Whether it was selling the Star Wars figures he collected as a little boy for 50 times their value or using $125 of grass-cutting money to buy a Michael Jordan rookie card that he later sold for $1,500, it was clear Bryan Bottarelli was a born trader – possessing the unique ability to identify opportunities and leverage those investments.

Graduating with a business degree from the highly rated Indiana University Kelley School of Business, Bryan got his first job out of college trading stock options on the floor of the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE). There he was mentored by one of the country’s top floor traders in the heart of the technology boom from 1999 to 2000 – trading in the crowded and lively Apple computer pit. Executing his trades in real time, Bryan learned to identify and implement some of his most powerful trading secrets… secrets that rarely make their way outside the CBOE to individual traders. 

Recognizing the true value of these methods, Bryan tapped into his entrepreneurial spirit to take a risk. He walked off the CBOE floor and launched his own independent trading research service called Bottarelli Research. From February 2006 to December 2018, Bryan gave his precise trading instructions to a small, elite group – most who joined him on day one and have been followers ever since. 

As a so-called “play tactician,” Bryan uses his hands-on knowledge of floor trading to shape opportunities and chart formations into elegant, powerful, and profitable recommendations. And by using the same hedging techniques taught by professional floor traders, Bryan is able to deliver his readers remarkable gain opportunities while strictly limiting their total risk. 

Along the way, Bryan has developed a cumulative track record that could impress even the most successful hedge fund manager. His early calls on some of the most consequential stocks of the past two decades speak for themselves…  

• He flagged Apple in 2011 at a split-adjusted $12.35 – shares that have since climbed more than 2,100%.  

• That same year he identified ASML as “the hot property in chips,” a call that has since produced gains of over 2,000%.  

• In 2012, Bryan told readers there would be “higher prices ahead” for Netflix, a prediction that has borne out to the tune of more than 10,000%.  

• He’s also written about Amazon 113 times beginning in December 2009, starting a drumbeat that has been rewarded with a 3,100% rise from his first article.  

• And perhaps most notably, in 2012 Bryan publicly called Tesla an “innovative category killer,” urging readers to buy the stock when it traded for less than $2.50, split adjusted – a position that has since grown more than 16,000%. 

The thread connecting each of these calls is Bryan’s singular focus on identifying transformative trends early – before Wall Street catches on. Whether it was recognizing Apple’s breakout potential in 2011, spotting Netflix’s long runway in 2012, or pounding the table on Tesla when it was a fringe idea trading for pennies, Bryan has consistently found the signal in the noise.  

He now spends his days guiding one of the first trading communities ever created, The War Room… and creating proprietary strategies, software, and scanners for members to level up their trading, such as his Stock Flips strategy, Post-Market Profits service, and his Cash Code X scanner. You can also catch him every Tuesday in  Monument Trend Advisory’s weekly live “Intelligence Briefing.” 

Karim Rahemtulla has always had a nose for value other people miss. As a kid at boarding school in England, that meant reselling his mother’s homemade snacks to homesick classmates for a profit – anything to escape the horrendous British food. Years later, it meant something bigger: spotting an overlooked oil services company when crude was trading at $10 a barrel and everyone else had fled the sector. Different decades, same instinct – Karim was a born fundamental analyst, possessing the rare ability to see value long before the crowd does.

Educated in England, Canada, and the U.S., Karim is fluent in several languages, with undergraduate studies in economics and foreign languages and a master’s degree in finance. He put that education to work fast, becoming one of the youngest CFOs of a brokerage and trading firm that cleared through Bear Stearns in the late 1980s. There he was trained by veterans of the business – traders who had already made their mistakes and whose late-career strategies Karim recognized as genuinely powerful. 

His father taught him early: never pay full price – not for a house, a car, or a stock. Karim has carried that principle with him ever since, and it has shaped everything from his personal investments to his professional calls. He prefers to see things firsthand. He once bribed his way onto a fishing boat in the Persian Gulf just to observe the Strait of Hormuz with his own eyes. Days after the revolution in Cairo in 2011, he sat across from the head of Egypt’s stock exchange. He has stood inside a copper mine in Arizona years before data centers showed up nearby. For Karim, the edge comes from getting there before the analysts do. 

Since his early days, Karim has built a cumulative track record that spans more than 35 years of options trading and international markets – and a body of macro calls that could impress even the most seasoned global macro fund manager. Over a span of 18 months in the late 2010s… he avoided a single realized loss on 37 consecutive recommendations.  

His early calls on some of the most consequential trends and stocks of the past three decades speak for themselves… 

• In 1994, when the commercial internet was still a fringe idea, he told readers to ignore the flashy IPOs and instead buy the companies building the backbone – Comcast, Nextel, and Ericsson – which went on to return 10x, 20x, even 25x during the boom. A $1,000 investment in each could have grown to $69,000. 

• In 1999 he warned people that the No. 1 threat was massive overvaulation of the stock market. What happened next? The dot-com bust. The companies Karim recommended ended up going up big time. 

