I started on the sell side in 2012, writing equity research notes that real people read about ten percent of the time. The other ninety percent of the time I was reading them myself, three times over, trying to figure out what I actually believed. That's an underrated way to learn to write — and to be honest about what you don't know.

I left research in 2018 to trade options for my own book. Five years of being wrong in expensive, specific ways teaches you something about which tools matter and which ones are theater. The takeaway: most of the trading-software industry survives on switching costs, not quality. Once a trader has built ten years of layouts inside a platform, they will tolerate almost anything to avoid rebuilding them.

I joined Trader Alternatives in 2026 because the writing about this stuff is overwhelmingly bad. Affiliate-driven listicles, vendors reviewing themselves, the same three platforms ranked in the same order across forty different sites. There is room — and a need — for someone who pays for the products, runs a live book through them, and writes about what actually broke.

Charting platforms, equity-side execution venues, and the working-trader workflow — pre-market scan to order entry to post-trade review. I run every review on a funded account; the platforms I score the harshest are the ones I had to use the longest before I could write about them honestly.

Off the beat: trading psychology pieces, get-rich newsletters, and anything that uses the word "guru" without irony.