I grew up in Germany's Ruhr region — industrial towns, no money, no connections. I dropped out of school. The establishment wrote me off early, and that became the engine: at fifteen I decided I'd own a Ferrari within ten years. I did it at twenty-six.
China.
In 2004 I landed in Shanghai for two weeks and stayed for fifteen years. In Shenzhen — a city of twelve million where I was the only white man with a black Ferrari — I built a wealth management and currency business for China's ultra-wealthy. My partner and I thought like chess players, always two moves ahead. At the peak I managed $156 million in client capital, ran currency positions through the 2008 crisis, and founded a licensed market-analysis firm whose research served American and European banks and hedge funds. I didn't read about institutional flow in a book. I was the flow.
The fall.
In 2011, a business partner — a man later found to have embezzled millions from his own company — reported me to the authorities. I spent seven years and seven months in Chinese detention and prison. 2,770 days. Forced labor. Conditions I later described, in full, in a book. I survived on one skill above all others: emotional control under conditions designed to break it. I read over 300 books in there, including every law book China prints.
The book.
I was released on December 19, 2018. Germany's biggest news magazine, DER SPIEGEL, told my story; the book that followed — Drachenjahre ("Dragon Years") — became a SPIEGEL bestseller, Germany's equivalent of the New York Times list.
Why this matters for your trading.
Everyone tells you psychology is the hard part. For me that's not a chapter in a book — it's the reason I'm alive. The discipline I teach — patience, emotional control, process over impulse — isn't theory. It's survived knowledge. And the market read I teach is the one I used when the money was real and the size was institutional.
I moved to a small island in the North Sea and started over: streaming my trading live, every day, showing wins and losses alike. That grew into a community, a Bookmap education partnership, and now — a desk.
I won't sell you dreams or shortcuts. I'll show you how order flow is really read — the same read I used to move capital. What you do with it is on you.
