About The Trading Cafe
A combination of trading expertise and educational excellence
We reached out to 5 million traders and found a small handful who actually made it. Then we built a school around their knowledge.
How this school started
With all the dogmatism of brevity, here's our story.
01
The problem
The trading education industry is broken. Most people teaching on YouTube and social media are better marketers than they are traders. They have polished videos, professional websites, and compelling sales copy. And strategies that don't work.
Peter Visser learned this the hard way. He borrowed $15,000 from his parents to take a trading course from someone who promised to change his life. The strategies didn't work. The coaches turned out to be salespeople with upsell quotas. He fell for it completely. Then spent years falling for variations of the same trick again and again.
He could have bought two houses with the money he wasted.
02
The phone call
In 2022, Peter was on a call with an old friend. Education expert and entrepreneur Zack van Niekerk. The conversation took its usual turns before landing somewhere neither of them expected.
The trading education industry was missing something fundamental. Proper, structured, ethical education. They could both see it with complete clarity. And they believed they could fix it.
One idea led to another. A plan began to take shape.
03
The search
They needed to find real traders. Not YouTubers. Not influencers. The ones nobody knew about, trading from home, quietly making real money, with no interest in being famous.
They set strict criteria. A live six-figure trading account. A six-figure income generated from trading. A proven track record of consistency over at least twelve months.
Then they ran a Google advertising campaign. $25,600 to show their ads 5.49 million times. 52,900 traders visited their landing page. 5,200 showed genuine interest.
From those 5,200, a small handful were real.
04
The Expertise Extraction Framework
Finding the traders was only half the problem. Turning them into educators was the other.
Zack developed a six-week programme called the Expertise Extraction Framework. It painstakingly pulled everything out of each trader. Every rule, every decision, every nuance of how they read the markets. Then turned it into something teachable.
Most of the traders who started it couldn't finish it. The ones who did became the foundation of The Trading Cafe. An ethical process for turning genuine expertise into genuine education. Nothing like it had existed before.
05
December 2022. The Trading Cafe opens.
The idea was simple. Give away genuine trading education at no cost. The kind of education others were charging thousands for. Build a place where real traders could share real knowledge with people who genuinely needed it.
In December 2022, The Trading Cafe opened its doors. Free. No credit card. No catch.
It filled with thousands of traders almost immediately. Proving that the demand for something honest had always been there. It just needed to be built.
Our core philosophies
What we believe. And what we won't compromise on.
The principles that determine how every course is built, every instructor is chosen, and every student is taught.
01
Trading is a skill, not a gamble
Success requires structured learning, discipline, and patience. Not shortcuts or hype. Most people enter trading without the foundation they need. We build that foundation first.
02
Data over hype
Every claim we make is verified. Over 100,000 trade entries, every one with a screenshot. The numbers on this page are real because we built a system to make sure they could only ever be real.
03
Education first, profits second
Long-term skill development over quick wins. Strategy, risk management, and financial literacy built properly. Not rushed to get someone into live markets before they're ready.
04
Real traders, real strategies
Every instructor has a six-figure verified trading track record and a proven ability to teach it. Students learn from people who have done it themselves. Not people who are good at talking about it.
05
No fluff, no nonsense
We're honest about what it takes to succeed. Trading requires discipline, structure, and patience. If you're willing to put in the work, we give you everything you need to do it properly.
The result
"Our average student who completes the course achieves a positive return within 3 months of going live."
Based on verified student trade data · Legacy program · Individual results vary · Trading involves risk
The founders
Built by people who had the same problem you do.
Zack and Peter aren't traders. They're entrepreneurs who identified a real problem and built a school around the solution.
Zack van Niekerk
Co-Founder · CEO
Originally from South Africa, Zack grew up in the UK and built his career in education and entrepreneurship. His role at The Trading Cafe is closer to headmaster than CEO. His focus is curriculum design, learning structure, and making sure the education actually works. He believes that if you can learn well, you can teach well. Everything he builds is designed around that principle.
Peter Visser
Co-Founder · Head of Marketing
Peter spent years as a consumer in the trading education industry and lost a significant amount of money on courses, robots, and signals that didn't work. That experience, combined with a background in business and lead generation, gave him an unusually clear view of why the industry fails most people. He co-founded The Trading Cafe to build the thing he wished had existed.
The trading instructors
Meet your trading instructors.
The instructors who take ordinary people and turn them into competent traders.
Brent Carlile
The Falcon Method
Brent is our standout instructor. His Falcon Method encompasses two distinct strategies, developed and refined over years of competing at the highest level of professional trading.
Appeared on the World Cup Trading Championship leaderboard three times
Won the World Cup Trading Championship outright
Six-figure verified trading track record
The Falcon Method is taught exclusively inside the Trading Academy
Alex Moris
Supply & Demand · Order Blocks
Alex trades Supply and Demand and Order Blocks, identifying institutional zones and high-probability entry points. His students consistently produce some of the strongest live trading results in the school.
Sid Naiman
Overbought & Oversold
Sid trades an end-of-day strategy using RSI and MACD on stocks, designed to run in around 30 minutes. He uses this strategy to fund his own retirement and has been teaching it inside The Trading Cafe since the beginning.
