Friday night. My wife was out with her girlfriends. Like any self-respecting husband on a Friday alone, I bought a ticket to whatever Marvel movie was playing and went by myself.

I sat down thirty minutes early. The guy next to me had also just dropped his wife off with hers. We started talking — hot dogs, snacks, the usual.

Turns out he was a day trader.

Every morning, he told me, he'd get up early, sit down with coffee, and walk the same ritual: pull the signals, look at the data, see where the action was, build the game plan. By the time the bell rang, he already knew his moves.

That's when it clicked.

I'd been doing the exact same thing every morning for years — just not with stocks. I worked at a global company with 200 locations across 60+ markets. Every morning, coffee in hand, I'd scan all of them looking for trends, anomalies, things to act on. Same shape. Same pattern. Same coffee.

I wasn't going to spend my mornings analyzing stocks the way that guy did. I had a job. I had a life. But I had the analytical muscle — I just needed the system.

That's where Squintz started. A movie theater, a stranger, and the recognition that I'd been training for this my whole career — just on different data.