He Was Their Number One Trainer. He Walked Out Rather Than Teach Traders to Lose. That's Why ProAct Exists.

The dot-com collapse ended Scott Barkley's job in technology. He had been head of sales at a software company where Jerry Rankin was his boss.

“I was 50 years old and nobody wanted to hire me.”

Both men turned to a market that was brand new to retail traders: Forex.

Jerry lost a painful amount of money in just over three months, using the retail tools of the day.

Scott paid for a scalping course, got good at it, and was hired to teach scalping to traders all over the world.

Then came a long winning streak. Instead of celebrating, Scott looked at what he had risked to make it.

“I risk a whole lot of money to make a whole little bit of money … I had a paradigm shift right there.”

Later, after a seminar where they were both featured speakers, a veteran bank trader took Scott to dinner and proved why everything he had been telling people was wrong. In Scott's words, “it solidified my paradigm shift.”

Scott went to the company he trained for and told them to stop teaching scalping: the students were going to lose. The company said no. It was paid a kickback on every trade its students placed.

Scott was their number one trainer. He walked out anyway.

“Now I was totally on my own, had to start all over again … best decision I ever made.”

He started over with a small trading room in a rented building on Poker Alley, where cowboys once stopped to play poker on their way driving cattle to Kansas City.

They traded. And they tested, and tested, and tested.

Jerry, the programmer, told Scott: “I can program this stuff.”

He started building software to expose the hidden pitfalls he had found in every other charting package, and he put a White Dot on the chart. The 17 traders in the room each took a currency and went back through the history to see what price did after it appeared.

They never set out to sell software. They were building it for themselves. Then came a choice: get out of the business, or get 100% into it.

In Scott's words, they “got drug kicking and screaming into the … charting software business.”

During those years, a major broker hired Scott to teach its traders. For three years he traveled with a veteran who had traded for a bank for 12 years, four of them in London.

“Do you think I learned something about how the bankers trade? I learned a whole lot.”

More than twenty years on, the method is built on those lessons: read what the big banks are doing, trade with them instead of against them, and put risk first.

The ProAct charts now run on TradingView. And Scott still hosts the NY Live Room, four days a week.