About
That sentence does the work. Most trading-edu founders are SaaS people who quit trading to sell courses. I'm still in the seat. I traded yesterday. I'll trade tomorrow. The framework, the bot, the curriculum — they're the byproduct of running my own trading better, not the product I built instead of trading.
I started in Bitcoin in 2017 — the first run from $1k to $20k and the crash that followed. Then early-2018 parabolic runners on stocks before pump-and-dumps disappeared from regulation. The thinking: "do something where I could start to make a few million a year while I can enjoy it" instead of grinding 100-150k for 40 years. Naive about most things. Right about the direction.
I got 1-on-1 coaching at TradeNet in NYC. They sat me down after I ran a $14k account up to $31k in two weeks and told me I was overtrading. Take 3 shots a day max. Win or lose. I didn't listen. Blew up the whole thing.
That was the most expensive lesson I've ever paid for and the most valuable. Eight years later "3 shots a day max" is still my hard cap. Most disasters in this game are spiral disasters, not setup disasters — and the cap protects against the spiral mathematically. You literally can't take the 4th trade if you've used your 3 daily shots.
Five years where most people would have quit. Funded accounts. Blow-ups. Funded accounts again. Side jobs while keeping the lights on. WA unemployment payments that gave me runway. Custom Pine Script indicators that nobody asked me to build. 26,600 journal messages of decision context — I was journaling daily even when nobody was reading.
Looking back, this was the most important stretch. "It took me 7 years to get to this stage but I truly was building the roots. I have a stronger foundation than anybody trading a course." That's a real claim, not marketing. Five years of journaling your own decisions while losing money is worth more than five courses about how to make money.
Pulled $6k out of stocks. Put $4k into a personal trading account, saved the rest. WA unemployment was still paying weekly for both jobs I'd had the prior year — runway through to year-end. The exact words I journaled at the time:
June 19, 2024
"This is the time I succeed. Now or never really. It's the perfect opportunity. Just have to take good entries with smart risk. Live with the results."
Two days later I was journaling four-figure-a-day P&Ls in single-digit-contract MES trades. The roots had compounded into something real. The next eight months would be the densest journaling year of my life — 8,326 messages in 2024 alone.
At some point in August 2024 the goal crystallized. Not flashy. Not influencer. Lowkey:
August 18, 2024
"I know I'm gonna be a millionaire trader. I used to be excited to get there and tell people. But now I just wanna be the lowkey millionaire. Let people think whatever the hell they want about me. I'm golfing every week. Hooping 4 days a week. Lifting 4-5 days a week. Hanging out with fam and friends on the weekend. What more can I ask for?"
That's still the goal. Lowkey, sustainable, doing the work, real life around the trading. Most trading content sells the lifestyle of NOT working. I want the lifestyle of trading well, sleeping well, and being there for my people.
2025 was a quieter journaling year — only 596 messages versus 8,326 in 2024. Not because I stopped trading. Because I'd codified enough that the live-narration style wasn't necessary anymore. The 2025 messages are denser and more philosophical. The cleanest framework statement I've ever written came from this year:
February 2025
"Timeframe sync + paint sync on every timeframe from monthly down to 10 minute. Exact setup would probably be consolidation breakout on the daily combined with the consolidation breakout on the 10 minute for the best RR overall. Clear stop below consolidation."
And the explicit annual math:
January 2025
"Goal this year is to pull $100,000 from my 5 funded accounts. Risking $100 per trade per account = $500 per trade total. Target $250 × 5 = $1,250. If I have a 50% hit rate for the full year (250 trading days): $1,250 × 125 winning days = $156,250. Losses: $500 × 125 losing days = $62,500. Net: $93,750."
That's not aspirational. That's the math you do when you have 7 years of receipts on your hit rate and your average R-captured. If you can't math the year, you don't have a plan, you have a hope.
Right now: 5 funded TopStep accounts run via copier from a master account, plus a personal account I trade alongside. $25k max-payout milestone in sight. 1-2 MES contracts as base size, scaled up to 3-4 only on A+ setups maybe once a week.
And — for the first time — I'm opening the framework to other traders. Not because I stopped trading. Because the bot, the curriculum, and the community are byproducts of trading better, and a small group of serious traders should benefit from them too. Founding-100 lock $19/mo for life. After that, standard $29/mo. The framework you'd read in Module 1 is the same one I run on every trade today.
I'm 30. I'll be 50 in 2046. That's 20 more years of trading minimum, and the math says I'll keep doing it as long as it's profitable — which is to say, indefinitely. Most trading-edu brands have a 6-month influencer half-life because the founder isn't actually trading anymore. I'm the opposite. The brand at jalentrades.com is here for the long compound, not the quick churn.
That has implications. Customers who join Jalen Method at $19/mo lifetime today will still have an active practitioner running their bot in 2046. The cohort recordings will keep growing. The community will keep deepening. The override-capture data will keep teaching the system where instinct beats rules. This isn't a launch — it's the start of a 20-year compound.
Marketing copy. But operator-tested marketing copy. These are the principles I trade by, in order of how often I lean on them.
The actual stack. Not affiliate links, not sponsored mentions — what's open on my screens during a session.