Hunt Gather Trade is Changing
This isn’t the first time I’ve changed things up, but this time is different. Nothing is being left behind. I’m just widening the scope of the newsletter.
Oh boy, here we go again. Larry is on another kick. Why can’t he just keep his shit together? Just deliver market trading strategies and research and keep it simple. Stop trying to reinvent the wheel.
If that’s what you’re thinking, I hear you. I really do.
And I only have this to say in response:
Fuck off.
Still here?
Cool. I like you. Let’s get into it.
I started this Substack in late 2023, and my only focus was learning how to become a better day trader. Over the last two years, I learned a lot. We went from using NinjaTrader and improving ATS strategies with better code. I got asked to stop doing that by the ATS creator, and that marked the first shift.
After that, I wasn’t really sure what to do. My knowledge in this field was still limited, but I knew one thing: if you’re going to create or test automated strategies, you need to understand how the coding side actually works. That sent me down a rabbit hole. I picked up some good books by Timothy Masters and started exploring.
I used the concepts from those books to build a bunch of Python scripts for testing indicators and features. That was fun, but I was still green.
I started researching different trading platforms. I looked at QuantConnect and the Lean engine. I used TradingView for a while and tested some ideas. Then I found RealTest. This was the first program I really fell in love with. The philosophy behind its development resonated with me. Marsten Parker is a wizard—programmer and trader. Seriously, he was in Unknown Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager. But it was the design philosophy of RealTest that really drew me in.
Why?
Because details matter.
That is what separates amateurs from pros. I’m not claiming to be a pro. Not even close. But I am neurotic, and I crave precision. I’m not naive enough to think perfection is attainable in the pure sense, but striving to get as close as possible still matters. That’s how we sharpen ourselves.
Once I found RealTest, I dove hard into strategy research. I built and dropped a bunch of strategies. I used indicator testing tools to test different features, then pulled them into RealTest to see how they performed in backtests. I was testing equities, futures, and whatever else came to mind.
That ran strong for months.
Then, somewhere around the beginning of this year, I hit a wall.
I started losing sight of what I was doing. Life was kicking my ass, and I fell off for a while. The more I learned about quantitative trading, the more I wanted better tools, and the more I became aware of the disconnect between retail traders and firms. I got jaded. I started questioning what I was doing and, eventually, started disliking it.
I was still actively day trading futures into the beginning of this year, but then I decided to step away for a while. I’d been researching systematic and quantitative trading for a good bit and still hadn’t reached the point where I felt confident enough to run an automated strategy live. I did run one of my RealTest strategies live for a while, but it wasn’t fully automated and left a lot to be desired. It did well enough, but I turned it off anyway. My heart just wasn’t in it, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next.
That was when I decided I was going to build my own tool for researching trade strategies.
As much as I love RealTest, it still doesn’t do everything I want. It’s proprietary. It has quirks. Marsten is an old-school C programmer, and RealTest is opinionated. Good opinions, mostly. A lot of them I agree with. But it still lacks some of the things I want.
I spent a good bit of time writing indicators in C that could be used directly in RealTest, and that taught me something: I like low-level languages like C more than I like languages like Python, C#, Go, JavaScript, or Java.
So I started the quantKit project. Since I wasn’t proficient in C yet, I decided to build the tool in Python—but without major dependencies, and with explicit code instead of all the Pythonic shit that makes code look like Arabic to me. I get why Python is the way it is, and I understand I’m taking the road less traveled, but it made sense to me. Still does.
During all of this, I stopped writing.
I haven’t produced a new strategy since February. That cost me subscribers, and I get it. That’s why most people are here. They want strategies with good results so they can test them and maybe make some money.
But that was part of the problem.
I had become one of those guys posting content that feeds directly into people’s desire to make more money. Nothing I posted was meant to be used as advice (read the disclaimer) but still. It was my research, and anyone who used it live did so on their own. That disclaimer still stands. But the more I sat with it, the more it bothered me.
I didn’t want to be one of those people.
I wanted to give real knowledge to the community. I wanted to help people actually understand what they were looking at so they could make better decisions. I couldn’t do that by just posting strategy results and backtests. That became a moral conflict.
quantKit was supposed to be the answer. It still might be.
