I’m Daniel Alexander, the founder of InvestmentLeap (pictured with wife Amanda and whippet Chloe). I’m not a trader, not a sales person, not a marketeer. I went to city law after university but then went on to pursue my dream career in classical music in the States which I started in 2003. I’ve since played in orchestras in the US and Europe and taught all over America including at university level.

But I struggled financially because music never quite paid enough. I sold my flat in London in early 2008 which created a welcome injection of £132,000 – more money than I’d ever had – but I knew I had to grow that amount if I was to stay in music and regular savings at 1% or 2% weren’t going to cut it. Between 2008 and 2013 I learnt everything there was to know about trading financial markets – I developed my own systems, I followed other people’s systems, I did scalping, I did trading off support/resistance, I did fibonacci, I did everything. But just when something started to look promising, there was the inevitable subsequent period of losses. By 2013 I was back to zero. So I fell back on my academic background and landed a job with Tutors International for 2 years where I was one of those high-paid tutors you sometimes read about. I taught a 13 year old in Arezzo, Italy and financially I was starting to recover but I couldn’t resist the lure of the market.

It was in Arezzo that I discovered that some brokers offered a higher daily interest payment or “swap” than was debited by other brokers on the same asset. On the 12th of March 2014 I simultaneously bought and sold the same currency pair (USDTRY) on two different brokers. At 10pm UK time that night, when the swaps came in, I paid 5 pence in swap to the first broker and received 14 pence in swap from the second. I was up 9p and knew at that point that I’d cracked it. I had earnt that 9p without taking any directional risk in the market – I wasn’t bothered if the price went up or down, I already knew ahead of time what I was going to make and at precisely what time I was going to make it. I added more capital to that deal and made 5.5% a month over the next 6 months. When that deal expired, I simply moved on to another deal.

I never looked back and systematically analysed as much of the FX and commodities universe as I could to stay on top of the best deals across the financial markets. Once I had enough data and a sufficiently powerful excel that could calculate the profitability of deals, I simply rode from one deal to the next. I’ve had deals running for myself and even for friends and family continuously since March 2014 – with the exception of honeymoon and a couple of holidays.