I was a carpenter and a builder when the financial crash arrived — not because I saw it coming, but because everyone did, eventually, whether they wanted to or not. Work dried up the way it does for people whose hands build things, while the people moving numbers around seemed to walk away untouched. That contrast stayed with me longer than I realised at the time.

In the months after, I started writing — and quickly realised a writer needs to eat. Looking for a way to make money while I worked on the book, I got distracted one day, mid-sentence, by an ad for trading penny stocks. I looked at my first chart. I’m a puzzle person. I couldn’t look away.

I spent the next few months and about €10,000 doing exactly what most people do: chasing indicator systems, memorising candlestick patterns, trusting people who sounded confident. None of it held up. Then, slowly, I started seeing something underneath all of it — the way one price swing fits precisely under or over the swing before it. What happens, specifically, when a high gets broken. Not a theory. A shape, repeating.

Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. I started predicting turns with a precision that startled me, and I scalped it hard enough to nearly burn myself out doing it.

The charts did exactly what I’d needed them to do — they gave me a living. These days, that’s reversed: the writing is the work I care about most, and the charts are what give me the freedom and the time to do it.