But it is a huge endeavor, and it has taken me (just some dude trying to do this from home while being a full-time stay-at-home dad) a lot longer than I expected. There’s probably a bias for that. Kahneman wrote about it. I can’t remember the name right now, but you know the one.
While all of that was happening, life started fighting back.
Interlude: It’s about to get personal, real, and maybe a little heavy. Skip it if that isn’t your thing. Sometimes it’s easier to pretend the people you read online aren’t actually human.
Right before March, I had a pipe burst in my basement and flood the place. I had to handle all of that repair myself, except for the pipe itself—which I now know I probably could have handled too. I had to replace all the flooring in my father’s studio and deal with all the drying and repair work from the water damage. It sucked up a lot of time and energy.
Then in March, while I was already trying to find myself, my father almost died. He had cardiac issues that sent him to the ER. During that visit, he had a femoral bleed that almost killed him. After surgery, he came home, then went straight back to the ER in septic shock from the surgery site. That second visit turned into a hospital stay and rehab that lasted for months.
For context, my father lives with me and my family. When we moved into this house in 2021, he came with us so I could help take care of him. My mother passed many years ago, and he needed to be with someone. Don’t mistake that for sainthood. I am not particularly close to or fond of my father. There is history. But he is the only parent I have left, and I care enough not to leave him to figure everything out alone.
That wasn’t the end of it.
Aside from the house repairs and my father being in the hospital, my wife was also pregnant with our second child. That’s a blessing, obviously, but it changes the environment. Our first child is two and requires more attention, more energy, and a lot more patience.
Then there was me.
If you’ve been reading for a while, you know I don’t have the normal résumé for someone writing about trading systems. Before my son was born, I was a paramedic. That was my career for over a decade. Before that, I was in the Army. When I got back from Iraq in 2009, I had more time in a combat zone than I had in garrison. For those who don’t know what that means, I deployed almost immediately after training and was fast-tracked through the pipeline.
When I got out of the Army in 2010, I went straight into EMS and didn’t leave that life until my son was born in 2023. I almost missed his birth because I was in Iraq. I would not have made it back in time if my former Spades partner hadn’t just been promoted to project manager. Thanks to him, I was able to fly home fast and be there when my son was born. The day after he was born, I called my company and resigned. I wasn’t going to stay absent from my family.
That was when I started getting into trading and eventually launched this Substack.
Why am I telling you all this?
Because from 2007 to 2023, I worked nonstop in high-adrenaline and eventually high-threat environments. I never really took enough time off to recognize that I had issues I had never addressed. Then I quit. I really quit. I went all in on being a stay-at-home dad and trying to figure out how to work from home.
Once I slowed down, all the shit from deployment and EMS became impossible to ignore.
My house breaks. Then my father breaks. And during all of this, I am breaking too.
I couldn’t sleep because of nightmares. I found out I also have sleep apnea and needed to deal with that. I started therapy to work through a lot of shit I never worked through before. It was rough.
I let the Substack slide.
I couldn’t concentrate for shit. I didn’t know who I was. I was still trying to be a parent, a husband, and the stay-at-home spouse. The Substack just didn’t make the top-priority list.
On top of all that, I was trying to get a bunch of VA stuff settled and unfuck some bad financial decisions from the past couple of years. Maybe I’ll talk about that in another post, but for now it isn’t the point. It felt like every time I handled one thing, two more popped up. All the while, I was going crazy internally.
To put it bluntly, this year was a whirlwind of fuckery that had me questioning everything. Not just HGT or my own sanity. Everything.
I started seeing things differently. I started spotting patterns in the things we take for granted. I started thinking harder about profit, capitalism, and how far we’ve drifted from anything resembling a real free market. I started wondering how much of our current condition is stupidity, and how much of it is malice that finally learned how to wear a tie and speak politely.
Then I did what I always do.
I decided to handle more of it myself.
And weirdly enough, that is what helped me find solid ground again.
Once I started doing that—really doing that—things started clicking.
And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
That’s just life, right?
We’re all human. We all get tested. I handled this year the best I could, and this Substack absorbed a lot of the cost. So to the readers who made it this far, and to the people who have been here for a while: I’m sorry. I did not make this a priority. I believe that was the right call, but I also know I owe you an explanation.
Still, I didn’t just spiral. I kept learning.
