# *The Road to One Hundred Thousand: A Trader’s Transparent Experiment*
## Prologue: The Three A.M. Tick
Only three lights are on in my studio.
One pools over the MetaTrader 5 screen: six timeframes stacked vertically, indicator lines branching like a neural network. Another glows on the monitor to my right, where data streams from seven live verification platforms pulse—cold, precise, indifferent. The last is a desk-corner lamp meant to be kind to the eyes, its halo covering an open black notebook where ink pins down the logic and emotions behind every decision I made today.
Three in the morning. London has closed; New York’s second half is in full swing. Somewhere in a high-rise apartment in this city, I’ve just finished my final review of the night. In the lower-right corner of MT5, the balance sits calmly—small, yes, but every incremental gain is exposed under the stare of seven electronic eyes. No retouching. No hiding.
Outside the window, the river of city lights thins. I lean back and sweep my gaze across the row of verification windows: a real-time signal on the MQL5 community, a smoothly extending equity curve on Myfxbook, an independent certification stamp from SignalStart… Every number is mirrored and backed up across at least six different servers.
This is the highest level of transparency I’ve built for myself—not marketing copy, but a daily confrontation with naked truth.
And it all began on an ordinary Tuesday, with a number that—inside the finance circle—is almost embarrassing to say out loud.
By day, I work in a bank’s treasury department, handling institutional FX orders worth millions of dollars. By night, I return to my apartment, open MT5, and face my own account—started with four hundred dollars.
From four hundred to one hundred thousand—I’ve decided to walk this road in the clumsiest, most honest way possible. Not to prove how much I can make, but to test one thing: whether an ordinary person, using a system that is completely public and fully traceable, can actually survive this market—and reach a distance worth marking.
One hundred thousand dollars is that distance. Not the finish line, but a checkpoint.
---
## Chapter One: A Double Life — Bank Back Office and Personal Terminal
### 1. A Bystander in the Dealing Room
The dealing room at my bank is a world made of glass walls, Bloomberg terminals, and low-voiced instructions.
My desk sits at the edge of the trading area, separated from the proprietary traders by a corridor and double access control. I can see them: three curved screens each, noise-cancelling headsets, fingers flying. Global FX quotes flicker in real time; chat windows flash with instant messages from London, New York, Tokyo.
They talk about positions, carry, central bank expectations—six- and seven-figure numbers that, to me, are settlement data I must process flawlessly.
My job is to ensure the back-end of these trades runs without error: confirmations, settlement, fund transfers, risk monitoring. I know every step an FX trade takes from birth to delivery—except the most central step of all:
**Decision.**
“Send this EUR/USD swap settlement instruction to the counterparty bank before four p.m.,” the trading supervisor says, handing me a document. I catch a glimpse of his screen—EUR/USD position: a full three million euros long. The floating profit is a number you can feel in your throat.
“Got it. I’ll handle it now.” I take the paper and turn back to my desk.
By day, I’m a screw in the machine, keeping the process precise. By night, when I open MT5 in my apartment, I’m the only decision-maker for my own account. That account has four hundred dollars—“experiment capital” I quietly saved over three months. Small enough that losing it all wouldn’t ruin my life.
Heavy enough that every time I click **Place Order**, I can hear my heartbeat.
### 2. First Lesson: Paper Tactics vs. Live Fire
I remember my first live order with painful clarity.
That day at work, the room kept circling around the Federal Reserve minutes. In the morning briefing, the supervisor said, “The dollar will stay under long-term pressure, but it’s due for a technical rebound short-term.”
That night, I analyzed the same EUR/USD on MT5. On the four-hour chart, MACD crossed upward above the zero line. On the one-hour, price pulled back to the 50-period moving average and held. Every technical concept I’d taught myself pointed to a long.
Based on my demo “experience,” this structure had a strong win rate. I placed a 0.03-lot buy limit at 1.1120, with a stop at 1.1100—twenty pips.
The moment I hit **Confirm**, a strange split seized me.
That day, I had processed a two-million-euro EUR/USD forward at the bank; in the system it was just a line to reconcile. But now, this tiny 0.03-lot order—this four-hundred-dollar account—made sweat bead in my palms.
Price dipped five pips. My breathing became shallow without permission.
I remembered something Old Zhao, one of the traders, once said during lunch: “Retail traders’ biggest enemy isn’t the market—it’s themselves. They panic the moment they see a floating loss, and once they panic, they start doing stupid things.”
I inhaled and told myself, *Follow the system.*
Price kept grinding down: minus eighteen pips. Two pips from my stop.
My mouse drifted toward **Modify Order**. My finger hovered.
