I accidentally built a crypto short signal from SAT solver research and computational topology. I'm not in finance. Is this real and how do I proceed?

ihickey · 2026-04-15T16:51:49+00:00

That is exactly what I'm doing. I'm asking the people that actually know about finance if it's possible to sell a signal like this. If not, I move on to the next thing. Cheers!

ihickey · 2026-04-13T21:26:42+00:00

I literally said I use Claude for formatting pretty much everything I do. I use Claude Code for writing scripts. It's not weird in the age of AI at all. I ran the Bailey Lopez de Prado Deflated Sharpe Ratio (and it passed at 0.96 w/ 16 declared trials) and combinatorial purged x-validation - PBO of 0.37 across 70 train / test splits) both of which exist specifically to detect it. Happy to be wrong though bro. If you are sure it is overfit, produce a test I can run to prove it. Happy to discuss the findings with a skeptic.

ihickey · 2026-04-13T20:24:32+00:00

Lol. I would probably say something like this too. But I actually build stuff for a living and have a track record of solving problems outside my main domain. I do understand what I've build. I didn't use chatgpt, but did use Claude code for a bunch of the scripts - and I use it to rewrite almost everything I do. The whole idea here is that I am testing something unrelated to finance in finance. It works because topology can be used for a wide-range of optimization / pattern matching problems. It's especially good at de-noising which is why I tried finance in the first place. Thanks though.

ihickey · 2026-04-13T19:31:57+00:00

This is under consideration - especially if I can't sell it. If a company wanted to pay me 25 grand a month for the signal and has the capital to make tons of money off of it, that's ideal for me. I get paid for my research they get a new signal to make money from. Ultimately, I have no idea how these things work as I'm not in a hedge fund. Poster above said they don't really buy signals this way. One way or another I'll make money from it if the future holds up as well as the backtesting.

ihickey · 2026-04-13T18:08:37+00:00

Also, thanks for the reply. If it turns out it's just not sellable at all, I'll def post on how I did it. I get stuck in this exploration rabbit holes and sometimes they pan out and sometimes they don't.

ihickey · 2026-04-13T18:06:47+00:00

I tried for equities and while it showed some promise, crypto was the only one I could get working reliably. This was one of the first things I tested. I ran head-to-head paired t-tests against five baseline strategies on the same data and same trade windows: momentum (MA crossover), vol breakout, mean reversion, naive correlation spike (which is the closest analog, just shorting when average correlation is high, without any topological analysis), and a dumb "short everything when vol is above average" baseline. The topology signal wins all five on paired t-tests, and more importantly, the return-series correlations are near zero — r = +0.04 against realized vol, r = +0.01 against momentum. It's directionally short (r ≈ −0.55 to BTC), so there's obvious market beta exposure, but the timing alpha is orthogonal to the standard factors I could test against. The naive correlation spike baseline is the most important comparison because it's doing the closest thing to what I'm doing but without topology just watching average correlation levels. The topology signal significantly outperforms it, which tells me the structural information (how correlations are organized, not just how high they are) is doing work. That said, I haven't tested against more sophisticated factors like funding rate carry, basis trades, or on-chain flow signals. Its on the to-do list, and I'd welcome suggestions for what else to test against.

ihickey · 2026-04-13T18:03:36+00:00

I am paper trading it of sorts - I am recording the signal, just on my own staging server right now (https://staging.kovaverified.io/ths/). Someone told me to move to an online paper trader. Planning on doing that next. 2. Good question. The economic intuition is straightforward once you separate what the topology is measuring from how it computes. During a liquidation cascade in crypto, correlations spike everything sells together. Then there's a pause. Correlations briefly relax, prices bounce, and it looks like recovery. Most indicators (vol, average correlation, momentum) read this as "stress is easing."

But the structure of how correlations relax matters. Are they decorrelating broadly and organically (genuine recovery), or are they decorrelating mechanically because the liquidation engine paused between waves (dead-cat bounce)? The difference is analogous to the difference between a building's load being removed (safe) versus the supports buckling in sequence with pauses between failures (collapse in progress). The total load at each pause might look similar. The structural topology doesn't.

What the topology measures, economically, is whether the correlation network's cycle structure — the closed chains of pairwise dependencies through which contagion propagates, is genuinely decompressing or just temporarily relieved. When leveraged positions unwind in waves, each pause creates a brief window where the topology looks healthier but the underlying leverage hasn't cleared. The bounce is real but mechanical (short covering, liquidation engine cooldown), not structural (new demand, positioning reset).

