About
I'm Mark. I've been trading since 2019 and building automated systems for MetaTrader since 2023. I trade my own money, I build the tools I use, and I sell some of them.
How I got here
I started the way most people do, reading everything and trying most of it. I started off trading forex after a couple of trading courses online and then I moved on to stocks, where fundamentals play a much bigger role in my opinion; tricky when you’re trading mainly using technical analysis.
Eventually I found automated systems, and specifically the category that dominates the retail market: grid and martingale EAs. They were compelling. The equity curves were smooth, the win rates were enormous, and for a while my account did exactly what the marketing said it would.
6 months either side of the US Presidential Election in November 2025 there were some deep trends on the US dollar, rippling off into other markets as well. These long and persistent trends are the worst market regimes for a martingale system and I didn’t help my situation with some quite aggressive settings.
What I took from that wasn't that automation doesn't work. It was that I'd been looking at the wrong number. I'd been watching the returns when I should have been asking what the system does when it's wrong, and how far it can go before it stops.
What I build now
Single-position Expert Advisors. One trade at a time, a defined stop on every entry, and logic you can read in plain language rather than a black box with a nice chart attached.
They're less exciting. A single-position system will show you losing trades, because it closes them instead of holding them open and hoping. Over a year that's a bumpier ride than a grid, right up until the point where the grid isn't.
Why I'm still running one grid system
Consistency matters, so I'll be upfront: I run Perceptrader AI, which is a grid system with martingale-style sizing. I run it on the low-risk setting with some of the early grid trades filtered out, and I've written about exactly how and why on its page, including the parts I'm not comfortable with.
I'd rather explain that than quietly leave it off the site. If I only showed you the things that fit the story neatly, you'd have no reason to trust the rest.
What I think about trading
This industry sells a fantasy. Rented cars, hired yachts, screenshots of one good week. It works because the fantasy is more appealing than the reality, which is that sustainable growth is slow, unglamorous and mostly about not blowing up.
The traders I know who are still here after ten years are not the ones who found a system that never loses. They're the ones who understood their risk well enough to survive the bad months, and who compounded modest returns without interruption. That's a less marketable message and I think it's the true one.
Talk to me
If you're looking at an EA and want an honest opinion, ask. It doesn't have to be one of mine, and I don't need anything from you. I've spent enough money learning these lessons that I'd rather pass some of it on than watch someone repeat it.
Nothing on this site is financial advice, a recommendation or a forecast. Trading carries risk, including losing more than your deposit on leveraged products. High Tide Trading sells software and is not authorised or regulated by the FCA.