Then my supervisor’s voice from earlier echoed in my ear: “A stop-loss isn’t decoration. If you set it, you accept it. If it hits, it means you were wrong.”
I clenched my jaw and closed the modification window.
At two in the morning, the stop hit. The trade closed for a loss of six dollars.
Six dollars—in the bank’s trading room, it’s too small to appear on any risk report. In my MT5 balance, it was 1.5% of my capital. It meant the market had rejected days of careful analysis with a cold, mechanical no.
I stared at the balance: $394.
And I understood something:
**In trading, the distance between “knowing” and “doing” is a chasm called execution—filled with fear, greed, hope, and self-deception.**
Everything I learned at the bank about discipline, process, and risk control—on my own live account—had to be forged again in the flame of real money.
### 3. Building a System: When Professional Habits Enter Personal Practice
That weekend after the loss, I did three things.
**First, I bought three physical notebooks.**
- **The blue trading journal:** a forced record of each trade’s complete decision chain. At the bank, every institutional trade has an ID, a trail, an archive. Now I would build the same strict audit trail for myself.
- **The red mistake manual:** only for moments when I violated system principles. Time, mental state, and postmortem reflection—no excuses.
- **The black system notebook:** my methodology framework. I began fusing the institutional risk-control principles I observed by day with the technical tools I studied by night.
**Second, I re-evaluated the value of MT5.**
Switching from MT4 to MT5 wasn’t casual. It wasn’t just a terminal—it was an analysis platform:
1. **A powerful strategy tester:** I could validate ideas on historical data, like the bank’s quant team, by coding them into an EA.
2. **Multi-timeframe analysis on one screen:** perfect for the “resonance observation” method I envisioned.
3. **Richer built-in indicators:** 38 technical indicators, enough to test combinations without external plugins.
**Third, I drew the first framework diagram in the black notebook.**
I adapted the bank’s risk logic to personal trading and wrote:
Institutional Principles -> Personal Adaptation
1. Single-trade risk limit -> 2% (survival + growth)
2. Daily/weekly loss cap -> hard red line
3. Stress testing -> simulate black swan scenarios
4. Full audit trail -> personal version: seven-platform public transparency
At the bottom of the page, in heavy red ink, I wrote:
**“The gap between professional and amateur isn’t knowledge width—it’s execution hardness.”**
---
## Chapter Two: Forging the System — Discipline Above Prediction
### 1. The First Full Validation of the Resonance Rule
One spring night at ten, the market offered a textbook opportunity.
On GBP/USD, signals stacked layer by layer:
**Daily chart:** MACD above the zero line, a second upward expansion—trend momentum strengthening.
**4-hour chart:** price formed a small flag and pulled back to EMA20—structure intact.
**1-hour chart:** stochastic (KD) formed a clear bullish cross in oversold—rebound beginning.
**15-minute chart:** price broke the consolidation ceiling, pulled back, confirmed support.
More importantly, there was a vague sense of *fit*. At the bank during the day, I’d noticed several familiar hedge funds increasing their long exposure to the pound. I didn’t know their exact rationale, but the direction of “smart money” deserved weight in observation.
I calculated like I was writing a risk report:
- Account balance: $387.22
- Planned stop distance: 15 pips
- Allowed risk per trade: 2% = $7.74
- Position size: 0.05 lots
I placed the order. This time my hand didn’t shake.
I set the stop and initial target, then did something I’d never done before—I opened a book that had nothing to do with trading and forced myself to read. I let the order breathe in the market.
For the first hour, price chopped in a narrow range. In the corner of my vision, MT5’s floating P/L flickered between pale green and pale red like a quiet heart monitor.
After midnight, price launched its first leg up. My trailing stop triggered, lifting automatically to entry—risk locked to zero.
I kept reading, only turning pages a bit faster.
In the end, the trailing stop closed the trade at +112 pips. Profit: $56.
Balance updated to $443.22.
In the blue journal, I recorded everything: the daytime observation, the nighttime analysis, the execution steps, the psychological state. At the end, I wrote:
**“The dollar amount doesn’t matter. What matters is that I executed every instruction like a machine. Trust begins with one complete execution.”**
### 2. The Unique Lens My Job Gave Me
Over time, I realized my bank work had given me a perspective most retail traders never touch:
**1) A physical sense of “big money thinking”**
- Seeing how institutions build positions in tranches and pyramid in—rather than going all-in.
- Understanding why they care more about time efficiency and risk-adjusted returns than raw direction.
- Learning to watch the “dark threads” of long-term profitability: carry, roll yield, funding.