Because that’s what we do.
If we get hit, we learn how to avoid it next time, or we get tougher. Sometimes you can’t avoid getting punched. But you can train how you respond.
Through all of this, I kept adapting. I slowly found myself again. I may not be the same shit-hot medic I used to be, but I am still sharp, still detail-oriented, and still driven. I just had to adapt my way of thinking to a different environment and a different life.
And that is what I want to talk about now.
This year taught me a lot. The biggest takeaway is this:
We are being trained to offload our lives.
Not just in trading. In everything.
We are conditioned to hand off anything difficult, tedious, or technical to someone else. We are taught that if we want to be good at one thing, we have to sacrifice competence in everything else. We are told it is impossible to be good at multiple things.
I think that is mostly bullshit.
Yes, there are some fields where elite specialization is real. If you want to be an Olympic runner, you probably are not also training to be an elite powerlifter. Fine.
But for most of life? No.
For most of life, “specialization” becomes an excuse for learned helplessness. It gives people permission not to try.
This year reminded me that I can still learn new shit. It reminded me that there are a lot of things we can become competent at without sacrificing everything else. And when we do, we gain back freedom we didn’t even realize we’d lost.
If we apply just a little more mental bandwidth across more areas of life, we often discover it doesn’t take much to get good enough at something that we no longer need to outsource it.
Let me give you a few examples.
Example 1: The basement flood
I won’t get into why the pipe burst, because the reason doesn’t matter. For the record, it wasn’t my fault, but the amount of damage that happened from it absolutely was somebody’s fault. The pipe was going to burst either way.
The first thing I did when I stepped into a couple inches of water in my basement was run to the breaker and shut off the power. Then I shut off the water at the main line. After that, I had no clue what to do next, so I called a plumber and got someone out to the house immediately.
They identified the problem (I had already found the leak and exposed the pipe) and fixed it. I watched them the whole time. The crew was cool, down-to-earth, and answered my questions. They repaired the pipe, replaced the fixture, and had a guy call me about water mitigation.
That guy couldn’t come out until the next day.
To me, that sounded like a great way to let my walls, wood, and insulation soak up as much water as possible before anyone did a damn thing. So I handled what I could. I cut the lower part of the sheet-rock, removed insulation that might have gotten wet, vacuumed up the water, assessed the flooring in the studio, and set every fan I had to work drying things out.
The next day, the mitigation guy told me it would cost five grand for his crew to come in and do exactly what I had already done.
I told him to kick rocks.
So I did the rest myself. Walls, floors, bathroom, moisture testing, all of it. It sucked. But I learned a lot. I learned that the previous owners had installed the basement room floor over carpet, so I had to pull that too and deal with the glue.
The glue. Fuck me. That was the worst part.
Point is, it became a major project that ate my attention for about two weeks. In the end, it cost me around $1,500, and most of that was LVP. I also found two other problems in the basement bathroom that I’ll need to address later.
Example 2: The kitchen
This one is quicker.
I like cooking. My favorite job was working in a kitchen. I watch cooking shows. I like a lot of different food. So naturally, I spend a lot of time in my kitchen.
And here’s something stupidly obvious that most people still ignore: if you make your own shit, you can save a lot of money and eat better food.
A pound of fresh fettuccine costs maybe one to two dollars to make, depending on the flour and eggs. A decent dried pasta at the store costs around five dollars, and the more common brands are still two to three. Most of them suck, usually get used all at once, and don’t store half-open especially well anyway.
This pattern is everywhere.
Bread? Dirt cheap if you make it yourself, and not nearly as complicated as people pretend.
Stock or broth? It’s made out of shit you were going to throw away anyway. That makes it basically free.
And once you start noticing it, you can’t stop. The question becomes: how much can you actually save by becoming an ingredient household?
The answer: more than you think.
It takes time, sure. Maybe a little skill. Maybe some love for food and process. But the payoff is bigger than most people realize.
Example 3: Finances
Big word. Scary word.
We hear “budget this” and “finance that” and “taxes this,” and eventually somebody says, “Just hire a professional.”
No.
Stop it.
The biggest secret about managing your own finances is basically the same as cooking: it isn’t hard. It can be tedious. It can be time-consuming if you start with no framework at all. But once you understand it, that’s it. The principles don’t change that often. Math definitely doesn’t.
