Transparency

The financial world online has an honesty problem. Every day people sell "safe signals", "guaranteed returns" and screenshots of gains that never happened. We decided to build the opposite.

Temple of Fortune is a trading lab that works in public. We test theses against real data — the sensible ones and the crazy ones. Lunar cycles. Fear and greed. Lucky numbers. Seasonality. Not because we believe all of it, but because we believe none of it unchecked. What survives the test, we publish. What dies, we publish too.

From this follow rules we cannot waive for ourselves:

• No promises

  Nobody can guarantee you returns. Whoever does is selling a story. Past results — including our own — say nothing about the future.

• No signals for sale

  We never tell you "buy X now". We show you how we think, test and fail — so you can think for yourself.

• Proof before product

  We are building a trading operating system. It goes on sale only once a real, verifiable track record is public. Until then there is a waitlist and nothing to buy.

• Mistakes are corrected, not deleted

  When we were wrong, the correction stays visible on the article. No silent rewriting here.

• Every number has a source

  Either our own lab (with the methodology attached) or a linked external source. Numbers without evidence do not appear.

• When we make money, you see how

  Today: not at all. Later: clearly labelled — product, newsletter sponsorship or referral links that passed our own tests. No paid praise.

My father held commercial power of attorney at one of the country’s largest daily newspapers. Through him, in the nineties, I met the first people who promised quick money — the same types who promise it today, in different suits and with better graphics. He rejected that way of earning money, and his objection was not moral but commercial: that is not a real economy. That is a parallel one.

I could not look away regardless. It stuck with me although there was so much else, and to this day I could not tell you why finance of all things. This house is built out of that contradiction: fascinated and mistrustful, both at once. If you wonder why our manifesto is so unfriendly towards promises of returns — that is inherited scepticism.

Access I had none. I grew up in the countryside; my schoolmates became car mechanics, electricians, tradesmen, and I became a car mechanic. A proper low-performer move. Nobody around me was anywhere near high finance. What I saw of that world, I saw in business documentaries: men in villas by the sea who seemed to steer the world from a computer and a telephone. The world went past, and I turned screws.

What came next was not the stock market but its opposite: goods. For many years I ran a sustainable clothing company — our own production, our own design, our own distribution, the entire chain. I built a media house and sold it again. And I am building Temple of Desire, a trade in esoteric goods that has grown dear to me. That is my actual profession: founding, building, keeping things running. Purchasing, margin, warehouse, returns, customer trust. I did not merely hear my father’s worldview — I lived it, before I ever set foot in the parallel world.

In my mid-twenties I lived in Berlin: companies, ideas — and for the first time friends from the actual financial world, people moving millions. In the end you attract what your subconscious wants. They gave tips, equities, Bitcoin, and I followed them — genuinely afraid. It was money I had earned with goods and work, and I was pushing it into a world whose rules I did not know.

Then came the reality check, and it was not the one I expected: the tips were right. Almost always. I lost anyway. I sold too early because I was afraid. I held too long because I hoped. My friends grew richer — not because they knew more than I did, but because they had themselves under control. The factor I had not accounted for was me.

For about ten years now, since 2015/16, I have traded continuously. On balance I have won more than I lost. But most of the money I lost went not to bad analysis but to basics in the emotional moment: no stop-loss set, no look at the fear index, skipping the hundred small disciplines that keep you from the crash. I understood it all intellectually. The execution: rather mediocre.

That is why there is no newsletter of tips here. If knowledge was never the problem, more knowledge does not help. So I built the only thing that helps in the moment a human fails: rules that hold anyway. A trading operating system, first for myself, then for my family, now for friends. In effect it has become software. Let us see where the journey goes.

Temple of Fortune is the place where that journey happens in public — not the villa by the sea, not the screenshot of a gain, but the workshop: what we test, what survives, what dies. Our graveyard is public, and the largest headstone on it is mine.

My father was not wrong. A large part of what calls itself the financial world is exactly what he saw in it. I simply did not have to choose between his two worlds — I found a third way: I treat financial markets like honest merchandise trade. A product you can explain. A margin you can recalculate. Costs you know before you pay them. Customer trust you lose if you lie. I do not sell secrets here — I run a business and show the books.

What I want is unspectacular: real success for my life and my family — and for the people who engage seriously and with genuine interest in what I have to say and do. That is not a promise to everyone. It is an offer to the serious. Anyone looking for a shortcut is in the wrong place; somebody else sells those, and sells them dearly.

Behind the articles stands the editorial desk of 28 quills: writing voices with their own character and beat, supported by an engine room of data pipelines and quality checks. The quills are editorial pseudonyms — deliberately kept as such, without invented résumés or false faces. Responsibility for every line rests with me, under my real name, reachable via the legal notice. (Why 28? The number accompanies this house as a signature — and yes, we did of course test whether there is anything to it. Results in the lab.)

The temple is built on the move: I emigrate to Mauritius in 2026 and document the journey — company structure, accounts, relocation, mistakes included — in the Freedom & Emigration section.

Our lab tests signals in four steps:

1. 01

   Collect data

   →
2. 02

   Form a thesis

   →
3. 03

   Test out-of-sample (walk-forward, multiple-testing correction)

   →
4. 04

   Only survivors count

Explained in detail in the Lab section. The live ticker on the homepage shows real metrics from this system — or honestly "offline" when it has no data. Faked live numbers will never appear here.