This is a weird sentence to write.
Teachers are not supposed to build software. We are supposed to grade essays, plan lessons, and eat yogurt at our desks during the fifteen minutes we have between classes. I did all of that too. But on the evenings when the grading was finally done, and especially through the stretch of winter break when I finally had some time to myself, I was also writing code for a swing trading scanner.
I want to tell you how that happened, because I think it might be useful to some of you. And because when I was starting out, I could not find a single person explaining this from the angle I needed.
The part where I was exhausted
Teaching is a job I love. It is also a job that pays roughly what it paid fifteen years ago while demanding more of your nights and weekends than most people would believe. I was spending Saturday mornings grading. I was spending Sunday nights planning. I was not sleeping enough. And the number in my bank account at the end of every month looked roughly the same as it had the month before.
I did not want to quit teaching. I wanted to keep doing it. But I needed something on the side that could generate income without stealing the few hours I had left.
The part where I tried trading
I started small. A little capital, a few tickers I had heard of, and the vague belief that if I just watched enough charts I would eventually see what everyone else was seeing.
I did not.
The problem was not that trading is too hard to learn. The problem was that trading is an entire discipline, and I had maybe forty minutes a night after the grading was done. Every book I picked up assumed I had time to study it like a degree. Every YouTube channel assumed I could watch the market open live. Every signal service assumed I wanted to be told what to do without understanding why.
I did not want a signal. I wanted a framework. Something that let me look at a stock and know, with reasonable confidence, whether I was looking at the start of a move or the end of one.
That framework did not exist in a form I could actually use.
The part where I started building
So I started writing down what I noticed. Patterns in how swings tended to play out. How long a typical upswing lasted before the volume thinned out. What a real failed bounce looked like versus a fake one. The stuff I wished someone had told me on day one.
At some point the notes turned into a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet turned into a script. The script turned into a scanner. My co-founder, who happens to be a Microsoft PM, noticed what I was doing and started helping me build it out properly.
I was not trying to build a product. I was trying to answer the question "where is this stock in its cycle" quickly enough that I could actually use the answer before the school day started.
The part I did not expect
Here is the thing nobody tells you: trying to build a tool that reads the market teaches you the market faster than trying to read the market directly.
When you have to write down what an early upswing looks like, precisely enough that code can recognize it, you start seeing things you missed when you were just squinting at charts. When you have to define a late downswing, you are forced to articulate what separates it from a consolidation. When you have to score hundreds of stocks a night, you see patterns that a single ticker never shows you.
I learned more about trading in the six months of building SwingCycle than I had in the two years before it.
The part where I decided to share it
Around the time the scanner actually started being useful, I started posting little pieces of what I was learning on Reddit. And the same questions kept coming back. Where do I start? How do I know when to enter? What does a healthy setup actually look like? How do I get better without quitting my day job?
I realized most of the people asking were people like me. Teachers. Nurses. Parents of small kids. Anyone with a real job and an actual schedule who wanted to understand the market without surrendering the rest of their life to it.
So I opened it up. That's SwingCycle. It's the tool I wish I'd had when I was staring at charts at 10 PM trying to figure out whether a stock was early or late in its move.
If you are just starting out
You do not need to learn everything before you start. You need a framework that tells you which questions to ask. Volume. Duration. Trend context. Position in the swing. Start there.
I'm going to keep writing these, walking through specific setups with real examples pulled from the scanner. Early upswings. Failed bounces. Late downswings that look like reversals but are not. If that is useful to you, you can sign up below to get each post when it goes up.
And if you want to see what the scanner sees tonight, the trial is free for fourteen days. No credit card. No locked-in-for-life upsell. Just the tool.
I hope this was useful. Off to grade some essays.