Introducing The Monogram — What This Site Is and Why It Exists

This site is new, and you're probably among the first people reading it. So let me tell you where you've arrived: The Monogram is a personal site built around one mechanical trading strategy — CRT Model 1 — and around a commitment to keep a public record with no excuses. This is the guide to what's here, what never will be, and why it exists at all.

Why the site exists

The trading-content market is full of embellished results: screenshots of wins, vanished losses, track records that can't be verified. I didn't trust them — so I decided to build the opposite. A site where every trade is recorded on the day it happens, a loss gets the same space as a win, and every number can be traced in a live journal running on a real database.

It's not charity; it's an experiment with my own discipline: what's public once can't be polished later.

What you'll find here

• The strategy — the complete mechanics of Model 1: liquidity sweep, confirmation, entry at the retest, fixed 3R target. No secrets; the value isn't in the information, it's in discipline and data.
• The live journal — every trade with its date, direction, result in R and a "followed the plan" field. Readable without login; only I can write. Plus live statistics: equity curve, monthly breakdown, results histogram.
• Case studies — trade breakdowns including preparation, management and post-mortems. Losing ones too; dissecting a loss is often more useful than celebrating a win.
• The blog — articles on the CRT concept, risk management and the psychology of discipline.
• A free checklist — the whole Model 1 process on one page, in exchange for an e-mail; once a month I send a journal recap.

What you won't find here

No signals. No courses. No managing other people's money. No profit promises — the backtest is always labelled as a backtest, and its statistical strength (t≈2) is honestly stated as a hypothesis, not proof. The forward test you're watching is what will decide.

Who's behind it

My name is David Žalman. By day I run programs in automotive; by night I test hypotheses on fourteen years of data. I approach trading like engineering work: definition, data, record. More in About.

What's next

The journal will grow at its own pace — the model produces a handful of trades a month, and that's correct. I'm building the MODEL-1 indicator for TradingView, which recap subscribers will get first. And the blog? It'll grow at the pace I actually have something to say — one article every three weeks that's worth reading beats four that fill a calendar.

If this approach makes sense to you, start with the Strategy — and open the journal again in a month. It will hold more data, not more promises.