About
Dhawal Ranka.
Dallas in the morning. The left screen runs ES and NQ in 5-minute candles, the right one a Pine editor with maybe two hundred lines uncommitted, and a notebook open to a question I am trying to answer with data.
Independent quant building tools and writing the research behind them. Three Pine indicators on TradingView under the handle thewallranka, a real-time market intelligence app called Mercury, an audiobook player called EarBook, an AI Spanish tutor called LinguaBot, and a 21-chapter book on technical analysis for futures traders. Everything ships under my own name, on my own schedule.
History
TODO (history, ~220 words): Dense paragraph prose, not a timeline. Geographic and career beats woven into narrative. Cover: where you grew up, the first futures contract you traded and what it taught you, why Dallas, the moment you stopped trusting closed-source charting tools and started writing your own. Linear's about page is the reference for cadence.
Ethos
“The best tools don't need your data, your subscription, your permission.”
The indicators are public on TradingView and the open-source ones are open-source by default. Publishing them is cheaper than gatekeeping them, and the only honest way to test a hypothesis is to let other traders break it.
I work from primary sources. Wyckoff and VSA for the supply and demand reading, Bulkowski and Edwards & Magee for the price-pattern catalogue, Brooks for the bar-by-bar grammar, Grimes and Dalton for the auction frame, Hasbrouck and Osler for microstructure. The papers I cite live in the research section so the underlying argument is one click away. Books that changed how I think about markets the most: Trading and Exchanges by Larry Harris, Mind Over Markets by Dalton, and Reading Price Charts Bar by Bar by Brooks.
Markets are not abstractions. They are crowds of people pursuing money, and crowds of people are eternal.
The mornings before the cash open are quiet. Coffee, a one-page market read, a check on overnight ranges and the economic calendar, and a written plan that fits on an index card. The plan is the contract; everything during the session is execution against it.
What I'm not
Not a signal seller. Not a course operator. Not on Twitter. Not a backtester-only quant who has never sized a position live, and not a discretionary scalper who refuses to write anything down. The work is the writing, the indicators, and the book. If something I publish is useful, it is useful without a subscription.
Beyond markets
TODO (~50 words): What you do that has nothing to do with markets. Reading, music, walking, cooking, languages, anything that resets the screen brain.
Contact
Reach me at [email protected]. I am on GitHub and on TradingView as thewallranka. I do not run a Discord, do not sell signals, and do not have a Twitter.