I’m Oskar. Nine years trading.
Consistently profitable since 2024, after most of those years spent destroying what I built.
About me
I’m Oskar. I’ve traded stocks, futures, crypto and metals for nine years. For years, profitable days and weeks repeatedly ended in one destructive session. More strategies, stricter rules and more discipline did not stop the cycle.
What finally changed was not another setup. I began treating size, pressure, state and environment as trading variables rather than personal weaknesses. Since 2024, I have traded consistently profitably by building limits around the version of me that appears under pressure.
Today I trade Nasdaq futures in the morning session and publish what actually happens. The interesting part of trading is not the entries. It is what stops a normal person from keeping the money.
I wrote the whole approach down in THE CAGE, a free book about why discipline keeps failing and what to build instead of it.
Where I was for nine years
I started in 2017. Within about a year I was competent, and I mean that plainly: I could read a chart, I understood the instrument, I knew what a good setup looked like and I could find one. Tested on paper I would have passed.
What I could not do was keep the money.
It always went the same way, and it took years to notice that always was the important word. I would trade well for a stretch. The account would climb. The climbing did something to me. It felt like proof, and proof made me want more of it, so the next position was bigger than the last. The rules I had, and I did have rules, quietly stopped applying. Rules are for the version of you who might be wrong, and I no longer felt like that person.
Then it turned. It always turned, and the fall was never proportional to the climb. Six weeks of careful work could come apart in two days, sometimes in a single afternoon.
That last part is the detail that matters. Not that I lost money. Everybody loses money. That I lost it while watching myself lose it, narrating the mistake as I made it, and continuing anyway.
I had not been unlucky for six years. I had been running a loop, and I had been running it well.
What was actually missing
Three things, and none of them were knowledge.
There was no real risk limit. Position size was a feeling. Leverage was whatever the broker allowed, which in practice meant whatever my confidence allowed, and my confidence moved with the last three trades.
There was no rule that could survive contact with me. I had intentions, and an intention is something you can talk yourself out of in about four seconds. Every rule I owned had an exception clause, and the exception clause was me.
I had no idea that my body was part of the trade. That five hours of sleep changed what I was willing to risk. That an argument at eight in the morning was still in my bloodstream at ten. That four green days in a row physically changed my sense of what a normal position looked like. I thought this was a soft subject for people who could not trade. It turned out to be the mechanism running the whole thing.
What changed
Between 2023 and 2024 those limits became a structure. Drawdowns that used to run 5-10% became roughly 1-2%. The spirals did not stop. They stopped becoming the month.
The honest trade
Every wall I built took away something that had once felt like an advantage: the freedom to press a day that was going well, to stay for one more setup, to argue with a loss instead of accepting it. Each one felt like a downgrade on the day I wrote it down. Not one of them felt, at the time, like the thing that would keep me solvent.
Structure costs you your best days. You will leave money on the table, you will sit out sessions that would have worked, and there will be weeks where you feel you are trading well below what you are capable of. What you get back is that you are still here in three years with the account intact.
For six years I took the other side of that trade, and it cost me every account I ever built.
“I did not become a more disciplined person.
I built something that did not require me to be one.”
This is the argument the book makes: what the structure was built against, and why willpower was never the variable. What no book can do is put those walls around your account. That limit is not modesty. It is the same mechanism the whole thing is about: the version of you reading this agrees with everything, and he is not the one who has to be stopped.