The Trade That
Built Everything

I built the access layer myself. That started with the Dhaka Stock Exchange, where I ran the first systematic execution on that venue — before moving to deeper liquidity.

The DSE system worked and the thesis held, but that market lacked the volatility a systematic strategy needs to express itself. I moved to deeper liquidity: Interactive Brokers for equities and options, Binance for crypto perpetuals.

Every tool I have used — Python, Postgres, Supabase, Oracle Cloud, Binance API, Foundry, Solidity, cadCAD, Stable Baselines — I learned alone. Every concept, every strategy, every optimization technique. No courses, no mentors, no team. Just documentation, trial, and error.

You are not just reading about a fund. You are reading about someone who built an entire discipline from nothing — in a country where the concept of quant trading did not exist before him. That is not a story about returns. That is a story about what humans do when they have no infrastructure and no permission.

The January 2026 Drawdown

In January 2026 I took a large leveraged position on silver perpetual futures. The thesis was macro-driven — resource nationalism, export restrictions, a dollar used as a weapon — and my models put the probability of success high. The thesis was right. The trade was not.

Silver moved violently against the position and I was liquidated. The lesson was not about the thesis. It was about process.

I had already built the full stack — data infrastructure, an optimisation engine, walk-forward validation, cloud deployment, monitoring. I had run thousands of simulations. I had done all of it.

What I did not do was use it. The thesis felt so clear and so well-researched that I got lazy. Setting up a proper systematic process takes months of analysis, simulation and optimisation. I skipped it. I traded manually. I told myself conviction was enough.

It was not. The loss taught me that cutting the process short — even once, for even the strongest thesis — is how you lose everything. The vow was not to learn something new. It was to never again pretend I could afford to be lazy about what I already knew. That vow is the reason every trade you see in the public record is system-generated.

October 2025

For most of 2025, crypto was in a slow bleed. XRP, the asset my bot trades, peaked at $3.40 in mid-2025 and spent the rest of the year falling. By year end it was near $1.88. Nearly fifty percent gone from its high.

Across that entire period — while the underlying asset lost half its value — the bot kept making money.

Then came October 10th.

A single policy announcement triggered a cascade: $19.37 billion in crypto positions liquidated in 24 hours, 1.6 million traders wiped out, Bitcoin down 18% and XRP and altcoins down 60–80%.

At 2:39 AM on October 12th, my stop-loss triggered at −17.41%.

I was asleep.

The system exited. No hesitation, no "maybe it comes back," no one watching a screen at 2 AM hoping for a reversal. The rules executed. Two days later, the system re-entered on its own. I finished October with a profitable month — five trades, net positive.

That is the point of building a system rather than trading with conviction. I do not follow individual trades. Most days I am entirely unaware the bot has done anything until I check the balance. I know exactly how it behaves in every market condition — but I do not need to watch it.

For that October drawdown the system behaved as the simulations said it would — the stop pulled it out around 17%, inside the modelled range. The underlying asset lost fifty percent of its value across the year. The bot finished the month profitable. The difference was not intelligence or courage. It was the presence of a system that did not care what I believed — and did not need me to be awake.

The Numbers

Over 22 months of live trading on 3.5x isolated margin, the strategy more than doubled at its peak, having absorbed a 62.5% peak-to-trough drawdown along the way and since recovered to its all-time high — the normal rhythm of any systematic approach. I don't trade for a headline figure; I build a system that survives both the runs and the drawdowns. Current performance is shown live on the track record page; the detailed record stays private for clients.

Before going live, I validated across 517+ assets. Multi-year backtest. 8-fold walk-forward (87.5% folds profitable). 10K Monte Carlo simulations. Every parameter stress-tested. Every edge verified.

I tested LSTM, Random Forest, and Hidden Markov Models on DSE equity data before concluding that rule-based DC+VWAP-EMA generalizes better on thin markets. Walk-forward validation showed ML overfitting — so I chose the approach that works, not the approach that looks impressive.