**2) Risk control as a reflex**
- Handling daily risk reports taught me which metrics matter: maximum drawdown, Sharpe ratio, profit factor, expectancy.
- Knowing black swans aren’t theoretical—they arrive bloody every few years.
- Carving “daily checks, weekly reviews, monthly summaries” into habit.
**3) Filtering the information environment**
- Instinctively separating emotional noise from usable information.
- Knowing which economic releases truly move markets.
- Reading between the lines of central bank statements to catch hints of future paths.
I kept feeding these observations into the black system notebook. A hybrid framework sharpened:
**Technical analysis for precise entries and exits. Fundamentals and flow as a position-weight reference. And bank-born risk discipline—the thing that decides how long I survive.**
My goal wasn’t to catch every wave. It was to build a machine that could run stably across years.
And I was its first operator—and its first mechanic.
---
## Chapter Three: The Choice of Transparency — Building Irrevocable Trust
### 1. Why Go Fully Transparent?
After a period of steady growth, I faced a fundamental choice.
At the bank, transparency is mandatory—compliance is the foundation. Every trade must be recorded, auditable, explainable.
In personal trading, concealment is the default. Selective display is an art. Forums overflow with polished screenshots, “track records” with the losing curve cropped off, myths no one can verify.
I decided to import the professional world’s principle into my personal practice:
**Go fully transparent. Build trust that cannot be revoked.**
The motives ran deeper than they first appeared:
1. **The ultimate self-constraint:** knowing countless eyes are watching forces every trade to withstand scrutiny. Laziness, impulse, and wishful thinking have nowhere to hide under daylight.
2. **Reality in a sea of lies:** in an environment polluted by misinformation, fully verifiable truth becomes rare value.
3. **A public experiment:** if my method can keep functioning under full livestream conditions—unfiltered, unedited—and still move toward the target, then perhaps it contains principles worth discussing. One hundred thousand dollars would be the stage checkpoint of that experiment.
### 2. The Seven-Platform Network: My Personal “Central Clearinghouse”
Choosing seven platforms wasn’t random. It was a verification mesh—mutual backup, different strengths:
- **MQL5 Signals:** the core of the MetaTrader ecosystem, facing global technical traders.
- **Myfxbook:** deep statistical analysis, producing institution-like performance reports.
- **SignalStart:** independent third-party verification and hosting for credibility.
- **Forex Factory thread:** full logic posted on the largest FX forum, open to the widest public critique.
- **FX Junction:** more professional, granular tracking.
- **ZuluTrade:** social copy-trading—testing performance under real follower conditions.
- **DigiTrade:** another independent verification and backup layer.
Connecting them felt like building a private back-office monitoring center. When the last platform’s API returned “Sync successful,” I didn’t feel excitement.
I felt relief.
The escape route was cut off. From then on, my trading would take place inside a glass dome.
### 3. The First Setback Under Public Light
Not long after full transparency, the market handed me a public exam.
EUR/USD presented an almost perfect bullish resonance signal. I entered by the rules—position size and stop placement both compliant.
Hours later, a hawkish remark from a senior ECB official—spoken in a non-public context—was leaked. The euro dropped in an instant, slicing cleanly through my stop.
Loss: $84.30. Single-trade damage: -2.1%.
Across seven platforms, the numbers flipped red almost simultaneously. Rankings slid. The equity curve dented. Comments appeared in the discussion threads—skeptical, sharp.
The feeling was complicated. At the bank, losses are part of business, absorbed by procedure and shared responsibility. Personally, under a public magnifying glass, a blend of shame, defiance, and pressure began to grow.
I forced myself to follow the plan:
1. **Update notes immediately:** post a trade summary across platforms, candidly analyzing the loss—ignoring the news-risk window.
2. **Record the mistake:** in the red manual: “Even a perfect technical setup must respect major event schedules. Signal weighting must adjust.”
3. **Stay still:** no revenge trade. No attempt to “win it back” or “prove” anything. Let the system cycle naturally.
Unexpectedly, among the harsh criticism came other voices:
“At least the loss is real.”
“Transparent failure is more useful than edited success.”
“Stick to the system. One loss means nothing.”
And I realized:
**Transparency isn’t a performance of perfection. It’s an experiment where the entire process—errors, fragility, imperfection—is handed over to time for verification. In that experiment, failure data is as valuable as success data. Together they form complete evidence of whether a system works.**
---
## Chapter Four: One Hundred Thousand — A Verifiable Milestone
### 1. What the Target Means: Not an End, but a Measuring Stick
One hundred thousand dollars.
To me, it isn’t even primarily about wealth. It’s a clear, measurable, challenging **verification yardstick**.
