The Night That Changed the Next Five Years of My Life
A naive Notion sketch, a trading discipline problem, and the first idea that eventually became Floaty.
As traders, we rarely talk about that uncomfortable moment when we realize the problem isn’t our strategy.
It’s us.
We know the rules. We know what to do. And somehow, we keep making the same mistakes. Again, and again, and again.
I had this moment around the second half of 2021.
My first full year of trading, 2020, went far better than I had any right to expect. Then 2021 happened. The market changed, my life changed, and the discipline I’d fought so hard for became harder to hold.
I spent the year writing rules, sketching promises, analyzing triggers, setting commitments. Dozens of entries in Notion, plenty of trade reviews, a “masterplan” to fix it all — and still, I ended up in the same trap, over and over.
The problem was clear: I had a set of rules I’d written for myself as a trader, and I was breaking them. The rules weren’t wrong. I’d written them when I was thinking clearly.
I broke them anyway.
I’ve been coding since I was thirteen years old. So naturally, I looked for solutions in software. That’s where I feel comfortable. That’s where I feel safe. That’s what gives me a sense of control — the same control I was missing in my trading.
Sometime in early December 2021, I sat down and wrote the first version of the idea that would eventually become Floaty:
“It’s time to code a trading police — a risk manager that stops me from doing dumb shit. Something that helps me enforce my own rules, forever.”
The same entry had the other half of the idea. I wanted the thing to tell someone:
“Think about your dad getting a notification that you’ve taken an 8k loss after committing to discipline…”
Soon enough, I added yet another page to my already-bloated Notion and naively sketched it out:
For non-coders, this is what it meant:
It would monitor my open positions until I breached my max loss, then give me 5 seconds to close them before quitting my trading platform.
If I opened my trading platform again after that, it would send an alert to my “top circle” and notify a Discord channel of my choice that I was not behaving.
That naive Notion entry was the first seed of what Floaty is today. I never thought it would be this hard to build, but I stuck with it.
And now it’s ready.
I’d love to show you live on June 13th.
Save your spot for the launch webinar at tradewithfloaty.com
— Abel
Esperando el día 13! 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼🛟