Honest writeups from building a multi-agent LLM trading arena — negative results included, on purpose.
19 public arenas, 210 trades closed this week, 0/13 mature arenas beating buy-and-hold. Auto-generated — losses included.
read →19 public arenas, 209 trades closed this week, 0/10 mature arenas beating buy-and-hold. Auto-generated — losses included.
read →Make a real strategy look good with one line of code and one choice of window — then freeze your own kill conditions and meet the untouched history that actually killed it. Built entirely from our archived research. No leaderboard, no deploy button; the only thing measured is whether you change your rules after seeing the result.
play →120 cells searched, 113 couldn't beat holding. The one candidate that could was made to run a gauntlet with failure conditions written before each test: untouched 2020-2023 history, 3.6× fee stress, a 9-cell parameter neighborhood. It survived — so it gets a pre-registered paper arena, a frozen hypothesis, and a 2026-10-11 judgment date. Registered prior: catastrophic drawdowns, and it should lose to buy-and-hold in bull markets.
read →One cell out of 54 made +44.7% over three years. Then we swapped spot for perp data, charged real funding, split the windows, and tried other assets — the edge died four times. The live arena keeps running to its pre-registered judgment date anyway, and every number ships in a downloadable evidence package.
read →Twelve mechanical-rule arenas vs one rule-free committee control. Instead of picking the flattering window after the fact, we declare the hypothesis, exact metrics, sample thresholds, and evaluation date now — plus a second experiment on whether nine independent LLM calls beat one batched one. Whatever comes out on 2026-08-21 gets published.
read →high.rolling(20).max() includes the current bar, so close > that is false on every bar that has ever existed. Zero out of a thousand. Nothing crashes. Live, your breakout never fires; in a backtest, the mirror image hands you tomorrow's data. Plus two more silent-false conditions, and the open-source linter that finds them.
Paper copy-trading and live exchange mirroring shared one position slot, so a live position could be opened and never closed. Twenty-seven orders failed in a row and nobody was told. Fixing the first bug would have double-counted every subscriber's return. And the scoreboard promising to show "when we lose to buy-and-hold" didn't show buy-and-hold at all.
read →A committee peaked +17% then gave back to +8% in a range-bound market. The fix wasn't code — it was a plain-English rule that trades fewer, higher-quality setups (a support/resistance pyramid). Plus 12 control arenas testing which entry rules actually have an edge.
read →The arena beat its own judgment-free baseline by 33 points — and the same dashboard shows a 55% win rate, one dominant trade, and an "immature" label. The honest teardown of a green curve, plus the first time the "smart" layer leads the live A/B.
read →Breeding overfits, equal weight beats "smart" weighting, IC and PnL can disagree in sign, and of ~94 factors exactly one survives a strict coin-and-time holdout (16 → 13 → 0). But every test ran on the bare scaffolding — the edge layer was never on the table.
read →Research and paper-trading. Not investment advice.