Why I Built a Rule-Based Trading System.

I took my first trade after seeing a bullish pin on a 5-minute chart, just a minute after my trading account was approved. I was on the train to Zurich, convinced my life was about to change.

I entered and a few seconds later my position was 400 Swiss francs in profit. It felt unreal for about 2 minutes - then the market reversed and turned that profit into a 200-franc loss. I panic-closed the trade nearly at break-even. My heart was racing at 170 beats per minute, and I was drawn to the adrenaline. A few weeks later I blew that account and stopped trading forex forever.

What did that experience actually teach me?

• Signal (opportunity) - bullish pin on the 5-minutes timeframe alone was not enough to put real money on the line
• Position size - I did not calculate how much I was willing to lose on that trade. I just used the pre-defined order size which resulted in very high leverage
• Trade plan - I had no idea where to take profit and what would invalidate the trade. I closed this one manually despite being paralysed by fear, but in many others I let losses run because there was not stop loss. I did not have a take profit either. 400 francs would have increased the value of my account by 20% - and still, I wanted more.

I did not have an edge, and it took me years to build one - through studying, testing and seeing what actually works. And then, I was still making mistakes. I kept breaking my own rules: overtrading, moving stop losses to avoid taking a loss, and taking revenge trades that usually made things even worse.

That’s how I decided to remove myself from the decision-making. I needed a system that could define and manage trades without emotions. That’s how I built the trading bot which later became the Candela North solution.