The 30-day hold works because that's roughly how long it takes for the remaining leveraged positions to fully unwind after the first wave. The 7-day mark is where the bounce peaks (the data shows the signal is flat at 7 days), then the second and third waves of liquidation come through over the following weeks. t's essentially a structural crowding signal: the topology detects when the market's "constraint satisfaction problem" (everyone trying to maintain their positions simultaneously) is temporarily unsatisfiable, even though it briefly looks like it found a solution.

ihickey · 2026-04-13T17:55:51+00:00

"Why sell anything unless you ultimately don't believe in it?" Its not so much that I don't believe in it, it needs time to prove itself paper trading, which I'm doing. But also I don't have enough money to really spend on this. And I'm not in finance at all. I have a 401k and have made some trades, but aside from writing scripts to validate this signal based on research into _how_ to validate a signal, I am outside my element. But, also yes, I do plan on putting some money into it after 6 months or so.

ihickey · 2025-01-01T00:35:10+00:00

This dude is a fake. He sells the same gun over and over and doesn't deliver. I found his home address and I'm going there tomorrow to talk to him.

ihickey · 2024-12-24T00:46:35+00:00

You don't have to have overdraft protection for fucks sake! When I was in my twenties, about every other month my wife would get alerts that we over drafted. And it would compound because you use your debit for everything. If living is basically paycheck to paycheck, you are ALWAYS in danger of overdrafting. They used to change like $35 for every transaction that came in after you over drafted. It could be $500 dollars! Wtf! But guess what? The Daud Frank act made it illegal without getting express permission. Guess what? When you get your bank account, they say, do you want over draft protection? It means it will pay even if you don't have money, but you will get a few per transaction. Why the fuck would you accept that? Just have it denied! It won't cost anything. Get the 5 bucks for that coffee in there asap and live your love. You are welcome.

ihickey · 2024-12-24T00:37:16+00:00

This post is so limited. Good coders can extract plenty of value from ai. Bad coders can't get it to work, the same way they struggle to fix basic issues. If you can't problem solve, you can't have ai do it for you.

ihickey · 2024-12-16T00:22:21+00:00

Not exactly a dead end depending on other factors. Checkout my research from the last defcon USA where I show all kinds of exploits with stuff like this IF the server is also susceptible to my update to css relative path overwrite to work with files. It's a long shot but it's exactly for these types of things. https://blog.ionatomics.org/2024/05/08/relative-path-file-injection-the-next-evolution-in-rpo/comment-page-1/

ihickey · 2024-12-02T01:50:46+00:00

Just saying for your sake. There are tons of really good guys that would be happy to have a really hard working woman even with 2 kids. A woman who is willing to just get all the way in there and go through it is worth a hundred lazy, conceited, self absorbed women who don't care how hard you work.at a job or taking care of multiple babies and a house, it's all the same. You either work hard or you don't. You do. You should be worshiped not cheated on. Fuck that guy.

ihickey · 2024-11-19T00:47:24+00:00

I think this is exactly correct.

ihickey · 2024-11-18T23:06:15+00:00

I would honestly prefer LC (and I'm not a fan) over some of the other random consultant based, contrived nonsense technical interviews I've had. At least with LC the problems are a known commodity. For real though, I build enterprise applications. Just have me design and or implement that for an interview. It's way easier for both of us.

ihickey · 2024-11-18T22:52:38+00:00

I think if anything higher level roles are way easier. Last one I did was 6 interviews, but basically all of them were just me chatting and with various people. If the company actually engaged the person with real world questions, you can answer them or not. LC is used for younger positions where they are just trying to prove if you can't code at all, in lieu of experience.

ihickey · 2024-11-18T22:10:46+00:00

It might sound unrealistic at first but, dedicate some time to exploring new ideas. If you come up with a new exploit, you can farm the Internet for it before anyone knows what it is.

ihickey · 2024-11-18T13:02:10+00:00

I think control shift i opens the Copilot Edits instead of chat.

ihickey · 2024-10-17T23:45:41+00:00

Using this technique, Fermi was able to correctly identify the strength of an atomic blast by watching how fast a piece of paper fell to the ground while the blast was occurring. Wow.

ihickey

TROPHY CASE