About Us
Our Origins and Story
Year 1996. I was just a graduate student of Norwegian University of Science and Technology (former University of Trondheim). I was born lucky; good brain, parents who valued education, precious little athletic talent, but I always had an interest in the financial markets. My first assignment was as Junior Market Analyst at Handelsbanken Norway during the last year at school. The knowledge I gained through this assignment allowed me to achieve the learning outcome of: overall market analysis, advanced fundamental analysis, collating and analyzing information to make sense of what's on the market.
I moved to United States in 1998. I got a job as Commodity Trading Advisor at one of the small trading companies. I made my first investment at this time. I loved technology and internet-related companies were on the rise. Easy money. Watching stock go up and then selling for a hug gain was one of the most exciting things I had done until then. I thought I would never have to work again. I was wrong. I almost lost everything during dot-com bubble burst. I got to a point where I had to face reality. Either I had to start to make money in the stock market or I would lose everything and get taken out of the game. That meant realizing that I had not been investing or trading with any sort of strategy at all. My first lesson learnt was that most of the people do not invest in the stock market with any sort of game plan at all. To make money in the stock market, you have to have a strategic game plan and stick with it all the time.
My first trading software purchase was Tradestation. I was quite good at programming, so I made my first automated system that was based on technical analysis only. After a few years of intense research of testing literally a thousand different trading rules and optimizing various strategies that were crunching numbers on two high-end computers running 24/7, I came up with a trading system based on floor trader pivots support and resistance zones and the probabilities of the market opening and closing within those levels.
In late 2006, long before popular trading forums and thousand new trading retailers, me and Mike (my friend and superb fundamental analyst) created a company offering our clients with automated trading systems based on technical and fundamental analysis. We had the good fortune to meet and consult with floor traders, hedge fund managers and traders of all types. Valuable lessons were learned about what really goes on in the business of trading.
Daniel Saugstad
CEO