Bernard Itoro

Backend engineer | User-centric technology | Loves philosophy and critical thinking

[Bernard Itoro @bernarditoro_]

Just found out that the creator of Task Manager (remember Windows) has now rebuilt the entire app and it is now available cross-platform (didn't even know it was available for Mac)

Installed it now and my Godddd

[Bernard Itoro @bernarditoro_]

@Man_Nuelz Oya na

I started using it where I am and it does smell so nice. Na to just dey change am every week 🤦🏽‍♂️

[Bernard Itoro @bernarditoro_]

@2cene Real ooo

Make you no go lock out

[Elyon @0xkitng]

I think there is an interesting difference between people who were brought up in wealth and people who became wealthy after growing up with less, particularly in the way they understand generosity and appreciation.

People who grow up around wealth are sometimes taught from an early age that when someone does something for you, the important thing is not necessarily the monetary value of what they did, but the fact that they chose to do it for you. The emphasis is placed on the gesture, the thought, the effort and the consideration behind the act rather than simply calculating what it cost.

Someone can buy you something relatively inexpensive, help you with something that took them time, drive across town because you needed them, remember something important to you, make an introduction for you or simply go out of their way to make your life easier. The response is usually, you didn’t have to do that. That was thoughtful. Most times, the value comes from the fact that someone thought about you and deliberately invested something of themselves into you.

I think people who grew up with scarcity can sometimes develop a different relationship with value.

This is one of the reasons I think some people who become wealthy after experiencing scarcity can remain extremely transactional in the way they relate to people. They may have acquired money, but they haven’t necessarily changed the thought process through which they measure value. They continue to evaluate things through cost, utility, return and equivalence.

Unfortunately ,relationships don’t work entirely on economic accounting. You cannot meaningfully quantify loyalty. You cannot put a price on someone consistently showing up for you. You cannot reduce thoughtfulness to how much was spent. You cannot measure the significance of someone choosing to inconvenience themselves for your benefit simply by calculating the financial cost of what they did.

And I think people raised around abundance sometimes learn the difference fast enough because they are not constantly forced to evaluate every interaction through scarcity.

Of course there are people born into wealth who are incredibly entitled and incapable of appreciating anything, just as there are people who grew up with very little who are exceptionally generous and understand the meaning of small gestures better than anyone.

So I think it is really between transactional valuation and relational valuation, and upbringing can have a major influence on which one becomes dominant.

The healthiest relationship with money is the one where you understand its value without allowing it to become the only way you understand value.

[Bernard Itoro @bernarditoro_]

@ifiokambrosee I didn't see this earlier

I think you're confusing the product for the marketing. Perception isn't how "good" the product is; it involves how good people think it is. Convincing people on a global scale on how good your thing is, is a long process (even with an unlimited budget)

[Bernard Itoro @bernarditoro_]

@ifiokambrosee Another thing to note is product perception. Ideally the global market isn’t just one big market, it’s made up of chunks of local markets. What are the chances you’d successfully onboard a US client from here esp as a new product? The goal is global, the process: local -> global

[Bernard Itoro @bernarditoro_]

@ifiokambrosee On this,
Building and scaling are different things, with different context. Building for the global market would mean one solution that fits all (building for local limit the scope of that particular solution). Scaling would mean building for immediate locality, then expanding…

[Bernard Itoro @bernarditoro_]

@ifiokambrosee …a product that already exists, and is successful where it exists

[Bernard Itoro @bernarditoro_]

@ifiokambrosee there to limit you, but to help understand the needs and practical solutions to success, then scale. Scaling—rather than building—is the emphasised term. In reality, one size fits all doesn’t exactly apply to most of the digital solutions available. The adaptation comes from…

[Chetuya Chinagolum @Chetuyachinago]

During my second year in college, a close friend introduced me to the Forex market.

I was instantly fascinated by the seductive idea of sitting in the comfort of my small hostel room, pressing a few buttons on my smartphone, and effortlessly making clean, hard currency. Even though the concept sounded childish and too good to be true, there was no immediate reason for me to doubt it. A simple search on social media platforms revealed thousands of flashy accounts belonging to self-proclaimed trading gurus who swore that day-trading was the ultimate shortcut to financial freedom. Usually, these influencers recorded their promotional videos from rented luxury mansions, staged private jets, rented sports cars, and expensive studio setups specifically designed to flex wealth.