Denislav Dantev
Bollinger Band · Fibonacci
A certified financial advisor who specialises in getting trading accounts funded. Denislav teaches two strategies: Bollinger Band momentum trades and Fibonacci reversals, giving students multiple approaches to the same markets.
Simon Pullen
W&M · Head & Shoulders
Simon has been trading full-time for 17 years. His wife quit her job over a decade ago, supported entirely by his trading income. He teaches the W&M strategy and Head & Shoulders, straightforward reversal methods that have become some of the most followed approaches in the school.
Toby Williamson
Health & Performance
BSc Strength and Conditioning Sciences, Qualified Teacher, and former Head of Strength and Conditioning at Wellington College UK. Toby teaches the physical and mental foundations that serious traders need to perform consistently.
Johnathan van Niekerk
Education & Backtesting
Johnathan manages the education process across the school, running live backtesting sessions, supporting students through their practice projects, and ensuring the curriculum delivers consistent results.
The trading instructors
Four products. One journey.
From a free school to an invite-only advanced program — every product is built around the same verified strategies and the same education-first philosophy.
Free · No credit card
The Trading Cafe
Free forever
The starting point. Five complete strategies, live sessions every week, 100+ hours in The Vault, and a community of 88,500+ students. Everything you need to learn and decide if trading is for you.
5 complete trading strategies
1–3 live events every week
The Vault — 100+ hours of recordings
Full strategy results spreadsheet
Book · $10
Six Figures From Scratch
$10 · PDF + 7 bonuses
The story of four ordinary traders — in their 40s, 50s, and 60s — who quietly built six-figure accounts from scratch. Read in 1–2 hours. Backed by 60,000+ student-recorded trades.
17-chapter PDF — any device
7 strategy bonuses included
Lifetime access
Full refund guarantee
28 Days · $10 trial
Quick Win Program
$10 for 7 days · then $390
A structured 28-day cohort program. Five fully tested strategies, 30 live sessions per week, guided practice projects, and a 1-on-1 Education Advisor — so you learn them properly, not just theoretically.
5 strategies with verified results
13 live sessions per week
1-on-1 Education Advisor
Practice projects + answer sheets
Invite Only
The Legacy Program
$6,997 + $199/month
The highest level. An invite-only program for students committed to becoming full-time, profitable traders. All 11 strategies, up to 30 live sessions per week, and the structured path from backtest to live markets.
All 11 trading strategies
Up to 30 live events per week
Backtest → demo → live market path
Lifetime access to all courses
Where we are
A global team. Three registered companies.
35 people working across 8 countries, all focused on one thing.
🇺🇸
United States
The Trading Cafe LLC
1007 N Orange St. 4th Floor Suite #3131
Wilmington, Delaware 19801
🇬🇧
United Kingdom
The Trading Cafe Limited
128 City Road
London, EC1V 2NX
🇭🇰
Hong Kong
The Trading Cafe Limited
2301 Bayfield Building
99 Hennessy Road, Wan Chai
Our team works remotely from the USA, UK, South Africa, Thailand, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Australia, and Mexico.
Press
The Trading Cafe in the press.
Fintech Review
January 2026
Infrastructure Reinvented: Interview with Peter Visser
Peter breaks down the convergence of fintech and EdTech, why standard retail trading education fails, and how learning design must take precedence over market expertise.
UK Tech News
March 2026
An Interview with Peter Visser, Co-Founder of The Trading Cafe
A profile piece exploring the operational and data infrastructure behind the scaling business.
FINTECHNA
March 2026
The Trading Cafe Releases New Trading Academy Legacy Support Tool
Zack details their custom internal software and how tracking every instructor question since 2023 is building data-driven learning feedback loops for students.
FounderAt
August 2025
Inside The Trading Cafe: How Zack van Niekerk Is Redefining Trading Education
Zack discusses the platform's tech infrastructure and how they structure independent trader education using AI and custom data tools.
FINTECHNA
November 2025
Financial Education Industry Scams: What They Are and How to Avoid Them
Both founders contributed guidelines on the Three Verification Principle to help retail investors check reputations before allocating capital.
EUROPEAN FINANCIAL REVIEW
MARCH 2026
Why the Middle Class is Shrinking, and Who Survives the Transition
Peter argues the UK middle class is shrinking due to unaffordable housing and gatekept financial knowledge, with survival hinging on financial literacy.
Ready to start
Start with our free school today.
Upgrade to our more advanced school when you are ready.
No credit card. No commitment. Takes 60 seconds.
Who are we?
The Trading Cafe Limited is a company registered in both Hong Kong and the U.S. We run a free online school for people who would like to learn trading properly. This is an education focused platform and we do not offer any trading signals, financial advice, or trade recommendations.
In fact, we actively recommend newcomers stop trading altogether until they have gone through the necessary education in order to do it safely. We do sell products and services under a brand called The Trading Academy.
Where are we?
Our team works remotely from all over the world and we have flexible working hours, however we do have two permanent addresses:
U.S. Address:
The Trading Cafe LLC
1007 N Orange St. 4th Floor Suite #3131, Wilmington, Delaware 19801, United States
Hong Kong Address:
The Trading Cafe Limited
2301 Bayfield Building, 99 Hennessy Road, Wan Chai, Hong Kong
Founded by Zack van Niekerk and Peter Visser
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