Let me be intellectually honest right from the start: the title is not a marketing masterstroke. It is, however, accurate.
“How To Suck As A Day Trader” is the book I wished existed when I started trading four years ago — sitting in my hermit office in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, freshly diagnosed with Early-Onset Parkinson’s Disease, with a brain that was staging a full-scale dopamine revolt and a brokerage account that was about to find out the hard way what “learning curve” actually means.
This isn’t a book written by a hedge fund manager in a glass tower. It’s written by a bloke with a degenerative neurological condition, a service dog named Purple, and a very patient wife called Sarah. That distinction matters enormously.
Why I Wrote It
The honest answer? Because nobody else had.
The day trading book market is stuffed with two types of content. First, you have the “I made $47,000 in a week from my laptop on a beach” brigade — the TikTok gurus flogging courses that cost more than your trading account and deliver roughly the same value as a fortune cookie. Second, you have the dense, clinical, university-textbook style guides that assume you have the working memory of a 25-year-old with a finance degree and the attention span to match.
I had neither the budget for the first type nor the cognitive bandwidth for the second.
Parkinson’s had already done a number on my short-term memory, my focus, and my executive function. The apathy engine was running at full power. The idea of wading through 400 pages of institutional trading theory to find the three paragraphs relevant to my situation was, frankly, a non-starter.
So I started writing down what actually worked. The stuff I learned the hard way. The mistakes that cost me real money. The psychology that nobody warns you about. The hacks that kept me in the game when my brain was trying to quit. And eventually, what started as notes in my Obsidian vault became a book.
Who It’s Actually For
The title says “day trader” but the audience is broader than that.
This book is for anyone operating under constraints — people who don’t have perfect conditions, perfect health, or perfect cognitive function, but still want to build a skill, generate income, and stay mentally sharp. That includes:
- People with chronic illness or disability who need a low-stimulation, home-based income strategy that works around medication schedules, fatigue cycles, and unpredictable symptom days
- Carers and partners who’ve had to step back from traditional employment and are looking for flexible financial independence
- Beginners who’ve been burned by the guru culture and want something honest that actually explains what day trading looks like on a bad day as well as a good one
- Anyone who’s tried to learn trading and felt like every resource assumed they were already an expert
If you’ve ever stared at a chart thinking “I have no idea what I’m doing and also my brain hurts,” this book was written directly at you.
How AI Made It Possible
Here’s where it gets interesting — and relevant to anyone with a disability who has a goal they think is out of reach.
I could not have written this book without AI. That’s not false modesty; it’s a neurological fact.
Parkinson’s had taken a wrecking ball to the cognitive functions that writing a book requires. My short-term memory meant I’d lose the thread of an argument mid-paragraph. My executive dysfunction meant starting a new chapter felt like climbing Everest in flip-flops. My apathy engine meant that on most days, the idea of sitting down to write felt physically impossible.
AI — specifically Claude, which I used as my primary writing partner — changed the equation entirely.
Not because it wrote the book for me. It didn’t. Every idea, every experience, every hard-won trading lesson in those pages is mine. But AI acted as what I call my cognitive prosthetic — the external scaffolding that my failing dopamine system could no longer provide:
- When I had a half-formed idea and couldn’t structure it, AI helped me organise the thought without losing it
- When I wrote something and couldn’t tell if it made sense, AI gave me honest feedback without judgment or fatigue
- When the apathy hit and I couldn’t initiate a session, AI gave me a low-friction starting point — “just tell me what you want to say and we’ll work from there”
- When I needed to check a fact or find the right technical term, AI retrieved it instantly without the cognitive cost of a Google rabbit hole
The result was a book I genuinely could not have produced alone — not because I lacked the knowledge or the story, but because my hardware didn’t have the RAM to execute it without assistance.
The Bigger Point About AI and Disability
This is the message I want to land, because I think it matters beyond day trading and beyond Parkinson’s.
We are at a genuinely remarkable moment. For the first time in history, people with cognitive disabilities, chronic illness, motor impairments, and neurodivergent conditions have access to a tool that levels the playing field in a meaningful way.
AI doesn’t care that your hands shake. It doesn’t get frustrated when you ask the same question three times because you forgot the answer. It doesn’t judge you for taking two hours to write a paragraph that a “healthy” person would finish in ten minutes. It doesn’t have good days and bad days. It is simply there, patient and capable, ready to be whatever cognitive support you need it to be in that moment.
The goal — writing a book, building a trading strategy, starting a blog, learning a new skill, completing a project — doesn’t have to be abandoned just because the biological hardware is running suboptimally. You just need the right external support.
I’m living proof that a 54-year-old British bloke with a degenerative brain condition, a service dog, and an Obsidian vault full of half-finished notes can produce something worth reading.
If I can do it, the question isn’t whether you can. The question is just: what’s your goal, and which AI tool do we point at it first?
“How To Suck As A Day Trader” is available now on Amazon. And yes, the title is still accurate. But so is everything inside it.
Leave a Reply