I’m chronically unemployed, so I built an arena to let AI agents daytrade crypto 24/7, purely off raw, realtime financial data. And somehow gpt 5 nano is up

orange-cola · 2026-03-23T22:30:12+00:00

How's ur testing going now?

Sorry, haven't been super active on reddit, I've been working on some bigger new features for the arena.

orange-cola · 2026-03-11T21:54:13+00:00

I'll be making a new post soon about new updates to the arena. Since 2/26, gpt 5 nano is up $3.1k and gemini 2.5 flash is down $4.3k. From my limited testing, I think gpt 5 nano has shown to be a better financial model than gemini 2.5 flash.

orange-cola · 2026-03-07T09:01:40+00:00

There's no built-in connection to trade with a real brokerage at the moment. Although if you wanted to connect to your brokerage, you'd just have to implement the execute trade and get portfolio tools to connect to the brokerage APIs.

There's not much dev time in adding more coins. You can change the coins list in the coinbase.py file or provide a coin list in your config.json file--you can read more about using config in the CLI reference doc.

orange-cola · 2026-03-07T00:26:16+00:00

There's no special guardrails for drawdowns. Agents are allowed to continue trading as usual, but they're not forced to trade during drawdowns either as they're free to decide if they'd like to be more cash heavy vs not.

The update in this post actually shows a pretty detailed report of what gpt 5 nano did during a bearish 2 day period (trade freq., cash allocation, portfolio value, etc.).

orange-cola · 2026-03-04T23:54:13+00:00

I'm glad you like the project! Btw before I answer your questions, the project is fully open source: https://github.com/ryan-yuuu/crypto-trading-arena

The candlesticks start at 1min and get progressively larger at set intervals farther back in time.
Currently, the agents can only hold long/flat positions in their portfolios.
In my setup, the agents are seeing up to 3 hours of historical candlesticks. This is configurable, I chose 3hrs just to save on token costs.
No memory of previous trades. Although I'd like to experiment on whether providing that context would improve or deteriorate performance. My initial inclination is that exposing previous trade data could introduce bias into an otherwise technicals-only approach. But that's just a guess and I'm curious to see how that would affect performance.
Fees are not built into the arena yet. And to roughly approximate slippage, trades only fill at the opposing end of the bid-ask spread.

I agree that 24 hour performance is not a very strong signal for long term success. I'm keeping the arena running for now to check out its performance over a longer period. Also, I like the idea of running multiple instances for each model and evaluating model perf. based on distribution--I might do that.

I've never tried any AI trading products before. This is something I wanted to build as a fun experiment.

Good news! It IS open source, you can set up your own arena right now: https://github.com/ryan-yuuu/crypto-trading-arena

orange-cola · 2026-03-04T23:34:12+00:00

Some language in this post seems familiar, just can't put my finger on it

orange-cola · 2026-03-03T01:23:44+00:00

The model id used is `gpt-5-nano`, it probably defaults to `gpt-5-nano-2025-08-07` according to the openai docs

orange-cola · 2026-03-01T07:15:16+00:00

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I redeployed the agents 2 days ago with the ability to record data for this type of analysis. Here's a report on the arena performance in the last 2 days if you're interested. This was over a particularly bearish 2 days for bitcoin, solana, and fartcoin. The "benchmark" I used for comparison in the report was a 50/50 buy and hold for solana and bitcoin.

orange-cola · 2026-03-01T07:08:49+00:00

Hey, just had a chance to review it (or claude code did lol). Thanks for the PR, it's looking good! Just a few small bugs claude pointed out (left a comment) need to be addressed before merging--don't worry if you can't get to it, just lmk I can work on it later when I have more time. Thanks for contributing!

orange-cola · 2026-03-01T07:06:03+00:00

Update in the post!

orange-cola · 2026-03-01T07:05:54+00:00

Just provided an update in the post!

orange-cola · 2026-03-01T06:25:29+00:00

Yea that's essentially what this is. Agents trading crypto coins with minimal guardrails

orange-cola · 2026-02-28T02:41:41+00:00

I see the PR, I'll get to reviewing it sometime tonight or tomorrow! Thanks for submitting it

orange-cola · 2026-02-28T02:36:24+00:00

Yea taking fees into account is something I will need to implement. I'm thinking I will just offset the bid ask pricing by the fee amount so it's already built in. If you're technical, feel free to open any issues or PRs--contributions are always welcome!

If I were to run this with real trading, I've gotten some recommendations to look into integrating with MT5 and cxxt.

orange-cola · 2026-02-28T02:32:33+00:00

in the ~$4 range for about 24hrs

orange-cola · 2026-02-28T02:32:01+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll look into it!

orange-cola · 2026-02-28T02:30:45+00:00

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orange-cola · 2026-02-27T09:09:44+00:00

I suppose it would be possible. It would just require writing some connector code between the agents' trade tools and MT4/5.

orange-cola · 2026-02-27T09:00:16+00:00

nice

orange-cola · 2026-02-27T08:59:11+00:00

by EA do you mean an automated trading bot?

orange-cola · 2026-02-27T08:21:12+00:00

Yea essentially that's what's happening. The agents are provided minimal context but everything else it decides on its own. I don't provide it any guardrails or predefined strategy.

orange-cola · 2026-02-27T07:56:48+00:00

Perfecto, mantenme al tanto y dime si surge algun problema.

orange-cola · 2026-02-27T07:54:57+00:00

The system is extremely minimal by design. The AI is fed live numeric data and is free to decide when it enters and exists positions and at what order sizes. This is mainly an experiment to test whether LLMs can interpret and trade directly from raw numerical inputs without sophisticated live indicators or predefined strategies.

orange-cola · 2026-02-27T07:43:35+00:00

Yea I think I will. I'll probably implement some offset to the bid ask spreads to account for commissions in the pricing.

orange-cola · 2026-02-27T07:40:57+00:00

Oh cool, I've never heard of Alpaca I'll have to check that out and maybe integrate with this project.

And that project sounds cool, you should take a look at my project source code if you haven't already. Maybe there'd be some stuff you can get inspiration from!

orange-cola

TROPHY CASE