The guy in Iowa that Wall Street called.

You should always know who you're taking advice from — especially on the internet, especially about money. So here's the honest version.

A Midwest kid with a savings account

Aaron grew up in a small, middle-class suburban community in Iowa. His interest in markets started in junior high, with a paperboy route, a few summers of detasseling corn, and a borrowed investing book that got him and his family thinking seriously about where money goes and why. It was a modest start, and an unusually early one.

Seven years of encyclopedic, inconsistent knowledge

After college, Aaron spent seven years working as an engineer while consuming everything he could find on trading stocks, futures, options, and commodities. Elliott Wave. Fibonacci. Gann. Bollinger Bands. MACD, RSI, and a dozen "specialized" oscillators and strategies from more than a dozen well-known names in the industry. He became, in his own words, a walking encyclopedia of trading knowledge — and discovered, the hard way, that almost none of it worked consistently or as advertised.

Family, and a decision about how to build a career

During this period Aaron got married and started a family. Raising his kids well, and being present for them, became the central fact that shaped almost every career decision that followed. A conventional path — climb the ladder, travel for clients, chase the next promotion and relocation — wasn't going to fit the life he wanted to build. He built this career, instead, to be home with his family.

Finding volume-at-price

Trading, done well, offered a way to work from home and set his own hours. It took years of testing and discarding methods to get there, but Aaron eventually came across volume-at-price analysis and Auction Market Theory. Applying volume profiles to historical charts, the difference was immediate: this was consistent, objective, and logical in a way nothing else he'd studied had been. He adopted it as his primary methodology and never looked back.

From engineer to full-time trader

Not long after, the company where Aaron worked as an engineer was acquired. It was the opening he needed. He left to trade full time, and was soon approached by a group building an ethanol business who needed someone who understood commodities and could structure hedged positions. He applied the same auction-market techniques to substantially larger sums, and the results opened doors he hadn't expected.

Bloomberg, Wiley & Sons, and Wall Street

Around this time, Aaron introduced himself to industry contacts and began producing analysis and trading commentary distributed on the Bloomberg terminal. Bloomberg was collaborating with Wiley & Sons on a book about new techniques in technical analysis, and Aaron contributed material on auction market principles and trading setups.

Through that work, he met the collaborators who would later help him co-found a market research firm. That firm's daily analysis reached, at its peak, as many as 20,000 financial professionals worldwide — advisors, hedge funds, and wealth managers at institutions most people would recognize instantly. Senior Vice Presidents and Chief Investment Officers at "too big to fail" banks, with armies of analysts of their own, solicited his specific market calls anyway.

Most of them had no idea it came from a guy in the middle of Iowa.

Why teach it

There's nothing about the methodology Aaron can't teach. No secrets, no sixth sense, nothing that requires special access or talent — just an objective, consistent, teachable process he's refined for over 20 years, and the same one he still uses — and teaches — today. He's watched the trading-education industry sell hype and hope to people who deserved better, and he built the VAP Method to be the opposite of that: math-honest, verifiable, and built to be checked, backtested, and questioned rather than simply believed.