How FX Monitor Came to Be: A Founder's Story
Hi! I'm Ivan, the developer and owner of FX Monitor. I want to tell you how I arrived at this project and what came before it. Buckle up, it's a long story 😊
A bit about me
My name is Ivan Pochta, I'm 35. I was born and still live in Ukraine, just 90 km from the front line, and I haven't left despite the war.
In 2013 I earned a Master's degree in Economic Cybernetics. Put simply, it's the modelling and automation of economic processes: something like financial analytics, but with a heavy tilt toward math and programming. When I enrolled in 2008, nobody could clearly explain what we'd become: mathematicians, economists, programmers, analysts? In the end, everyone from my department went in a different direction.
How I got into trading
In 2012, at 21, I discovered the Forex market. Technical analysis came fairly easily to me, but manual trading has plenty of pitfalls. There's the psychology of sitting in a drawdown (not to mention black swans). There's risk management: trading by hand, it's hard to train yourself to enter strictly on signal and always set a stop loss and take profit.
But the real issue was something else. Say my strategy is profitable today. I scroll back a couple of months on the chart and see a high win rate and solid expectancy. And then the thought creeps in: "Maybe this is just the current market phase?"
That's how I came to algo trading. I had two problems to solve:
1. Test a strategy on historical data and see how robust it is when market phases change.
2. Control risk and automate execution, because you can't sit at a screen 24/7 managing open positions.
With help from freelancers, I built my first EA purely to test a strategy on history. It answered my main question: the strategy had worked steadily for the last six months, in a market that suited it, and lost money before that. That was the start of my journey as an algo trader.
I set myself the goal of building something more robust than my early manual strategies. Over time I realised that developing EAs fascinated me more than trading itself. You think, try different entries and exits, hunt for patterns, optimise, test — and then, eureka, it works!
Strategy matters more than code
Some say EA developers are just programmers. It always annoyed me to be seen as a coder. The heart of any EA is the strategy; code is maybe 20% of the system.
Today, even without coding skills, you can write an EA with Claude or ChatGPT. But the essential part is still yours: the strategy, the pattern you found on the chart and know how to trade. AI can't find that for you, at least not yet.
2016: the pound flash crash and the end of manual trading
In October 2016 came the famous flash crash in the British pound. My manually traded accounts got margin calls, while my EAs actually made a little, despite crazy slippage and terrible execution. That was the turning point: I decided to give up manual trading completely in favour of algorithmic trading.
My father said to me then: "Do you realise that what you're doing is the only thing that matches your degree 100%?!" He was right. Nothing describes economic cybernetics better than building trading strategies and EAs.
The MQL5 Market and my first tools
At the end of 2016 I wondered whether I could actually sell EAs on the MQL5 Market. I signed up as a seller — and off it went!
Now I could reinvest profits into new accounts and other authors' EAs, so I started exploring their products. The two that interested me most were Momentum EA by Wim (you all know him, he's a vendor on FX Monitor 😊) and SFE Price Action by Joel. My main analytical tools back then were QuantAnalyzer 4 and Tick Data Suite 2.
The idea behind FX Monitor
I spent the lion's share of my time testing and optimising, and realised QuantAnalyzer 4 no longer met my needs. It lacked what I needed day to day: working through tons of backtests, strategy combinations and portfolio building. So in 2018–2019 I came up with the idea of an analytics tool for backtest analysis and portfolio optimisation. That idea became the seed of FX Monitor.
I started drafting a spec: what do I and other traders really need, and what would fix my pain both as a developer and as a trader-investor? One of the main problems was overfitting. Is the system curve-fitted to specific market conditions during optimisation, and how will it hold up in live trading?
To answer that, you need live trading monitoring linked to backtests, so you can track in real time how live results deviate from the tests. That eventually became the Strategy section in FX Monitor.
And I came to a conclusion: monitoring is the most important part of the project, even though I originally thought only about backtests. It's the entry point that all other analytics are built on.
2022: a pause
Then came 24 February 2022, and my life, like the lives of millions of others, changed. I stepped away from trading and EA development. It was only in January 2025 that I found the strength to come back to the markets.
2025: coming back and building monitoring for myself
Believe it or not, after all those years neither QuantAnalyzer 4 nor Myfxbook had really changed. Nothing new.
I hit a problem right away: I launched several demo accounts and couldn't get them added to Myfxbook properly. Not to mention that its depth of analysis was far from what I needed. So I decided to build a monitoring and trade data collection system for myself.
It came together fairly quickly, and I connected my first accounts. Back then I had no idea it would grow into a project this big 😊 But I loved how it worked: accounts connect without issues, and data updates regularly instead of hanging for a day. It was immediately clear I also needed Telegram notifications for trades — something I'd always missed.
A huge amount of time went into perfecting the charts and the calculation of profit, loss and drawdown. The math had to be flawless and the charts had to match reality. Most similar services have issues either with charts (some don't even draw them :D) or with profit calculation. The main trap is deposits and withdrawals: that's what breaks the math and the charts for most of them.
From a personal tool to a public product
One day a client asked me: "I need proper monitoring, can you recommend something?" I told him I'd built one for myself. Hang on — it's coming soon 😊
That's how the migration to a public product began. I had to expand the functionality a lot: registration, authentication, plan limits and much more. On 18 March 2026 I opened public access to FX Monitor. That was the point of no return: it was time to build everything I'd been working toward — backtest analysis, strategies and more.
Sign-ups started coming in and, most importantly, feedback: "This product is amazing!" That was incredibly motivating. Ideas for new features kept coming, and many came from you: "I'd love a feature like this." If an idea is useful and in demand, it goes on my to-do list.
Investors and going independent
In the very first month I received several offers from investors. I accepted one — from a trader client who actively used the project and kept suggesting ideas. Creative freedom mattered to me: I wanted the project to stay focused on traders, not be driven by pure commercial interest or turn into an advertising dump.
The investors even registered a company in Singapore that was meant to become the managing entity. But it didn't work out, and we went our separate ways. Today FX Monitor is fully my project: I'm its sole owner and developer, and development hasn't stopped for a single day.
One more question I sometimes get. Although I live in Ukraine, FX Monitor's servers run in European data centres and don't depend on what happens here. Your data and monitoring run 24/7.
What FX Monitor does today
The project has grown a lot over these months:
• MT4/MT5 account monitoring with Telegram notifications;
• portfolios combining multiple accounts;
• backtest analysis and Monte Carlo simulation;
• the Strategy section, comparing live trading with backtests;
• slippage analysis by broker and instrument;
• an EA ranking and public profiles;
• a free desktop app for backtest analysis and portfolio optimisation.
And I keep building — both FX Monitor and my EAs. If you haven't tried FX Monitor yet, connect your first account at fx-monitor.com. If you're already using it, tell me which feature you're missing.
Instead of an epilogue
I'm sure the best is yet to come. When I was a kid, my parents would come to pick me up from kindergarten and find me sitting in the corner, building with a construction set. I still remember those red blocks…
Even then I was a builder. And all my life I've been driven by one thing: to create something new, beautiful and unique. That goes for everything — from FX Monitor to my EAs.
Yours, Ivan Pochta
Author website / source: https://fx-monitor.com