So, the problem for me then was not whether there was money flowing through the market; the real, scientific question was how to actually trade the market with a verified edge. My friend eagerly suggested that we pool our money together to buy an expensive online trading course from a particular guru, but that idea immediately rubbed me the wrong way.
If someone actually possessed a secret, money-printing algorithm that consistently beat the global markets, why on earth would they be desperately selling $200 courses to poor college students? The absurd narrative that a random guru abandoned his quiet life, his family, and his private investments just out of pure charity to teach me how to get rich was beyond silly.

YouTube tutorials were the next option on the table, but I quickly dismissed them as well. Historically, I have never learned anything concrete from YouTube videos. In fact, despite producing educational content myself, I can never truly comprehend how people learn complex subjects from watching videos. Whenever I sit down to watch a long instructional video, my brain completely checks out, and I end up falling fast asleep. I even tried watching a couple of highly recommended video series on technical analysis, but I ended up sleeping straight through the night with the video playing to an empty room.

I do not know if this is simply how my brain was structurally wired, since we never really had a television in the house growing up, and up until I was fifteen years old, I was never exposed to digital screens or social media at any serious level. Books have always been my primary companions. Furthermore, I find educational videos to be inherently shallow and completely lacking in intellectual depth. I learned complex LaTeX typesetting not from watching quick YouTube tutorials, but by quietly sitting down and reading the comprehensive official documentation line by line.

To this end, I downloaded heavy textbooks on technical analysis, and even spent my limited cash to physically print out all three massive volumes of Al Brooks' legendary price action trading books. I thoroughly read the first two volumes and meticulously skimmed through the third. Every single serious author in those classic texts explicitly emphasized that an investor must possess a deep, rigorous understanding of financial risk before ever placing a live trade. So, my next logical step was diving headfirst into quantitative finance, risk-management models, macroeconomics, portfolio theory, and statistical probability.

But after spending hundreds of hours deeply studying the mechanics of the market, a cold, unassailable truth finally dawned on me: as an isolated retail trader, I could not consistently make money trading.

Yes, this conclusion sounds completely counterintuitive to the average person, but that is precisely what the raw mathematics proved. After months of intense, grueling study, accumulating deep knowledge on candlestick patterns, price action, risk hedging, slippage, order-block dynamics, leverage ratios, and liquidity sweeps, I arrived at the firm mathematical conclusion that a retail trader cannot reliably beat the market.

First of all, according to the Random Walk Hypothesis, you cannot extract consistent, long-term profits from a mathematically random, highly chaotic market. In any random distribution, there will naturally be streaks where you get a series of winning trades, followed inevitably by devastating streaks of losing trades. Once you factor in broker commissions, wide spreads, overnight swap rates, execution delays, and unexpected slippage, your expected statistical value becomes negative, meaning you are guaranteed to bleed money over time. The only way to systematically extract wealth from such a market is the way institutional giants like Goldman Sachs, Renaissance Technologies, and Citadel do: by hiring armies of PhD holders in mathematics, physics, and computer science, modeling market microstructures with complex differential equations, building high-frequency trading algorithms that execute orders on a nanosecond basis, colocating their fiber-optic servers directly next to the exchange servers, and using their massive order flows to front-run retail traders. And on top of all that technical dominance, they do not merely sit back and watch charts; they spend hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying high-profile politicians, securing insider policy secrets, and getting regulatory favors.

That is not to say an individual trader can never find an edge. The market may be largely random, but there are still statistical anomalies and structural patterns to exploit, provided you trade on higher timeframes like the 4-hour or 1-day charts. Unfortunately, most naive beginners immediately jump onto the 1-minute or 5-minute graphs, which almost always ends in tears and blown accounts. The candlestick patterns and technical indicator signals on those micro-timeframes are essentially pure market noise compared to the dominant daily trend.

