John Margerison spent years going door to door selling investment properties before he built the algorithms that now trade on his behalf. Somewhere between that early hustle and his current work funding meals, flights, and dental care for strangers, he arrived at an approach he applies to money and to giving in equal measure.
The first hour of John Margerison’s day belongs to numbers. Before anything else, he checks the financial markets, scanning for the small shifts that will decide how his trading algorithms behave once the exchanges open. Then he goes to the gym, a habit fixed into the schedule as firmly as the market check itself. What follows is a day spent largely with code: refining the systems that place trades on his behalf, testing them against the noise of the market, adjusting where the logic breaks down. By evening, the numbers give way to something else entirely. He sets the work aside to spend time with his children, treating that boundary as seriously as any of the disciplines that built his career. It is a small daily negotiation between automation and attention, between what can be systematized and what cannot, and it says something about how Margerison has come to think about value, in markets and in life.
From Door to Door Sales to Systematic Trading
Margerison did not begin in finance. He started as a traveling salesperson, going door to door on behalf of investment properties, before moving into commercial real estate. That early experience, built on direct persistence and reading the person across the table, eventually gave way to a different kind of business, one built around the financial markets and the tools of artificial intelligence. Rather than trade by instinct alone, he began developing algorithms designed to automate trading decisions, systems built to bring accuracy and efficiency to a process that rewards discipline. The shift, from selling property in person to designing code that executes trades without him at the keyboard, reflects a broader pattern in how he approaches problems: start close to the ground, then build something that can run at a scale no single transaction could reach.
Widening the Frame
When Margerison approaches a new idea, he resists narrowing in too quickly. Instead, he expands the scope of a problem before he tries to solve it, working from the observation that a wider view often makes the smaller, more immediate difficulties resolve themselves. That habit of thinking beyond the nearest obstacle runs through both halves of his work, the trading systems he builds and the causes he funds, and it stands out as one of the more consistent threads in how he has approached entrepreneurship generally.
Meals, Flights, and a Different Kind of Ledger
Margerison has spent the last seven years directing part of his attention, and his resources, toward hunger relief. In that time, he has helped provide 1.5 million meals to people who needed them, work that runs quietly alongside his trading business rather than in place of it. When the war in Ukraine displaced people from their homes, he purchased flight tickets for 41 people, giving them a way out of the conflict and into safety in Australia. It is the kind of intervention that does not scale into a broad program so much as it solves a specific, immediate problem for a specific group of people, which is consistent with how he tends to operate.
Protecting Children
His giving extends into harder territory as well. Margerison has supported organizations working against human trafficking, specifically those focused on rescuing and rehabilitating children caught in sex slavery. He has also contributed to dental programs that provide care to children whose families cannot afford it, a smaller and less visible form of support, but one aimed at the same basic goal: a safer, healthier start for children who did not choose their circumstances.
Applying Business Principles to Giving
What distinguishes Margerison’s philanthropy from a simple checkbook is his belief in venture philanthropy, the idea that traditional giving, on its own, often fails to reach the root causes of the problems it means to address. He brings the same entrepreneurial instincts he uses in his trading business to the nonprofits and social enterprises he works with, seeking out organizations that can show effective strategy, transparency, and outcomes that can actually be measured. He looks in particular for initiatives capable of scaling, the same quality he would look for in a business worth investing in, on the theory that an idea proven small can, with the right support, extend well beyond its first success.
Where the Technology Is Headed
Professionally, Margerison is closely watching advances in artificial intelligence and quantum computing, technologies he already relies on in his own trading systems. What excites him most, though, is not their application to markets but to medicine. He points to personalized treatment, tailored to an individual patient rather than a general diagnosis, as one of the clearer paths toward better healthcare outcomes, and he expects medical breakthroughs to become more frequent and more accessible as the underlying computing power catches up to the ambition.
A Sunday Ritual
One habit Margerison points to directly is a block of two to three hours he keeps free every Sunday evening, dedicated entirely to email. Clearing pressing correspondence before the week begins puts him ahead of most Monday mornings, and he estimates the practice adds the equivalent of a full extra day of work each week, a gain he puts at roughly twenty percent in overall productivity for a couple of hours of effort. It is the kind of small, repeatable adjustment that compounds, not unlike the trades his algorithms are built to execute.
What He Would Tell a Younger Version of Himself
Looking back, Margerison says the lesson he most wishes he had learned earlier is the value of saying no. As a young man, he got excited by nearly every opportunity that crossed his path, chasing possibility rather than progress. Over time, he came to see that staying focused on the goals already in motion produced better results than scattering effort across everything that looked promising, and that the discipline of declining has done more for his efficiency than any single opportunity he said yes to.
Failure, Strength, and Staying in Your Lane
Setbacks, in his view, are simply part of the work. Rather than treat failure as a signal to change course entirely, Margerison treats it as information, something to extract a lesson from and fold into the next attempt. That same logic extends to how he thinks about opportunity generally: he argues that every person has a distinct way of creating value, and that the more consistently someone can identify openings that fit their particular strengths and preferences, the more success and fulfillment tend to follow. Chasing something outside that alignment, by his account, tends to cost more than it returns.
A Wary Eye on Government Debt
Margerison also holds a view on public finance that runs against the common assumption that government borrowing carries no real consequence. He believes the scale of debt many governments have taken on will eventually produce a market crash, a position built less on ideology than on the same scrutiny he applies to any balance sheet, personal or public.
An Opportunity in Retirement
He also sees an underused opportunity in the number of baby boomers approaching retirement with profitable businesses and no clear buyer lined up. His suggestion: approach multiple businesses within the same industry with personalized letters, offering to acquire operations at a discount from owners ready to exit. The appeal, as he frames it, is straightforward: acquiring an existing, profitable business carries less risk than building one from nothing, provided the buyer is willing to do the outreach that most people skip.
Tools and a Recommended Book
In his own trading, Margerison relies heavily on TradingView, which he considers indispensable for the analytical detail it brings to market decisions. For anyone looking to think more clearly about money, he points to The Richest Man in Babylon, by George S. Clason. The book, in his account, offers lasting lessons on managing finances and investments, and reading it prompted him to reconsider some of his own earlier financial decisions, an influence he says has stayed with him.
Working Without Walls
The consistent thread underneath all of it is flexibility. Margerison built his business specifically so that it would not require managing a large staff or working from any fixed location, giving him the freedom to work from anywhere and to shape his schedule around the things, including his children, that a larger, more conventional operation would make harder to protect. That pursuit of flexibility, more than any single trade or donation, appears to be the organizing value behind the choices he has made.
What Comes Next for John Margerison
The pattern across Margerison’s work, in markets, in philanthropy, and in the small disciplines he has built into his weeks, suggests someone still testing how far a systematic approach can be pushed into areas that resist easy measurement. He continues to develop the trading systems that anchor his business, continues to route resources toward hunger relief, trafficking prevention, and children’s health, and continues to look for opportunities, in technology and in business, that align with what he does well. Whatever comes next, it is likely to carry the same signature: a wide frame drawn first, and a disciplined system built to fill it.
