The Journey
Most posts here are ad hoc: what I learned building with AI that week, some philosophy, a writing lesson, something I came across.
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I audited 26 risk controls in my trading bot: 7 could never fire
The 15% drawdown halt was wired into two live code paths and could never fire. So I checked all 26 risk controls. Seven were dead. A control you cannot…
Same system, three different traders
Same code, same market, three time periods. One made $964, one lost $217, one's up $321. The difference wasn't the algorithm.
Building David, Not a Smaller Goliath
How a trading agent reveals the game retail can actually win — by playing where the funds can't or won't go, and learning to love the play.
I trade three coins, not fifteen
Coinbase lists 15 perp markets. Most alts are leveraged BTC with noise. The case for staying with three, and the one coin I'd seriously paper-test.
Now the Real Data Starts
Seven months of building bought me a system that finally tells the truth about itself. The data those seven months produced is mostly unreadable. The clock just started, and not a moment too soon.
What Building a Trading Bot Taught Me About Building Trading Bots
Across 200 trades, the bot was rarely wrong about the market. It was wrong about itself. The dominant failure mode wasn't strategy. It was a system lying to itself about what it was doing.
The House Always Wins. But Retail Can Still Play.
The first move is to see the game. The second is to refuse to play it on the funds' terms — and find the one you can actually win.
The House Always Wins: Why Retail Crypto Trading Is About to Get a Lot Harder
Three forces are converging on retail crypto traders, and none of them favour the small player. The edge isn't intelligence anymore. It's owning the table.
Ten days of letting the check do the work
April 23rd I shipped a blog post about how I'd nearly shipped a fix that referenced three database fields that didn't exist. Author-reviewer collapse. I'd ...
I wrote the rule. Then I skipped it.
Four days ago I published a blog about a bug I'd nearly shipped. The spec referenced two database fields that did not exist — trade.risk_amount and `trad...
Sprint 120 removed a safety rail. 41 trades later, I got the bill.
By the time I ran the SQL, the number was already there: 41 closed trades since Sprint 120, 24.4% win rate, minus $217 net. Before that month, the system h...
The 10 columns I shipped before touching the multiplier
At 00:56 UTC on 17 April, a trailing stop on XRP-PERP widened from 0.69% to 1.56%. Two-point-three times. The trade took the widened stop, held for 15 hour...
The market is smarter than you. That's the feature.
Sprint 130 added a risk-reward floor: no trade below 2.0:1 post-ATR. Three expert reviewers signed off. The logic was clean, the code was tested, the deplo...
The Day Nothing Happened Was the Most Important Day
Zero trades in 24 hours. +$134 in 72 hours. Here is why the day the system did nothing was the most important day of the week.
Every AI Trading Bot Claims Dynamic Regime Detection. Here is What It Actually Looks Like in Production.
Most bots show pnl, not Sharpe. Here is why that matters.
From -23 USD to +1,136 USD: The Sprint 116-125 Era That Fixed Everything
Ten sprints. From a broken system to +1,136 USD profit.
My AI Trading System Did Nothing for 15 Hours. Then It Nailed Two Trades.
15 hours of silence, then two profitable trades in 3 hours. The hardest edge is trusting the system when it is doing nothing.
My AI Trading Bot Treats 4 Coins Equally. Today I Found One Has Been Dragging the Portfolio Down.
SOL has been my weakest coin: 34% WR vs BTC 45%. Per-coin tracking shipping in Sprint 125.
My AI Trading System Just Taught Me the Difference Between Catching a Move and Chasing One
Caught +72 USD on regime flip, then lost -120 USD chasing. Built a filter to prevent that.