About.
I'm John Montgomery, founder of EdenFintech. 22 years of programming, 10+ of those in and around trading systems, and a long stretch of WordPress and WooCommerce work in the middle (much of it under the legacy YourDesign name).
The long arc
I started coding "bots" for a trading company in the early 2000s, before the open-source PHP / MySQL world became the default. By 2004 I was building fully functional CRUD web applications in PHP and MySQL, before WordPress or Drupal had meaningful share. That became freelance work, and the freelance work became yourdesign.co.za, which became 20+ years of custom WordPress and WooCommerce builds for small businesses, brand projects, and agency sub-contracts (Nimue Skin Technology, the Woolworths Mother's Day campaign via Flume).
The current work is a loop back to where I started. edenfintech-scanner-python is a screening and scoring pipeline for US-listed equities, productised through edenfintech.com. It grew out of the earlier AI playground at devai.co.za (the InvestAI Analyst Platform, a Natural-Language-to-SQL app, a YouTube summariser) which is where I learned my way around agent toolchains (CrewAI, Fabric, PraisonAI) in 2024.
In parallel, I maintain WeCoza 3.0 for an education-sector client in South Africa: a WordPress plugin with most of the operational logic in a 43-table Postgres schema. And I run a knowledge-graph practice on the side. signaltrace-site hosts five OSINT / financial-research case studies, and this site uses the same pattern.
How I work
- Solo or as a lead developer on small teams.
- Remote, UTC+2 (South African Standard Time).
- Comfortable with long-running client relationships; current WeCoza engagement has a 14-month paper trail of meetings, PDFs, and PRDs.
- Bias toward linear, reviewable code and fewer dependencies. Stdlib-only where it fits.
- Research projects get honest postmortems when they don't pan out. See Why I publish negative results.
Trading
I trade XAUUSD full-time; most of the quant and AI-review work here grows out of that practice. The fuller story is on the Trading page.
Who I've worked with
The Clients & collaborators page lists named relationships and carries three real client testimonials lifted from yourdesign.co.za. References available on request.