• In the 2000s, he predicted the real estate meltdown, nearly two years before it happened.  

• Years before stocks like Fortinet took off, he told readers that cybersecurity would become one of the biggest industries in the world – a prediction that has since been validated many times over. 

• And perhaps most striking, in 2020, when COVID collapsed air travel and Rolls-Royce’s stock fell below $1, Karim looked past the jet engine business that every analyst was fixated on – and focused on its nuclear division. His recommendation helped one subscriber turn $20,000 into $1 million. Another used the proceeds to pay cash for his home. A third bought over 500,000 shares at under $1 and is now sitting on $8 million. Subscribers who followed the call had the chance to see their capital rise more than 11x in three years. 

The thread connecting each of these calls is Karim’s singular focus on finding value the market has missed – overlooked sectors, depressed prices, and structural mispricings – and getting there before institutional capital catches on. Whether it was the internet backbone in 1994, oil services in 1999, or Rolls-Royce’s nuclear division in 2020, Karim has consistently found the signal before the crowd did. 

He is the author of the best-selling book Where in the World Should I Invest? and now spends his days co-leading The War Room alongside Bryan Bottarelli, deploying strategies that span LEAPS trading, spread trading, put selling, and insider cluster buying. You can also catch him with Bryan every Tuesday in Monument Trend Advisory’s weekly live “Intelligence Briefing” and in the monthly “Field Report.” 

Nate Bear’s path to the desk didn’t run through Wall Street. It ran through 60-hour weeks remodeling Home Depots and McDonald’s as a construction worker, and through a gutting $15,000 loss on a single Apple trade – real money, at a time when that might as well have been a million dollars. What he lacked in Wall Street connections and finance degrees, he made up for in stubbornness, curiosity, and an absolute refusal to quit. Those qualities would eventually carry him from blowing up his first $1,000 trading account to turning $37,000 into nearly $3 million in just four years.

Nate graduated from Georgia Tech in 2005 with a bachelor’s degree in building construction. After two years in the corporate world, he ditched the suit-and-tie and launched his own business, United States Permit, which he ran from home. That flexibility gave him room to start trading on the side in 2008 – first with a $1,000 account, then with growing conviction that the markets were a puzzle worth solving, even as early losses mounted. 

Like most new traders, Nate struggled badly. He chased whatever stocks CNBC was hyping. He blew up multiple accounts. He took that devastating $15,000 Apple loss. But in 2015, something changed: his son was born, and Nate found his real reason to figure it out. It wasn’t about money – it was about time. He wanted out of the 60-hour grind of running a small business and into a life where he could be present for his family. From that moment, he stopped dabbling and started treating trading like a business that needed a real, repeatable system. 

What followed were years of deep research, pattern recognition, and systematic testing across thousands of stocks and options contracts. Nate spent time studying decades-old academic work from Harvard, MIT, and the Federal Reserve alongside his own observations of how retail money flows now drive markets in ways institutions can no longer control. He eventually built multiple proprietary systems to detect these forces – each designed to spot explosive moves before most traders even know they’re coming. 

His trading portfolio crossed $1 million within a couple of years of going full-time in 2016. The results since then have spoken for themselves. 

His calls across markets – up, down, and sideways – are the kind that stop people in their tracks… 

• On HIMS, when every conventional signal said to stay away – the stock was in a severe downtrend, down 25%, freshly downgraded by Citi – Nate spotted hidden pressure building beneath the surface and placed the trade. Within hours, it returned 1,140%. One subscriber bought four contracts at 50 cents, sold three at $5.85, and walked away with a 1,070% win in just 24 hours. 

• With B. Riley Financial, with the SEC breathing down the company’s neck and its stock down over 50% in five months, Nate identified a mass of retail traders quietly loading positions off the radar. He placed the trade – with no news, no announcements, no breaking events – and two days later, shares exploded. The trade closed for 1,130%, enough to turn $5,000 into over $60,000. 

• On Tesla, with earnings down, sales down, profits down, and the stock off 50% – Nate saw pressure coiling for a massive move. He placed the trade. Twenty-four hours later, it was up 325%. Every $1,000 invested returned $4,250. Later, when Tesla was going nowhere and most traders had written it off as dead money, Nate spotted selling pressure building instead and flipped to a put trade. That one returned 324% in a single day. 

• On Advance Auto Parts – a stock down nearly 60% over three years and written off by most of Wall Street – Nate’s system stayed green for an entire month. Five trades. Five winners. Zero losses: 31%, 52%, 35%, 33%, and 24%. 

The thread connecting every one of these trades is Nate’s singular focus on identifying hidden pressure in the market before it surfaces – whether that’s institutional money quietly accumulating after an earnings surge, or a mass of retail traders coiling a stock like a spring before it explodes. Since joining Monument Traders Alliance in 2023, he has recommended 300 money-doubling plays.  