A beginner sits there thinking the market is overbought on a 5-minute chart, completely unaware that the asset is merely taking a breath on the 1-day chart before launching into a massive upward spike. This exact optical illusion is why beginners end up panic-selling right when a major boom is starting, and buying frantically right when the market reaches its absolute peak. The only players who possess the computational infrastructure, low-latency execution, and capital depth to trade those micro-timeframes are institutional high-frequency firms.

As an individual trader, you must operate on macro-timeframes and exercise immense patience. But back then, I was a broke university student. I knew my own material poverty and subconscious greed would never grant me that level of cold patience. I simply could not afford to lock up $200 of capital in a broker's account for months when I desperately needed that money to buy food, pay rent, and purchase mobile data. If I tried to force the issue by going full beast mode with high leverage on lower timeframes, I would be ruthlessly liquidated. So, I made the logical, disciplined decision to quit entirely, focus my energy on real-world skills, build capital first, and hope to return to the markets in the future as an institutional-level investor.

Naturally, my friend did not follow this path. He went ahead and bought the expensive online trading courses, which predictably turned out to be a complete scam. One day, he came into my room, saw a stack of about ten heavy trading books I had printed out, and tried to passionately convince me to start trading with him. I calmly looked at him and explained that after hundreds of hours of rigorous study, the mathematics proved that a retail trader in our position could not win, so I had quit.

He took two of my thickest Al Brooks books, but I knew with absolute certainty that he was never going to read a single chapter. Those dense textbooks were completely different from the flashy video courses online: the authors focused on cold, objective probability and statistical market analysis, which held zero appeal for my friend. He wanted quick dopamine and instant cash, not a dialectical analysis of market auction theory. After graduation, he even packed his bags and moved to Lagos to attend a specialized Forex academy. He completely ignored my warnings, and today, even after three full years in Lagos, he has not made a single kobo of sustainable profit from the market. I am not the least bit surprised, because my initial research had been thorough and mathematically rigorous.

My lifelong obsession with deep theory, mathematical rigor, and systems analysis has definitely denied me plenty of cheap fun in life. But that exact same analytical mindset has repeatedly shielded me from making catastrophic, ruinous, and financially devastating life choices, including the addictive trap of sports betting, which is a story for another day.

Thank you for reading!

[Oseni Azeez Destiny @DestinyAzeez]

Today marks an important milestone in Gravy’s journey. We’re excited to welcome our newest #TeamGravy brand ambassador, @official_dezny 🎉

With millions following his craft and his authentic connection with everyday people, @official_Dezny is the perfect voice to show the world what #Gravy is really about.

This partnership isn’t just an endorsement, it’s a story. Because Gravy isn’t just another app. We’re building the one-stop shop for your digital life: payments, food delivery, e-commerce, utility and the everyday connections that turn transactions into community, locally and internationally.

Welcome to the Stream, @official_dezny 🌊

[Bernard Itoro @bernarditoro_]

Welcome to the family 😇

[Dezny @official_Dezny]

NEW DEAL, NEW FAMILY.

[Dezny @official_Dezny]

NEW DEAL, NEW FAMILY.

[GravyStream @gravystream]

Gravy Welcomes @official_Dezny as Brand Ambassador

@official_Dezny has built a loyal following of millions through storytelling that resonates with everyday people, and his authentic voice makes him a natural fit for Gravy’s mission. This partnership marks an exciting new chapter as we continue to expand our reach and deepen our connection with the communities we serve, both locally and internationally.

Gravy is more than a payments platform or an app. It is a one-stop destination built around the everyday needs of our users, spanning payments, food delivery, e-commerce, and the relationships that turn everyday transactions into a true community.

We look forward to the stories this collaboration will bring to life, and the opportunities it creates to introduce Gravy to new audiences.

Welcome to the Stream, @official_Dezny.

#Gravy #TeamGravy

[Bernard Itoro @bernarditoro_]

Me launching into my gym boy era 😮‍💨

[Bernard Itoro @bernarditoro_]

@Anonofweb3 My good ser! 😅🤲🏽

Handover live at blockfest?

[Bernard Itoro @bernarditoro_]

Another day to chop tech money abeg