An Educator, Developer, and Trader
Still Building His Position.

Hi, I'm Jonathan.

I'm a few months into day trading — not years, not decades. I started where most of you are starting: figuring out which broker actually fits how I trade, which monitor setup doesn't wreck my back after a 90-minute session, and which scanner is worth paying for versus which one is just noise with a nice UI.

What I bring isn't guru status. It's 25 years of building things on the web and teaching other people to do the same. I know how to evaluate a tool, organize information so it's actually usable, and tell the difference between something well-built and something well-marketed. Every tool on this site — including the position size calculator — is something I wrote the code for myself. Developed by a developer, not a guru.

The trade that cost me forty times what I planned to risk

In my first month I bought SKK Holdings ($SKK) near $13.91. It dropped, fast. My plan had a stop loss. I blew right through it, telling myself it was a dip that would bounce — the way a blue chip like Apple usually has for me.

That was the trap. A broken small-cap momentum trade is not a quality company on a dip. I didn't trim. I held. I watched it fall roughly 60% over a few days, and I turned it into a four-figure loss.

Here's the part that still stings: my planned risk on that trade was about $25. Honoring my own stop would have cost me twenty-five dollars. Ignoring it cost me more than a thousand — over forty times the risk I'd actually signed up for.

Long-term investing can forgive that kind of slip; a strong company often recovers, and some investors even add on the way down. Momentum runs on the opposite logic. When the move breaks, the reason you were in the trade is gone, and the play is to get out — not to average down. I wrote the longer version of this in Types of Trading, because the lesson isn't really about one ticker. It's about applying investor logic to a trader's position.

It's also the reason the position size calculator was the first tool I built for this site. The math was never the hard part. Respecting it was.

It's an embarrassing trade to publish. I'm publishing it anyway, because every new trader I've talked to has some version of it, and almost nobody writes it down. So: when a momentum trade breaks, get out. Not "watch it closely." Not "give it room." Out. Your stop is a decision you already made, back when you were thinking clearly — the moment you start renegotiating it in real time, you are no longer the person who set it.

Why I opened accounts at five brokers

When I started, I had no idea where to begin. I already held accounts at Fidelity, E*TRADE, and Robinhood — and I still do. Each does a job. E*TRADE was set up decades ago and holds a few long-term positions. Fidelity is where I access my investment club's account and an employer retirement plan; we've held AAPL there since 2009. Robinhood I opened after the 2021 GameStop frenzy as a set-and-forget account, and it now runs some automated copy-trading portfolios.

All real accounts. None of them right for day trading.

So I went looking, properly. I opened accounts at Interactive Brokers, TradeStation, TastyTrade, and Firstrade. I funded Webull, TradeZero, and Moomoo with real money — because you cannot honestly review an execution experience you've only read about.

What I learned is the kind of thing that doesn't show up on a features table. Webull clears through Apex, and Apex has been restricting more and more low-priced, high-risk tickers to liquidation-only. TradeZero also clears through Apex — but negotiated the ability to day trade many of those same restricted names, provided you close the position by the end of the session. That single operational detail is why Webull is my primary broker and TradeZero is my backup. It's not a preference. It's a workaround for a real constraint I hit in a real account.

That's the whole method, honestly: fund it, trade it, and report what actually happened. The broker comparison exists so you don't have to open five accounts to find that out.

Two passions, one site

I was nine when my dad brought home a pre-release Apple IIe he'd won in a sales contest at work — before they were in stores, before my school had one, and years before my school had more than one for an entire classroom. I've used Apple products ever since, and eventually held AAPL as a long-term position, which tells you something about how slowly I change my mind.

I knew in high school that I wanted to teach. Before that happened, I spent four years at GE Medical Systems (now GE Healthcare) as an eLead Systems Designer, building proprietary content management and project management systems from scratch. In 2000 I managed the launch of a continuing-education platform that delivered on-demand training video to a global audience through a subscription service — running video through Mark Cuban's broadcast.com, which Yahoo! later bought and eventually shut down. Building things that teach people, on the web, is not a new interest for me.

For the last 25 years I've been full-time tenured faculty at Milwaukee Area Technical College, in the School of Media and Creative Arts. I teach HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL — Web & Digital Media Design and Front-End Web Development. I've also built three degree programs from the ground up, including the Web Developer program, which means I've spent a good part of my career answering one question professionally: what does a total beginner actually need, and in what order?

I've also been a member of an investment club for over 20 years, and its treasurer for the last 15. Long-term investing and short-term trading are genuinely different disciplines — the SKK trade above is what it costs to learn those differences the hard way.

So when I started day trading and found myself drowning in jargon, the two passions collided. There is no shortage of sites teaching trading to experienced traders. There is almost nothing built for the pre-beginner — the person who hasn't picked a broker, doesn't know what a float is, and isn't sure whether any of this is even for them. That's the gap. That's this site.

The 344-term glossary, the book reviews, the course reviews — those aren't content marketing. They're the notes I was taking anyway, cleaned up and published, by someone who does curriculum design for a living and happens to be about several months ahead of you.

What I'm not

I'm not a financial advisor, and nothing here is personalized investment advice. I'm not going to sell you a $15,000 course to pay for a Lambo. I'm not going to post trade signals, and I'm not going to show you a screenshot of a green day and imply it's typical.

This site is also something of an experiment. I've built it in close collaboration with AI — I call mine Claudio — using it to research, cross-check, and keep recommendations current in a market where pricing and platforms change constantly. That's not incidental to my day job; it is my day job. I teach web development, and the fastest way to understand how AI actually changes that craft is to ship something real with it. Bullish Tools is where I find out. A real trader's firsthand experience paired with AI-assisted research and development is a more honest way to stay useful than one person pretending to track everything alone.

And the business part, plainly: I may earn affiliate income from some links here. If something on this site helps you, using those links supports the work. Either way, anything I link to with an affiliate tag is something I use in my own setup or have genuinely evaluated — and you'll find plenty of pages where I tell you not to bother.

— Jonathan