Dario Michalek is Partner and Chief Investment Officer of Soaring Pelican, LLC and has nearly three decades of experience researching, trading, and managing capital across the stock, options, and futures markets. 

His journey into the financial markets began in 1998 and quickly evolved into a lifelong pursuit centered on understanding market behavior, risk management, and the psychology that drives price movement.

Throughout his career, Dario has developed multiple systematic and discretionary trading strategies based on extensive market behavioral research and real-world application. From August 1999 through October 2002, he worked for Mapleton Capital Management, a proprietary trading firm where he researched and tested thousands of trading concepts, systems, and market trading ideas. 

This experience laid the foundation for his deep appreciation of market structure, probabilities, and disciplined research. From November 2002 through May 2007, Dario served as Head Analyst for Vision Investing Group, a financial newsletter publisher providing market research and trading education to individual and institutional investors. During this period, he reviewed hundreds of charts daily, eventually studying more than 750,000 charts and developing many of the market behavior concepts that continue to shape his trading philosophy today. 

In 2005, Dario founded Neptune Investing and began managing client capital professionally. His experience includes developing and managing systematic long-term trend-following strategies as well as discretionary trading approaches focused on the S&P 500 futures market. In June 2019, Neptune Investing joined forces with Soaring Pelican, LLC, where Dario continues to serve as Partner and Chief Investment Officer. 

He currently oversees investment strategies designed to help clients navigate a wide range of market conditions through disciplined risk management and market-based decision-making. Dario holds a Series 3 designation and has spent more than twenty-five years studying the recurring behavioral patterns that appear throughout financial markets.

 Outside of trading, Dario is an avid chess player ranked among the top 1% of players worldwide. He credits much of his strategic thinking, patience, and risk management philosophy to lessons learned from chess, martial arts, and the teachings of his grandfather and longtime mentor, Jim Kane. 

He resides in Utah with his wife Lori and their six children. When he is not trading, researching, or mentoring, he enjoys spending time with family, playing chess, working out, practicing martial arts and continuing his lifelong pursuit of understanding human behavior through the lens of the markets.