The path to Applecore.
Elias Johanssen, also known as Eli Yans, is a musician, designer, qualified mnemonics teacher, photoreader, author and market researcher. He lives with dyslexia and a speech disorder, which made school exactly the kind of warm, adaptive, deeply understanding environment schools love to claim they are. That was a joke. Both made him a target for years of bullying. Not the cinematic sort where the misunderstood hero delivers one clever speech at the end of the movie, the music swells, and everyone learns a valuable lesson about kindness before the credits roll. More the low-budget educational version, where everyone pretends the system is dealing with it, the bullies keep getting oddly good at timing, and the person being targeted is quietly encouraged to develop a spine.
A few situations were talked down. But most were not.
Fortunately, Elias did not become a motivational poster. He became something far less convenient to the accepted order:
curious, difficult to convince, and increasingly suspicious of systems that call you clever when you repeat the script and difficult when you ask who wrote it.
“When you get to the core of a thing, regardless of how complex it may seem on the outside, you soon realise that it was always a simple thing to understand.
All you needed was the curiosity and patience to analyse it.”
The path to
Applecore.
When Elias was ten, his father brought home a Rubik’s Cube. He was not allowed to touch it, which naturally made it much more interesting. After weeks of twisting, turning and eventually declaring it impossible, his father abandoned it. Then, during a school break, while his father was at work, Elias picked it up.
After fifteen minutes, solving the cube seemed less interesting than finding out how the thing worked. So he tried to separate the pieces just enough to look inside. One popped out. Then the whole cube fell apart in his hands. Not ideal. But once the horror of having dismantled something forbidden had passed, the accident became useful. He studied each part, drew the pieces, worked out how they fitted and moved together, then reassembled the cube “solved” before his father returned home.
A few months later, he figured out that it could be solved from any scrambled position with five fairly basic algorithms.
The 'ORIGINAL PROBLEM' - the cube that started his pull-it-apart obsession, and the notes that proved it was not going away.
“Books stopped being a problem when I stopped trying to read them the way everyone else did.
Unfortunately, it exposed a very different problem.”
In his twenties, a course in Photoreading changed Elias’s relationship with books. It did not cure anything, and it did not magically turn reading into a soft-focus montage. But it did give him something he had not had before – Access.
Books, which had often felt like punishment with page numbers, became accessible in a new way. More than that, they became useful. He began to trust learning again. With that new route in, he studied mnemonics, cognitive psychology, neuroanatomy, contract law, architecture and, eventually, the behaviour of the financial markets. Unfortunately, that access came with a hidden consequence.
Different covers. Different authors. Different promises.
Same explanations. Same patterns. Same confident bullshit passed around as though repetition had somehow matured into proof.
At first, that almost made the material feel safer. But if everyone was saying the same thing, either the knowledge was true, or the industry had learned to polish old bullshit until it looked like pearls of wisdom.
So when Elias began trading, the knowledge he had trusted did not lead to understanding; it led to spectacular failure.
∞
“I only invest in myself.
Everything else I trade.”
That line is not a slogan. It is Elias’s most fundamental risk statement.
He does not treat the market as somewhere to settle down and raise a family. He treats it as somewhere to enter with a reason, act with discipline, and leave when the reason is gone. The longer capital remains exposed, the longer it remains vulnerable to events outside the trader’s control.
This was not a lesson he discovered elegantly. It was learned through loss, bad information, overexposure, and the unpleasant practical consequences of trusting methods without testing them that sounded far more reliable than they proved to be.
That lesson eventually cost him all his money, his home, and a short period of his life sleeping in a car. Which, as educational experiences go, was pretty thorough.
"A trade can become dangerous when the reason for entering disappears and the trader stays anyway."
That became one of the fundamental rules of Applecore: if the reason no longer survives testing, the position has to go. That position might be a trade. But it might also be a method, a belief, a book, a lesson, a chart pattern, or an entire industry habit rehearsed so often it starts to sound like knowledge or truth - especially to new traders too trusting to challenge it.
Just because you invested in it, that does not make it valuable – not until you can prove its worth for yourself. Do not marry the method. Do not defend the position. Do not confuse staying in something with understanding why you entered it. That rule was written in blood in Elias’s personal trading notes. Actually, it was scrawled in red biro, but the point stands.
Those notes were never meant for the public. They began as a private attempt to understand what had gone wrong, strip out inherited trading assumptions, and build the tools Elias needed to test the market for himself.
Much later, that private manual became the foundation of Applecore.
28800
2026-08-04
rev 3
The third revision of www.applecore.trade brought together the full body of research and analysis, a much better user experience and Applecore AI—still in development, but already learning where everything was buried.
The first website was built to launch the book.
The second made the tools available.
So, this one had to contain everything that followed.
Those notes were never meant for the public. They began as a private attempt to understand what had gone wrong, strip out inherited trading assumptions, and build the tools Elias needed to test the market for himself.
Much later, that private manual became the foundation of Applecore.
∞
This timeline follows the NASDAQ through the years Elias began trading, lost everything, analysed the markets without bias, created the tools, wrote the book, and eventually made Applecore public. Click on the price points to discover more.
"A trade can become dangerous when the reason for entering disappears and the trader stays anyway."
That became one of the fundamental rules of Applecore: if the reason no longer survives testing, the position has to go. That position might be a trade. But it might also be a method, a belief, a book, a lesson, a chart pattern, or an entire industry habit rehearsed so often it starts to sound like knowledge or truth. Especially to new traders too trusting to challenge it.
Just because you invested in it, that does not make it valuable – not until you can prove its worth for yourself. Do not marry the method. Do not defend the position. Do not confuse staying in something with understanding why you entered it. That rule was written in blood in Elias’s personal trading notes. Actually, it was scrawled in red biro, but the point stands.
“I only invest in myself.
Everything else I trade.”
That line is not a slogan. It is Elias’s most fundamental risk statement.
He does not treat the market as somewhere to settle down and raise a family. He treats it as somewhere to enter with a reason, act with discipline, and leave when the reason is gone. The longer capital remains exposed, the longer it remains vulnerable to events outside the trader’s control.
This was not a lesson he discovered elegantly. It was learned through loss, bad information, overexposure, and the unpleasant practical consequences of trusting methods without testing them that sounded far more reliable than they proved to be.
That lesson eventually cost him all his money, his home, and a short period of his life sleeping in a car. Which, as educational experiences go, was pretty thorough.
6770
2018-01-13
the phone call
A friend returned from Barbados talking about a £10k Bitcoin CFD win on eToro. It sounded easy, which is usually how expensive mistakes introduce themselves. By the end of the weekend, the idea had taken hold.
“If a thing cannot survive being pulled apart, it was probably sold assembled for a reason.
Applecore is self-(re)assembly.”
Elias continues to build Applecore through analysis, strategy development, trading psychology, research, writing and tools built for traders who want to understand what they are looking at, not simply decorate a chart until it feels less dangerous.
It is not here to offer a holy grail, miracle method, trade signals or some guaranteed-success strategy wrapped in enough marketing bullshit to make it sound clever. There are already plenty of people selling that crap to traders genuinely trying to learn - usually with a disclaimer underneath quietly admitting the headline was talking shit.
Applecore exists for those willing to pull the method apart, test every piece, strip out the bias and rebuild their understanding from the core.