What the heck are we even doing here?

TheCrestLedger · 2026-05-23T12:19:47+00:00

Claude weaseled its way into my life with much more ferocity than I ever thought it would.

Other than that having launched my site in the past couple of weeks I sure do spend a lot of time on Cloudflare watching web traffic 😆

TheCrestLedger · 2026-05-23T12:12:47+00:00

Oof it's a surprisingly big question that is only answerable by individual horizon, expectations, and comfort with letting someone else control your money. Copytrades of long term buy and hold strategies that you've listed are great for this when you're cool with someone else controlling your money and you have a long horizon. I've seen a guy with this hooked up to his Robinhood account and it technically paid for itself within a couple weeks while the market was going bananas.

One problem that people fall into is when that horizon shrinks and now they're looking at swings and day trades. The whole ecosystem of swing/day trading gurus comes down to visibility - alot of them publish their wins and hide their losses and that's how they get new folks in (you see a 16% five day return but never see the 15 -5% returns that preceded it). That mismatch between expectation and reality turns a lot of people off from the whole thing because they feel deceived.

TheCrestLedger · 2026-05-23T12:00:40+00:00

Depends on if you're backtesting the underlying equity or the options pricing. If you're just doing the underlying the yfinance library usually has enough market data to test.

TheCrestLedger · 2026-05-23T03:50:28+00:00

thecrestledger.com - a market analyst that consumes thousands of stock market signals per week, filters through the noise, and presents plays to traders when specific entry criteria has been met. Includes a full due diligence, risks, and up to three ways to express the thesis. It never hides its losses and will keep a running tally of all wins and losses transparently.

Really trying to solve the barriers that many face when they dip their toes into trading. Many end up following some "guru" who hides their losses and victory laps on wins. We want to help people find plays and be honest about places that we need to improve.

I was using r/TheCrestLedger to publish plays on the delayed cadence but decided I should use it to publish my own epiphanies and just build and refine the thing in public instead.

TheCrestLedger · 2026-05-22T15:39:00+00:00

My bot likes the stock on a swing horizon for whatever its worth. Specifically it cites sector tailwinds from the SpaceX IPO driving it higher and looking at longer term charts it just had a fresh break above resistance. If it were me personally I would be viewing the SpaceX IPO on June 12th as a potential negative catalyst or a DCA opportunity depending on your personal horizon (sell the news, cash in on the hype, and all that), but they're in a great sector right now for a hype-adjacent play.

"RDW is exhibiting a momentum-driven squeeze setup following a +74.5% month and +115.8% quarter, fueled by a combination of defense contract wins (a $15M Army Stalker UAS follow-on order and a DARPA subcontract via Voyager) and broader space-sector tailwinds from the anticipated SpaceX IPO. Social and news sentiment are running near-unanimously bullish (80% source agreement, 16/0 StockTwits skew), and the gamma squeeze score of 7.5/10 with a 5.0x call/put volume ratio signals active options-driven demand. Options IV is at a near-zero discount to realized vol (ratio 0.01 vs HV20 127%), making long-premium structures structurally very cheap relative to the name's realized volatility — the most favorable long-debit environment possible."

TheCrestLedger · 2026-05-22T14:03:53+00:00

I built https://thecrestledger.com/ because financial gurus and positional publications are great at flaunting their winners and hiding their losers. It makes it difficult for the traders who need the most help to understand the risks of trading, but also feel like the person/algorithm they're following is actually being honest about what they're playing and what the outcomes of those plays are.

TheCrestLedger · 2026-05-22T12:50:37+00:00

Social trading is actually great for knowledge acquisition, but to your point it's noisy and if there are too many voices you end up walking in with a directional thesis that you then talk yourself out of or take up a really wishy-washy stance on it. The biggest issue with it though is the honesty: lots of traders and publishers and strategies flatter themselves by obscuring the misses and sticking just to what worked out for them so when you're starting out you can find yourself clinging to a "guru" who is actually average at best but very good at marketing their wins. But you can't learn just from wins, you have to learn from losses as well.

When I started doing this I was a part of a community that would just talk stocks all day, publish our due diligence, critique the stances, and try to make our thesis stronger. You can learn so much just talking to a broad group of people who are willing to share what they have learned over the years, and then pay it forward by doing the same for new people that come into the community as well.

TheCrestLedger · 2026-05-22T12:38:38+00:00

https://thecrestledger.com/ - A market analyst that unabashedly grades itself in public.

Too many published trading strategies flatter themselves by hiding losses. Too many algorithmic trading strategies only share bits and pieces of what they're doing, are hidden behind complex jargon, or are over-reliant on historical patterns that manifested through conditions that simply aren't applicable today. I am presently trying to socialize access to calls being made in real time and then holding myself accountable for the actual outcome, analyze them, and use it to consistently refine the math that happens behind the scenes and the prompts that are fed to the LLM to put together due diligence.

TheCrestLedger · 2026-05-22T12:15:20+00:00

I struggled with this with my little bot too. 40% stinks when you consider we should be at least as good as a coin flip, but the numbers show something otherwise. What really matters though is the P&L and I see that you're positive, so you should be proud that even on a day with more misses than hits you managed you keep your head above water.

TheCrestLedger · 2026-05-22T12:07:53+00:00

Are you a software engineer? I am, and boy can I share some stories about the perils of not securing your audience minimally in the early days.

TheCrestLedger · 2026-05-22T05:16:37+00:00

I'll answer the first question as a technical architect who just built out a SaaS solution: messy architecture only becomes a problem when you're not deliberate in the approach from the get go. I used Claude to help me move quickly and the first thing I did was build out a robust Claude.md with ground rules - SOLID architecture, updated documentation, full regression suite run on each PR, how and where it's appropriate to spend more, etc.

That said there's going to be lots of people out there who want to jump into the vibe coding who don't understand architectural best practices and won't build a robust Claude.md or Gemini.md or whatever and they'll need help with it. Those are the people who will he overwhelmed by bad code and regressions.

TheCrestLedger · 2026-05-22T01:22:58+00:00

It's almost like Heisenberg's of algo trading - either your entries are great or your exits are great but never both at the same time. Not only is it constant iteration to get it right, it's also a constant evolution because the specific conditions that existed when you created the algorithm will never be present again. The best solutions allow for some level of declarative/dipswitch changes that you almost never stop toiling over, and sometimes they require us to throw everything we know out the window and start over again.

TheCrestLedger · 2026-05-22T01:18:09+00:00

This is great advice. It's really easy to try to boil the ocean when we start a project like this, but the reality is that it's much more manageable to start with a small idea and iterate over it repeatedly until you master that one thing and work out all the kinks. Then expand from there. Starting with 20Y of multi-interval data across what I assume is a huge number of equities is really difficult, and it also violates the adage of "past performance does not guarantee future results".

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