the desk when I was spiraling. It didn’t work, and it wasn’t her fault. Tilt doesn’t negotiate, and no one can stand behind you at the exact second you click. Love is not a rules engine. The thing that stops me had to be there at execution, every time, not just when someone happened to be watching.
A notification failed.
My first real idea was to have the tool tell someone: a heads-up to a person you respect when you’re breaking your rules. In my case, it was my Dad, to whom I had promised a thousand times that I’d stop being dumb.
I still like the intention. But a notification arrives after the order does. By the time anyone knows, the damage is done. It couldn’t warn. It had to act, in the moment, before the trade went through.
A tool I could turn off failed.
Eventually, I built the first version of Floaty.
And it worked!
Yet, the first time it stopped me from taking a trade, I turned it off and took the trade anyway.
Then I did it again the next day, for a different reason. And again after that, for another one.
Tilt. Justification. Calm confidence.
There was no version of me I could reliably trust to leave it on.
I even caught myself building escape routes around it, which was probably the most honest feedback the product ever gave me.
A rule you can remove the moment you don’t like it is not really a rule.
So Floaty had to become something I couldn’t just dismiss when it mattered most.
A fragile tool failed.
Then came the next problem: real life.
The early versions worked only if trading happened in the neat, controlled way I imagined it would.
But that’s not how traders actually trade.
You take a trade from your phone. You switch from desk to laptop mid-session. You hold something overnight, or over a weekend. You come back the next day and expect the rules to still know what’s going on.
A protection product that breaks on an ordinary Tuesday isn’t protection.
So Floaty had to survive the messy, real way people actually trade.
Five failures, five decisions.
That’s Floaty.
On June 13, I’m doing a live walkthrough and showing the product those failures became.
Save your spot at tradewithfloaty.com
— Abel