On the verge — why I built it

In 2012 I made my first trade. By 2024, I'd lost more than half a million pounds to the markets. Most of it came back to the same single thing: clicking the button when I shouldn't have.

This is the long version of why I built Verge — with the names of the things that broke.

What "more than half a million" actually looks like

It's not one trade. It's never one trade.

It's six years of small leaks. Then three months of denial. Then a single Sunday evening trying to make it all back at 2x leverage. Then another six years of being more careful with a third of what I'd had.

I don't tell people the exact number much, because the number isn't the point. The point is that for twelve years I knew what I was doing — and I did it anyway.

The thing I kept noticing

Some trades I made calmly. Some I made wired. Most of the wired ones lost. The pattern was obvious if you wrote it down.

So I started writing it down.

I'd open the trading platform, look at my Apple Watch, screenshot my heart rate alongside my position. I'd note what I'd slept the night before. I'd record what had happened the trade before. Win or lose, I'd post-mortem.

It worked. Not because I started trading better — I traded the same — but because I started catching myself before some of the worst trades. The pattern was nervous-system-driven, not analysis-driven. The data was right there, on my wrist, the whole time. I just hadn't connected it.

Why nobody else was doing this

I looked. Properly.

There was a trading-psychology coaching market — books, podcasts, six-figure-a-year mentors. There were half a dozen trade-journal apps. But the link between biometric state and trade quality was something nobody had built. The closest things were:

• Trade journals that asked you to type out how you felt. Self-report is the worst tool for catching a problem that lies to you about its own existence.
• Fitness apps that tracked HRV but never knew the context. They couldn't tell you that your elevated heart rate at 14:42 was you clicking buy on Tesla calls thirty seconds before a CPI print.
• Trading platforms that knew the trade but not the human.

What was missing was the bridge. Something that watched both at once and showed you the join.

The decision to build it

The decision wasn't romantic. It was three sentences:

If I'd had this tool in 2012, I'd have £500k more.

If I'd had it in 2018, half of that.

If I had it now, my worst weeks would stop being my worst weeks.

I wrote the spec on the back of a Pret receipt in February. Started building in March. First version on my own wrist in May.

What Verge actually does

It pairs with your Apple Watch and quietly reads your physiological state — heart rate, HRV, sleep, recent activity — and shows you what's normal for you, in this specific context, at this specific time of day. Then when you tag a trade, it overlays the two: what you did, and what state you were in when you did it.

That's it.

It's not magic. It's not predictive in any way that matters. It's just the visible version of something most traders ignore until it's cost them their savings.

What it isn't

I'm careful about this part. The temptation in a market like trader-tools is to over-promise. So, in plain English:

• Verge does not predict the market.
• Verge does not make trades for you.
• Verge does not tell you when to enter or exit.
• Verge will not make you profitable on its own.

It does one thing: it makes the invisible visible. The nervous-system state behind your clicks. Whether you act on what it shows you is the actual work.

Why I'm saying this out loud

I've been quiet about the losses for a long time. The trading world has a strange relationship with failure — you either celebrate it as a "founder origin story" or hide it because it disqualifies you from being taken seriously. I've been doing both, depending on the room.

The studio is the version where I stop doing both. Verge is the version where I stop pretending the twelve years didn't happen. The Journal is the version where, occasionally, I write about it openly — so that someone deep in the cycle can read it and feel less alone, and possibly less doomed.

If you're early on this path: take the next twelve months seriously. The patterns are forming in you whether you can see them or not.

If you're deep in the cycle: there's no shame in that, only in pretending you're not. Talk to someone. Build a record. Make the invisible visible.

That's what Verge is for. That's what this studio is for.

— The founder