2004: The Year Forex Learned to Speak Serbian

Belgrade, 2004. The stock exchange is being reborn, shares are still bought over the counter, and the word “forex” does not appear in a single Serbian-language publication. That year, at forex-serbia.co.yu, a website appeared that changed it.

Behind the site were five people — brokers and traders learning the global market first-hand, at a time when trading books arrived in suitcases. On 5 December 2004 the site announced its first course: starting 24 January 2005, groups of four, demo accounts, trading competitions, a certificate on completion. The phone number for enrolment was mine.

On that programme, alongside fundamental and technical analysis, stood two subjects nobody else in the region was teaching.

By June 2006 it had a name and an address: the association “Forex Serbia”, Narodnih heroja 42, Belgrade, with an online advisor reachable every weekday from 08:00 to 16:00.

Twenty years on, those two subjects are still the whole story. Markets changed, platforms changed, instruments changed — the reason traders lose money did not: unmanaged emotion and unplanned trading. Everything I do today begins in that 2005 classroom.

I am not writing this to prove I was first. I am writing it because discipline is the only thing I sell — and discipline shows best over a long stretch of time. Two decades, one message.