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About

From the Iron Curtain to the open road

I'm Tomas Nesnidal. For 20+ years I've made my living building automated breakout trading strategies — eventually thousands of them, traded in my own hedge fund for institutional clients. But the story starts somewhere very different.

A smuggled computer in Prague

I grew up in communist Czechoslovakia, where owning a computer was rare and slightly dangerous. In 1989, a family friend smuggled a Commodore 64 across the border for us. I was fifteen and I couldn't take my hands off it for ten straight hours. On the evening of November 17, 1989 — the night the Velvet Revolution began — I was sitting at that machine writing BASIC, when history erupted under our balcony in the center of Prague.

Two revolutions started that year: my country's, and — though I didn't know it yet — my own.

The trading revolution

Years later I discovered the markets, blew through the usual painful beginnings, and slowly became obsessed with one question: can trading be turned into a system — rules a machine can execute, so results don't depend on my moods? The answer became my life's work: a repeatable formula for building breakout strategies, which grew into a database of over 2,000 validated strategies and eventually a hedge fund serving banks and pension funds.

I wrote the whole journey — and the formula itself — in my book, The BreakOut Trading Revolution.

Why "Systems on the Road"?

Because automated systems gave me something better than money: geography-proof freedom. I've run my strategies from beaches, mountain villages and airport lounges across the world. This site is my personal journal of that life — the systems, the travels, the failures, and what they keep teaching me.

What I do today