Who Writes LearnHyper — Background and Pen Name Disclosure

David Hollis is a pen name

Starting with the part most author pages leave out: that is not the name on my passport.

I write about leveraged derivatives, I link to an exchange I earn a commission from, and I would rather keep my trading and my publishing separate. Using a pen name is a common enough arrangement in financial writing, but it only works if it is declared, so it is declared here.

What is not fictional is the experience behind the pages. The name is a pseudonym. The track record is not.

The background

Over ten years trading derivatives, across three markets that between them cover most of what this site writes about:

• Foreign exchange — where leverage, carry and the difference between being right and staying solvent are learned quickly and expensively.
• Gold — the market that taught me most of what is on our gold page, including why an instrument that suits a two-week view is the wrong one for a decade-long thesis.
• US equities — including the part where the news that moves a stock arrives after the exchange has closed, which is the problem this entire venue exists to solve.

That is the whole claim. No fund, no institution I am going to name, no certifications, and no performance figures — because unverifiable performance claims are exactly the kind of thing this site exists to argue against.

Why this shapes what you read here

Three things follow from having actually held these positions rather than only written about them.

Funding gets more space than the trading fee. Almost every guide elsewhere leads with the headline commission because it is a small, quotable number. Anyone who has carried a perpetual through a crowded market knows the hourly funding rate is what decides whether the position worked. That is why the funding table exists and why it annualises everything.

Position sizing gets a page of arithmetic instead of a warning. “Use less leverage” is advice that has never once stopped anyone. The liquidation page derives the actual formula, because a number you can compute before you open the trade does what a warning does not.

We say when the boring route is better. An ETF beats a perpetual for almost anything held longer than a few weeks, and most of our pages say so somewhere. Writing that costs us signups. It is also the only version of this site worth publishing.

What I do not do

• No predictions and no signals. I have no idea where any of these prices are going, and a site earning commission on your trading volume is the last place you should look for that opinion.
• No performance claims. Mine or anyone’s.
• No advice about your situation. I do not know your jurisdiction, your tax position, or what you can afford to lose.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, I would rather hear it than not — hello@learnhyper.com. Corrections get made and recorded in the change record at the bottom of the affected page, with what changed and when.

That record is the thing I would actually judge this site on, and the one I would suggest you judge it on too. It is harder to fake than a byline.

The commercial arrangement

I earn referral commissions when readers open accounts through links here, and you pay less than you would signing up directly. How we make money sets out the full arrangement, including where it could bias what I write.