The company I trade out of. One employee, four monitors, no outside money and a great deal of coffee.
It is a difficult thing to believe on a Tuesday, at 09:34, with a position on. The belief and the position have never once agreed, and I have made a living in the argument between them.
Every line is one day, from the open on the left to the close on the right. Stacked, a decade looks like weather. The loud days are not the profitable ones. I checked, twice, hoping to be wrong.
Haque Capital is a limited liability company with one member, and the member is me. It has a desk, a tax ID, a filing cabinet and a decade of searchable execution records. It does not have investors, clients, a fund, a marketing department, or a plan to acquire any of those.
It exists for two boring reasons. The first is that the executions deserved somewhere better to live than a spreadsheet named final_v3_REAL.xlsx. The second is that a business with expenses and records behaves differently from a hobby with a login — you cannot lie to a general ledger the way you can lie to yourself.
What I do inside it is narrow on purpose. Discretionary intraday equities, concentrated in semiconductors and the companies that supply them. I read the tape, size into confirmation, and get out without negotiating. On a good day that description is accurate. On the other days it is aspirational.
In practice: I stare at chips until something happens, and then I have an opinion about it very quickly.
Almost all of the money is made on about nine days a year. The remaining two hundred and forty-three exist to keep me solvent and paying attention until those nine arrive. Nobody would design this on purpose. It is simply what the records say, and after twenty-four years I have learned to trust the records over the story I remember telling myself at the time.
The nine percent of the time I do not honour a stop is where the outsized returns come from. It is also where they go. I have never been able to prove which of those is larger, and I have stopped trying, because the number is not the point. The point is that I know the hole is there and I walk around it on purpose.
Occam's razor gets quoted at philosophers. It works better on a trading desk: the explanation demanding the fewest assumptions is the one worth sizing. Applied to a position it turns almost brutal — if the thesis needs a paragraph, I am already wrong. Every trade that has actually worked for me could be said in one sentence to somebody who has never opened a chart.
None of which is really about markets. Twenty-four years in front of the tape has taught me mostly ordinary things: that the price of being wrong should be settled before you find out whether you are, that conviction is the most expensive feeling on offer, and that most of what arrives feeling like insight is a story assembled afterwards to make the outcome bearable. The tape is an unusually honest mirror. It has never once cared who I thought I was, and I have not found many other surfaces in life so completely uninterested in my opinion of myself.
People want the edge to be a formula. Mine is closer to a habit: show up, stay small until the tape gives me a reason not to be, and refuse to make the day interesting when it isn’t. Boredom is a position. It has been one of my better ones.
A decade of clicks, placed by the minute of the session each one happened in. The two towers are the open and the close. The valley is lunch — statistically my most profitable hour, on the grounds that I am not in it.
I built my own screen because none of the four platforms above would show me what I wanted on one page. It is behind a login, and there is one set of credentials.