At some point this year, it became clear that I had made financial mistakes that needed correcting. That process really started around August. So I decided to get control of it.
Luckily, I had at least some background in finance and accounting from a degree program. I decided to go full send and built double-entry books for our family finances and my self-employment finances. That forced me to see every detail, build the account structure correctly, and actually plan.
It took time, but I backfilled all of 2025, and now I know exactly what is going on with our finances. Maintenance is easy now that the hard part is done.
And it taught me something important:
I do not need a professional to manage this for me.
Even taxes become much simpler when your books are right. The IRS rules are publicly available. They are not gripping reading, but they are educational as hell. Once the new year rolls around, I can print a handful of reports and basically have the whole picture ready to go. For anything weird (like unamortized mortgage points or deductible mortgage interest allocations) I can build supporting worksheets and cite the actual IRS or state publications.
The point is that complete control creates clarity. And clarity creates leverage.
That means real accounting. Not random tables and sloppy worksheets. Real cost analysis, supported by law, maintained honestly, and handled with the same discipline you’d expect from a professional.
Good principles and honesty go a long way here.
Time to bring it home
It was a wild year. Crisis, distraction, health issues, family obligations, and everything in between—all while still being a father, a husband, and trying to stay self-employed so I could keep being a stay-at-home dad.
And through all of it, I kept wondering what I was actually doing with HGT.
I haven’t actively traded since March, and quantKit stalled out. Something stopped feeling right.
As I got a more intimate understanding of my home, my finances, and the systems that shape everyday life, I realized how much people miss because they have been trained not to look. We’ve been conditioned to outsource the important stuff. It’s either “too hard,” “too complicated,” or “not worth the time.”
Well, I say fuck that.
A lot of it is not hard. Some of it is time-consuming, yes. But that is often the price of freedom. Freedom from complacency, from consumer dependence, and from blind trust in people whose incentives you haven’t even examined.
As a family man, I can’t think of a better use of my time than understanding the systems my household depends on and making sure they work. That means learning where the points of failure are. It means understanding the tools, the constraints, the costs, and the leverage points. It means reducing the amount of your life that sits at the mercy of somebody else’s “expert” opinion.
That is why HGT is shifting gears.
Researching day trading systems has been a great adventure, but I don’t know when I’ll actively trade again. Don’t freak out. I am not walking away from market research. I’m changing how I approach it.
quantKit was originally meant to be a research engine for quantitative and systematic traders. The project was always ambitious, highly detailed, and very complex. It will live on, but I’m pivoting it from a trading backtesting engine into a broader systems-analysis tool that better aligns with what I actually believe about household independence, resilience, and control. I’ll share more on that in the next post.
Since I am no longer focused on day trading, and since this year gave me the perspective to get honest about what I actually care about, Hunt Gather Trade is expanding.
The new focus is building resilient, well-managed households.
Systematic trading taught me something useful: systems thinking applies to a hell of a lot more than markets. Personal and small-business finance. Accounting. Kitchen management. Home infrastructure. Repair. Networks. Information control. The hidden incentives inside modern convenience. These are the systems we actually live inside whether we acknowledge them or not.
And these systems contain some of the biggest levers available to a normal family trying to gain control over its time, money, and quality of life.
So that is where HGT is going.
I am still going to write about markets, but less from the perspective of day trading and more from the perspective of longer-term investing, capital allocation, and durable wealth building.
I am going to write about home infrastructure and why understanding your own systems matters.
I am going to write about the kitchen as a serious household lever, not some side hobby.
I am going to write about finance, accounting, proprietary systems, dependence disguised as convenience, networking, repair, and whatever else helps people take more control over their own lives.
Hunt Gather Trade is not going away.
It is just becoming more honest.
If that sounds like something you’re into, stick around.
The goal is simple:
Figure out how to become as free, capable, and self-sufficient as possible.
Stay curious.
Stay open-minded.
Stay alert.
Happy hunting.
This post does not represent any type of advice, financial or otherwise. Its purpose is educational and informational only. Backtest results are based on historical data, not real-time data, and there is no guarantee hypothetical results will continue in the future. Day trading is extremely risky, and I do not suggest running any of these strategies live.