Most traders don't fail because their signals are wrong. They fail for lack of process and discipline. We built Tempest because we'd spent our careers on opposite sides of that problem — the markets and the machines — and we wanted the tool we wished existed.
Between us
One of us, Ken, was formally trained in portfolio management and did it day in and day out for decades — managing real capital under real accountability, where discipline isn't a slogan and a sloppy process shows up on someone's statement at the end of the month. That kind of work rewards consistency, position sizing, and risk control, repeated thousands of times — until they stop being rules you remember and become reflexes. On top of it sits more than ten years of price-action experience — judgment earned in the seat, not handed over.
The other, Alex, spent a career building reliable software in highly regulated industries — finance and healthcare — the kind of systems where "it mostly works" isn't acceptable and an audit is always around the corner.
What we did together
Ken had the edge — but the hard part of deep expertise is that most of it is tacit: a seasoned trader "just knows," and can't easily hand that knowing to anyone else. So we did the unglamorous work together — making the implicit explicit. We wrote the judgment down as a defined process (when to act, when to stand aside, how to size, how to exit), measured it the way a fund judges a strategy — with statistics like expectancy and R-multiples — and tested it on the computer before risking a dollar. A gut feel became a repeatable system.
Why it matters for you
The result is the combination that, until recently, lived only inside hedge funds — a professional's discipline, the statistical rigor to know whether a process actually works, and the software to run it — put in the hands of the individual trader. Not signals and hype: a process, with the tooling to size your risk in advance and define your exits before you're ever in a trade. (See position sizing and brackets.)
The one rule we'd give anyone starting
Build the discipline the boring way: trade small, paper-first, and let your position size — not your emotions — set your risk. It's the first thing we'd tell you to do — start here.
— Ken & Alex
Educational only — not financial advice. Trading futures carries a substantial risk of loss; results are not typical and are never guaranteed. You alone are responsible for your trades.