I want to verify:
- that an ordinary person, with a fully public, internally coherent system,
- under strict risk control (2% per trade),
- can cross different market regimes (trend, range, black swan),
- and ultimately reach a height that looked distant from the starting point.
It’s like climbing. Not to boast to people at the foot of the mountain, but to prove to myself the path is real—and my chosen method and equipment are valid. One hundred thousand is the planned camp: a place to look back and assess.
### 2. The Current Philosophy: Becoming Whole in the Process
I no longer stare at the finish line with hunger. My focus has shifted entirely to **process quality**.
1) **Rules above all**
- The 2% rule is iron, regardless of account size.
- Signals must come from multi-timeframe resonance—no missing layers.
- If the reward-to-risk is below 1:1.5, I skip the trade.
2) **Accept the system’s limits**
- My win rate is about 60%. That means accepting 40% failure calmly.
- In certain regimes (long, trendless ranges) the system will feel flat. Normal. Waiting is part of strategy.
- I don’t chase every fluctuation—only the ones that belong to my system.
3) **Transparency as practice**
- Every decision is recorded, every P/L scrutinized—forcing stricter thinking and cleaner execution.
- Public setbacks are the best sandpaper for the mind.
- I’m not only trading the market—I’m practicing discipline under watchful eyes.
### 3. The Road Toward Verification
I don’t predict when I’ll reach one hundred thousand. That depends on opportunity distribution and the speed of compounding. The only things I can control are:
- **Keep executing:** make every trade adhere to the system as closely as possible.
- **Keep learning:** extract lessons from every trade, win or loss, and tune the system’s details.
- **Keep public:** keep all data transparent in real time so the verification process itself cannot be disputed.
By day, I still do my job at the bank. But something subtle has changed—I’ve started gaining insights from my personal practice, insights that sometimes let me offer a different angle in discussions. Colleagues may find it odd.
They don’t know those angles come from a thousand nights of chart study—from hundreds of decisions tested in public.
---
## Epilogue: Three Lamps, One Road
Three twenty a.m.
Today’s review is complete. The balance sits quietly on the screen.
In the blue journal, I write a new entry in neat lines: entry rationale, execution notes, emotional state. Then, like finishing a daily ritual, I confirm synchronization across seven platforms one by one—green, normal, updated.
People ask why I choose such a hard, exposed path.
My answer was written long ago on the first page of the black notebook—and rewritten in every late night lit by those three lamps:
**“At work, I maintain the operation of systems. In trading, I build and maintain my own. The first gives me a foundation in reality; the second gives me growth made whole. They aren’t separate—they’re two sides of the same coin: understanding rules, respecting process, and accepting outcomes.”**
One hundred thousand dollars is a lighthouse in the distance. Not to declare arrival, but to light the voyage. The real value isn’t the lighthouse itself—it’s whether the hull becomes stronger, the navigation more skilled, the mind more steady on the way there.
I know the road is long. The market is always unknown.
But I also know this: every order executed by system instruction, every promise of transparency kept, every thought sharpened in review—makes the “verification” clearer and sturdier.
That is enough.
Outside, the city is about to wake. Soon I’ll merge into the morning crowd and return to the glass-walled building.
But on certain servers in the world, seven streams of data will continue—quietly, faithfully recording. They don’t speak. They only keep witnessing:
an ordinary person working inside traditional finance,
using the most modern tools and the oldest honest virtue,
conducting—across the ocean of markets—an experiment about discipline, systems, and growth,
lonely, and transparent.
The experiment continues.
And the road stretches on beneath my feet.
---
## *To You, Also on the Road*
If you work in finance and take trading seriously, a few lessons may resonate:
1. **Use your professional literacy:** you understand risk, process, and discipline better than most. Inject that into personal trading—it’s a major edge.
2. **Redefine “slow”:** when you’re used to big numbers, you must stay patient with small account progress. Every great river begins as a trickle.
3. **Build your own “compliance process”:** design rigorous logging, review, and audit mechanisms like you do at work. That’s the foundation of long-term stability.
4. **Keep life balanced:** a stable primary job is the best psychological safety net for exploring a side path. Don’t let trading devour life—let it deepen your understanding of finance.
All my trading data is public on the seven platforms above. There are no myths there—only footsteps, one step at a time; no permanent correctness—only constant trial, error, and adjustment.
I’m not a master—just someone who insists on treating a personal passion with a professional attitude. If this transparent experiment lets you see another possibility—or simply gives you a little more patience to persist—
then every night under those three lamps has gained an extra meaning.
Forward, together.
