Short-term mean reversion is one of the most robustly documented retail edges: when a liquid stock in an uptrend gets sharply oversold, it tends to bounce back toward its average within a few days. This is the Connors RSI-2 approach โ buy fear, sell the reversion.
The Wheel is a premium-collection loop using options on stocks you're comfortable owning. It has two stages and cycles indefinitely, harvesting time-decay (theta) every 2โ4 weeks.
This pattern exploits a classic market manipulation sequence: "stop hunts" where price briefly dips below a well-known support level to trigger retail stop-loss orders, then immediately reverses. The reversal is the trade.
Stocks that gap up significantly pre-market often continue higher in the first 30โ90 minutes as retail traders pile in. This strategy catches that opening momentum wave, then exits before it fades.
Goal: prove out four independent automated strategies with fake money against live market data, building a track record before any real capital is considered.
Diversification of edge: each strategy exploits a different inefficiency โ short-term mean reversion (RSI-2), volatility premium selling (Wheel), liquidity-sweep reversals (Sneaky Pivot), and opening momentum (Gap & Go). They rarely correlate: mean reversion buys weakness while the others buy strength, so a bad day for one is often a good day for another.
Risk framework: every strategy passes through risk_guard โ $300 intraday
loss limit, $5,000 max invested across all strategies. Any halt
requires a manual review and an explicit resume_trading.py โ nothing auto-resumes
after losses.
Operations: everything runs in Docker on the NAS via supercronic, scripts are wrapped by a watchdog that emails on any crash, and code deploys automatically via git pull every 5 minutes. Morning plan, end-of-day results, and a Friday scorecard arrive by email.
What success looks like: consistent positive expectancy per strategy measured in R-multiples, drawdowns contained by the risk caps, and zero unreviewed losing streaks.