If you scroll back far enough on this blog you’ll find posts from 2011 about ad trackers, affiliate networks, and meetups in San Diego. I was in my early twenties, buying traffic, testing offers, and writing about it here. This site has been sitting on the internet under my name ever since.
I’m writing this because the blog is changing direction, and I want to explain the road that got me here, because it’s not the road most trading content comes from.
The money printer years
Affiliate marketing in the 2010s was the wild west and I loved it. You found an offer, you bought traffic against it, and if the math worked you scaled until it broke. Some campaigns died in a day. Some printed for months. I ran media buys across every platform that would take my money, built ecommerce brands, health offers, apps, whatever the numbers justified.
Fifteen years of that teaches you things no course can. You learn to read numbers without emotion, because emotion is expensive at scale. You learn to kill losers fast, because every day a losing campaign runs is money walking out the door. You learn that a winner is not a feeling, it’s a spreadsheet. And you learn that nothing lasts. Offers die. Platforms change rules overnight. Accounts get banned on a Tuesday for no reason. The income can be spectacular and it is never, ever safe.
That last lesson is the one that matters for this story.
Income is not the same as wealth
Somewhere along the way I noticed something uncomfortable. I was good at making money, but making money and keeping money are two completely different skills, and nobody in my world talked about the second one.
Every affiliate I knew was chasing the next campaign. The wins got spent on more traffic, better cars, bigger launches. The whole game was income. But income stops the moment the campaign stops, and campaigns always stop. The people who actually came out of that era wealthy were not the ones with the biggest revenue screenshots. They were the ones who moved profits somewhere that kept working after the campaign died.
So that’s what I did. Campaign profits went into the market. Not trading at first, just buying. Companies I understood, positions I was willing to sit on. Over the years, through wins and some genuinely bad buys, that became a seven figure portfolio.
And at some point I realized the portfolio had quietly become more interesting to me than the campaigns funding it.
The overlap nobody told me about
Here’s what surprised me when I started taking trading seriously: I had been training for it for fifteen years without knowing.
A trade is a campaign. You risk a defined amount to test a thesis. If the thesis is wrong you cut it fast and cheap. If it’s right you press it. The affiliates who blew up their businesses were the ones who couldn’t kill a losing campaign, who kept feeding it budget because they were emotionally invested. The traders who blow up their accounts do the exact same thing with losing positions. Same disease, different platform.
Tracking is the journal. In media buying, if you don’t track every click and conversion you’re not running a business, you’re guessing. Trading is identical. The traders who log every position, every entry, every exit and every reason are running a business. Everyone else is guessing with extra steps.
Position sizing is budget allocation. No sane media buyer puts the whole budget on one untested campaign. No sane trader puts the whole account on one position. The math of risking a small fixed slice per test, so no single failure can take you out, is the same math in both games.
The difference is that the market doesn’t ban your account, change its algorithm, or kill your offer. The market has been running the same game for a hundred years. After fifteen years of building on rented land, there’s something to be said for that.
What happens on this blog now
So this site is pivoting to where my attention actually is.
The old affiliate posts stay up. They’re part of the record, and honestly some of them are funny to read now. But the interesting numbers on this site going forward won’t be conversion rates.
Dino
Everything here is education and documentation of my own trading, not investment advice. Trading involves real risk of loss. Make your own decisions.