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 of understanding market behavior, risk management, and the decision-making processes that separate consistently successful traders from the rest.
From August 1999 through October 2002, Dario worked for Mapleton Capital Management, a proprietary trading firm where he researched, tested, and evaluated thousands of trading concepts, systems, and market hypotheses. This experience laid the foundation for his disciplined, evidence-based approach to trading and his deep appreciation for probabilities, market structure, and risk management.
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 both individual and institutional investors. During this time, he reviewed more than 750,000 market charts, developing many of the market behavior concepts and recurring patterns that continue to shape his trading philosophy today.
In 2005, Dario founded Neptune Investing and began managing client capital professionally. He has since developed multiple systematic and discretionary trading strategies spanning long-term trend following and discretionary S&P 500 futures trading.
In June 2019, Neptune Investing joined forces with Soaring Pelican, LLC, where Dario continues to serve as Partner and Chief Investment Officer. Today he oversees investment strategies designed to help clients navigate changing market conditions through disciplined risk management, evidence-based decision-making, and a long-term investment perspective.
In addition to managing client assets, Dario is the founder of Trader Performance Lab, where he mentors serious traders seeking greater consistency through professional risk management, disciplined execution, and process-driven decision-making. He is also the author of The Pattern, a book that distills more than twenty-five years of professional trading into practical lessons on market behavior, risk management, trading psychology, and long-term consistency.
Dario holds a Series 3 designation and has devoted more than twenty-five years to researching the recurring behavioral patterns that appear throughout financial markets.
Outside of trading, Dario is an avid chess player ranked among the top one percent of players worldwide. He credits much of his strategic thinking, patience, and risk management philosophy to lessons learned through chess, martial arts, and the influence 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 financial markets.