For Nate, the numbers are meaningful, but the story behind them matters more. He vividly remembers the first time he sat down at the dinner table in the new home his trading career made possible – a house more than triple the size of the 1,200-square-foot place where six people and three dogs had once lived. 

“It was like a huge glass of ice water after a long walk in the desert.” 

Today, Nate trades full time and live-streams his trades to teach others the techniques that changed his own financial fate. He guides members through Daily Profits Live, Profit Surge Trader, and Sector Strike – sharing real-time setups and actionable alerts every day the market is open. Nate’s goal is simple: to make his trading community the same glass of water in the desert that once changed his life. 

Chris “CJ” Johnson is a seasoned equity and options analyst with more than 30 years of experience. He’s widely recognized for his quantitative approach to measuring investor sentiment and navigating Wall Street through a disciplined technical and contrarian investment style. 

An early adopter of big data analytics in finance, CJ began developing proprietary forecasting algorithms in 1998. Today, those models process millions of data points daily to identify both short- and long-term market opportunities. His research and quantitative work have formed the foundation of a distinguished track record in market analysis, technical forecasting, and behavioral investing. 

Holding degrees in finance, statistics, and accounting, Chris has served in several senior industry roles, including Director of Quantitative Analysis and Director of Research at a major investment firm. In 2006, he founded Johnson Research Group and ETF Advisory Research Partners, two firms that became well known for their work in behavioral valuation, technical analysis, portfolio construction, and investment management. 

In late 2025, Chris joined Monument Traders Alliance as Senior Quant Analyst, where he delivers technical, quantitative, and contrarian market insights to active investors and traders. 

Through his market research, daily commentary, and educational sessions, including hosting Monument Traders LIVE, CJ focuses on helping investors navigate volatile market conditions through technical analysis, earnings season preparation, options strategies, and behavioral market signals. He is particularly known for sharing actionable investment strategies designed for both traders and long-term investors. 

Beyond research and portfolio strategy, CJ has built a strong reputation as an educator and market strategist. He has spent years teaching investment fundamentals, technical analysis, options strategies, and market psychology through keynote speeches, educational seminars, trading workshops, and investment conference roundtables across the country. 

Recognized by TipRanks, Chris ranks among the top 99.3% of financial bloggers and the top 98.6% of overall financial experts. His market commentary and research have been featured in major financial publications, including Barron’s, USA Today, Newsweek, and The Wall Street Journal. In broadcast media, he has appeared regularly on CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business, and CBS Radio as a respected voice in financial markets and investor education. 

Stephen has been in the financial publishing industry for more than a decade, but he didn’t follow the typical path to success.  

Disillusioned by the failures of “broken” higher education, he dropped out of college at 23. Since then, he has built a career helping everyday people grow their knowledge and find financial success through alternative forms of education and the use of cutting-edge technology.

One of his first jobs was working for six-time New York Times best-selling financial author Loral Langemeier. He quickly rose up the ranks, running the company’s operations in less than a year. Seeing over 10,000 people become millionaires through non-traditional education opened his eyes to the power of building new wealth online.

Since then, he’s helped millions of Americans pursue financial independence through the newsletters and publications he’s worked for. He’s collaborated with some of the most famous influencers online over the past decade, including Daymond John (from NBC’s Shark Tank), Timothy Sykes, Dr. Eric Berg, and other experts in the financial space.

He joined Monument Traders Alliance in 2022, helping to develop some of the community’s most popular research services, software, and newsletters during a period of strong growth for the publication. In 2025, he was named the company’s publisher.

Stephen loves trading, hard assets, and studying the many ways Wall Street exploits hidden advantages within the market. Outside of work, he is an avid pickleball player! 

Ryan came to markets the way most serious investors do – not through a training program or a corner office, but through curiosity, skin in the game, and the kind of hard-won education that only comes from putting real money to work. Over the years, he developed a deeper understanding of options trading, position sizing, and market psychology – the same principles he now uses to evaluate every strategy Monument Traders Alliance brings to its members. He knows the difference between a system that looks good on paper and one that holds up when the Fed is at the podium, oil is surging, and the market is in freefall, because he has navigated those moments himself. 

In 2019, Ryan joined Bryan and Karim to help build the most transparent, results-driven trading community in financial publishing. What started as a small operation has grown into a thriving platform with tens of thousands of members, proprietary software and scanners, and a roster of expert tacticians covering everything from floor-traded options to global macro ideas to technical momentum systems. 

Under Ryan’s leadership, MTA has developed and launched some of its most powerful proprietary methodologies, including the Dark Ticker overnight trading system and the Stock Flip strategy. His fingerprints are on every major product MTA has built: not as a passive executive, but as someone who understands the mechanics deeply enough to know when the data is telling the truth. 

The thread connecting everything Ryan does is a founding conviction that financial opportunity should not be exclusive. He has charged the Monument Traders Alliance team with creating research, tools, and live events that give members the information and strategies they need to trade with confidence – in any market, on any day.