Everyone obsesses over entries. Which indicator. Which model. Which signal threshold. Entries get you into a trade. Exits determine what you keep. I spent more engineering time on my exit system than my entry model. Here’s why — and how it’s structured. Why Exits Are Harder An entry is a single decision: does this bar look like a long or a short? An exit is an ongoing negotiation between multiple objectives: ...
Day 3. Equity went from $701 to $928. Not because the market was kind. Because the data was finally clean. One line of code. Running for two days. Something felt off on day one. I was holding long positions, the market was moving up, but my equity was bleeding faster than it should. I couldn’t find the cause. On day three, I pulled the logs. Found a keyword repeating every 15 minutes: ...
Today I ran a full cross-audit of the V5 quant system. Scope: training, backtest, and live execution — 13 files, 6,500 lines. I was looking for drift. I found something worse. The Trailing Stop Was Updating. It Was Never Checking. My backtest engine has four exit paths: Fixed stop-loss Fixed take-profit Trailing stop Momentum fade SL and TP are delegated to the exchange. The trailing stop has to be managed by the script itself. ...
Most people obsess over model accuracy. Win rate. Precision. Feature importance. That’s 40% of the problem. The other 60% is how you build the backtest that validates it. What the Backtest Actually Controls A model tells you: this bar looks like a long. The backtest decides everything else: How big is the position? Where does the stop go? How does the stop trail? When do you decide the signal is gone? Do you re-enter after an exit? How do you handle overnight funding? Every one of those decisions compounds over hundreds of trades. ...
My V4 trading system used 11 data sources: price data, funding rates, open interest, institutional long/short ratio, liquidation data, fear & greed index, CVD, and more. The backtest results looked solid. Win rates above 80%. Drawdown under 15%. Then I audited the code line by line. What I found made me rebuild the entire system from scratch. Bug 1: The Fear & Greed index was always 50 The Alternative.me API returns data in this format: ...