This is not just a website, a research log, or a personal project. It is an intentional act of public design. In an industry built on opacity, institutional scale, and structural power, I am choosing to do something different: to build a full-featured personal trading and finance system in public, on my own terms. This manifesto exists to explain why and to invite others to follow along, question, contribute, or challenge what emerges.
The Problem with the Current System
Modern finance, at its core, performs essential services: credit allocation, liquidity provision, price discovery, risk transfer across time and sectors, amongst others. But the way these services are structured, and who benefits from them, is deeply broken.
The industry is built on complexity that often conceals rather than clarifies. Rent extraction is widespread, with value siphoned from markets and participants to feed institutions, platforms, and layers of intermediaries. Skilled individuals are locked into silos through contracts, compensation, and cultural codes of silence. Retail participants are gated out, are “protected” legally, but in practice excluded from access to meaningful tools and opportunities.
Finance has become structurally inaccessible. Regulatory and legal frameworks discourage experimentation and reinforce centralization. Tools and strategies are "gate-kept". And perhaps most importantly, public understanding of the financial system remains fragmented, confused, and often deliberately obfuscated.
This is not just a technical or economic issue, it is a political one. Financial power is central to how our society allocates resources and opportunity. And right now, it is disproportionately wielded by a small elite. That has consequences: for inequality, for legitimacy, for democracy itself.
The Vision
The motivations behind Money Ex Machina are multiple: some selfish, some systemic, but all honest.
At the most personal level: I have spent a decade in finance, and I have capital to manage. I enjoy this work. And I have seen firsthand that the options available to “sophisticated” individuals outside the institutional machine are deeply sub-optimal. So I am building my own money machine, tailored to my needs, but extensible by design.
More broadly, this is about personal empowerment and digital citizenship. I have proven I can do this work inside a Tier 1 hedge fund. Now I want to prove it can be done solo, with the right architecture and approach. That means demystifying the process, documenting the trade-offs, and building tools that others could one day use, without depending on a firm or platform. This is also the first step in answering the systemic problem: not yet changing the system, but broadening access to it.
At the same time, I am not satisfied with how finance interacts with the real economy and with society at large. I believe that better structures are possible. But I am a realist, not a revolutionary. I do not believe that one project, or one person, can redesign a system this complex alone. What I can do is model an alternative stance:
- modelling the type of personal empowerment I would like to see, in financial confidence and competence.
- building conceptual frameworks and tools for others to use to this effect,
- and modelling the thought, analysis, and arguments I am missing in public,
- behaving with clarity, intellectual honesty, and curiosity,
- offering critique grounded in construction.
Finance needs more than criticism. It needs thoughtful, principled engagement—especially from those who know its inner workings. That is what this project aims to offer.
The Method
Building a personal trading system is not just ambitious—it is structurally hard. Not because any single piece is unmanageable, but because the system only works when all the parts cohere. That is the real challenge.
To function end-to-end, a real trading machine must integrate:
- reference and market data ingestion
- signal generation and risk modeling
- portfolio construction and position sizing
- trade generation and execution
- back-testing, attribution, logging, infrastructure
- and many, many more
Each module alone can be handled. But together, they create a complex web of dependencies. It is not just a matter of solving problems—it is a matter of aligning assumptions, definitions, and design across the whole architecture. Most tools do not offer that. They either hide the complexity behind too much abstraction, or explode it into too many competing parts.
Why not use existing tools?
Because I do not just need functionality—I need confidence. I am managing my own capital, and that means I need to understand the tools I use to a deep level. Not just what they do, but how and why. That is not paranoia, it is due diligence.
More importantly, most off-the-shelf systems lack the one thing that matters most to me: conceptual coherence. Institutional settings sometimes offer that, at least internally. But most retail platforms do not. They offer dashboards and convenience, but not frameworks. They do not help you think in systems. They do not offer clarity about what an asset is, how a portfolio is built, or what a strategy does. They are designed to abstract away the thinking, not sharpen it.
I am building this system because I want a clear, composable, aligned framework for trading and finance—one that reflects my ideas, risk preferences, design principles, and view of the world. That does not exist off the shelf. So I am building it.
Why solo? Why public?
I am doing this solo not because I oppose collaboration, but because coherence demands ownership. Every assumption, every data structure, every transformation needs to be visible, inspectable, and intentional. Fragmented responsibility leads to incoherent systems—and incoherence leads to fragility.
I am doing it in public because visibility breeds clarity. Publishing forces me to expose edge cases, document decisions, and question my own defaults. That is not marketing; it is a form of discipline.
The system will be modular by design. I am not chasing speed or scale. I am chasing internal integrity: tools that snap together, that are easy to reason about, and that can evolve over time. Some parts will start out rough. Others may seem over-engineered. But all of it will be legible.
If trading is a conversation with uncertainty, then this system is my dialect. I am building it sentence by sentence.
The Political Dimension
Beyond the personal MoneyMachine lies a question: Can we imagine and build non-extractive financial infrastructure?
Finance, when functioning well, serves a public role, just like roads, courts, or power grids. But today, most of its benefits are privatized, while its risks and costs often flow outward. What would it mean to design trading systems that operate differently? That return value to participants? That serve more than just capital?
I do not pretend to have that system now. But I am interested in measuring extractiveness, identifying leverage points, and modeling better defaults. This part of the work is exploratory, but essential. It informs the design philosophy even if it does not yet define the immediate function.
What This Is Not
This might be the most important section (also see legal disclaimers).
This is not financial advice, firstly of course in the legal and regulatory sense (see disclaimers), but more importantly, also in a philosophical sense: I will never tell you what to do with your money. The point is to build tools and frameworks so that you can decide by yourself, or at least have the concepts to decide who to trust around money.
This is not an alpha service. I am not publishing signals, trades, or target positions. That might change in the future, but only with clear legal structure.
This is not a fintech startup. I am not building a product to sell, nor raising capital. This is an independent, self-funded project. If it leads to something more public, that will come later, and on its own terms.
This is not a pitch. Well, it is, but not for a service. It is a pitch for reclaiming personal agency in finance. A pitch for building systems that make sense, that make money, and that do not compromise your integrity.
This is not just critique. I have plenty of criticisms of the system I came from. But this is not outrage performance. It is an attempt to model how someone with deep exposure to a broken system might engage with it, constructively, thoughtfully, and openly.
Who This Is For
If you want to understand how markets really work, beneath the narratives, beyond the headlines, you are in the right place.
If you want to build your own tools, or learn from someone who is doing so publicly, welcome.
If you are here to think, challenge, co-create, or simply observe—you are welcome too.
This is for ex-practitioners, for curious outsiders, for students, critics, reformers, tinkerers, and anyone who still believes that how systems are built matters.
I am building this because I believe it is possible. And I am publishing it because I believe it is valuable.