The Question That Built Baraka

The bot was making money while I slept. Friends, family, people who watched my balance grow month after month — they all asked the same thing first. Not how does it work? Not can I invest? The first question, every single time, was: is this halal?

And I could not honestly tell them yes.

The bots use margin. Leverage. Borrowed money carries interest — riba — and interest is the one thing Islam draws a hard line against. I was making money in my sleep off instruments built on the exact thing my faith forbids, and I could not look someone in the eye and say it was clean.

So I sat with the question instead of dodging it. And the more I looked, the more I became convinced the problem was not finance itself — it was one assumption buried inside it. The interest term. A single parameter. What if you could rebuild these instruments — the same mathematical elegance, the same economic function, the same perpetual futures mechanism — with that one parameter set to zero?

That question is where Baraka came from. Not from a business plan.

Where Baraka Came From

I looked at DeFi protocols — on-chain finance, smart contracts that execute without counterparty trust — and I saw what they could become: financial infrastructure built from mathematics, not from institutional permission — and restructurable, at the protocol level, to remove interest entirely.

The mathematics already existed. Ackerer, Hugonnier and Jermann published a framework in 2025 (Mathematical Finance) that, at the parameter ι=0 — interest set to zero — produced a fully functional perpetual futures mechanism with no riba embedded anywhere. 17 working papers. Deployed on-chain. Zero interest hardcoded at the protocol level. Not a fatwa layered on top. Built from first principles.

The Partnership

Dr. Rafiq Bhuyan — Fulbright Scholar, 80+ peer-reviewed papers, PhD Economics Concordia Montreal, former Purcell Chair at Le Moyne College — saw what I was building. Before I had finished explaining, he said he wanted to be my co-founder. He offered to put $50,000 of his own capital into my system to manage.

He proposed all of this without hearing my plans. The work was the pitch.

What Happened Next

On May 21, 2026, Baraka won Best Emerging Innovation — Islamic Product Launch of the Year at the Global Islamic Finance Innovation Awards 2026 (The Digital Banker) — judged on the research and the protocol alone.

The Digital Banker's Managing Director called it “remarkable recognition amongst prominent competition from worldwide institutions.” The same awards have honoured Standard Chartered Saadiq, Emirates Islamic, Dubai Islamic Bank, Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank, Mashreq, National Australia Bank, and Wafra — a $30 billion asset manager. We were the only DeFi protocol in the room.

For context on what that company means: at these same awards, City Bank won Best Islamic Retail Bank — Bangladesh, a national country category, in 2024. In 2026, Baraka won a global innovation category — judged not by country, but against worldwide institutions, for the innovation itself.

And then, in the span of a single week, the inbound started. No cold emails from me, no pitch sent, no announcement. A top-15 Web3 venture firm reached out wanting to fund us — before the award was even public, so they came purely off the work. A liquidity contact from Binance's institutional side reached out about market-making the order book. All of it unprompted.

I had spent two years building completely alone, with no one around me who understood what I was doing. Then the people who do this for a living found us on their own. They see the same thing I see: a $3.9 trillion Islamic finance market that has never had access to these instruments, and a working protocol that finally gives it one.

What We Are Building

Web3 is becoming the infrastructure layer of global finance. Every transaction, every instrument, every settlement — eventually on-chain.

Muslims will face a choice: participate in systems built on interest, or have nothing. We are building the alternative. Baraka: a Shariah-compliant perpetual futures protocol, winner of Best Emerging Innovation at the 2026 Global Islamic Finance Innovation Awards.

Alongside it, Arcus Quant Fund manages capital systematically — the same rigor, the same accountability — for clients who want returns without the noise.

I built the system anyway. I found the alpha anyway. I found the partner, the protocol, the mission — all of it arrived, in sequence, as if it was always going to.

Now we build in public.