The hourly rate nobody calculates
Traders count their profits. Almost nobody counts their hours.
Do the math you've been avoiding
Take an honest look at your trading year. Six to eight hours a day in front of the charts — pre-market prep, the session itself, the journaling, the replaying of trades in your head at dinner. Call it 6 hours a day, 250 trading days. That's 1,500 hours a year. Closer to 2,000 if you're honest about the evenings.
Now take your net profit for the year and divide it by those hours.
For a lot of traders — including profitable ones — that number lands below minimum wage. For break-even traders it's zero dollars an hour for a full-time job's worth of hours. For losing traders, they're paying for the privilege.
Nobody runs this calculation, because the answer is uncomfortable: most people who "trade for a living" didn't build an income. They bought themselves a second job — an unpaid one with worse hours and a boss (the market) who doesn't care.
My day, honestly
Here's what my trading day looks like from Costa Rica, and I want to be precise because the internet is full of laptop-on-the-beach nonsense.
In the morning I check the overnight positions and make sure every strategy and alert is running the way it should. Then I go surf. In the afternoon I sit down again for a longer look — reviewing what fired, what's queued, how the accounts sit against their limits. All in, about an hour a day. Not zero. An hour.
An hour instead of eight. Not because I'm disciplined — because the decisions aren't mine to make anymore. Entries, exits, and position sizes are fixed in code. My job stopped being "make good decisions under pressure all day" and became "make sure the machine that makes the decisions is healthy." Those are very different jobs, and only one of them fits in an hour.
The proof is in the last quarter
This only matters if the machine actually earns while you're not watching it. So here's the most recent evidence — the strategies I sell, running on real funded accounts, April through June:
Every bundle and every strategy setup finished the quarter in profit — 12 of 12 bundles, 20 of 20 setups. The forex bundles led with +$21,429, +$18,402 and +$16,449. The steady $50k bundle added +$5,450. My newest strategy had a strong first quarter on micro gold: +$16,300 on the $100k account across eight trades (eight trades is a small sample — early days).
That's a quarter of profits at roughly an hour of my attention per day. Divide those numbers by ~90 hours instead of ~500 and you see the actual product here. It's not a secret indicator. It's an hourly rate that makes sense.
Full breakdown is in the Q2 results post.
This is not a dream sale
No Lambo, no 4 a.m. grind montage, no "quit your job in 30 days." The pitch is more boring than that, which is exactly why I trust it: rules in code, sized to the account's loss limit, plus about an hour a day of oversight. I've been building this for over two years, and this is the year the results are on the table.
The freedom part isn't the beach. It's the hours. Surfing is just what I happen to do with mine — you'll have your own answer, and that's the entire point of getting your hourly rate right.
FAQ
What is a funded (prop-firm) account?
An account where a firm provides the trading capital and pays you a share of profits, as long as you stay within their loss limits.
How much time does a systematic setup actually need?
In my case, about an hour a day: a morning check of overnight positions, strategies and alerts, then a longer afternoon review. The strategies execute on their own rules; the time goes into oversight, not decision-making.
Doesn't more screen time make you a better trader?
More screen time improves discretionary decisions — if that's your model, hours are the cost of doing business. With fixed rules in code, extra watching adds nothing, because there are no in-the-moment decisions left to improve.
What's in a bundle?
Several strategies across different markets, combined and pre-sized for one account size ($50k, $100k or $150k). One strategy alone takes few trades and swings quarter to quarter; the mix smooths that out.
Performance figures are a combination of live-tracked and modeled results. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Not financial advice.