Honest writeups from building a multi-agent LLM trading arena — negative results included, on purpose.
Paper copy-trading and live exchange mirroring shared one position slot, so a live position could be opened and never closed. Twenty-seven orders failed in a row and nobody was told. Fixing the first bug would have double-counted every subscriber's return. And the scoreboard promising to show "when we lose to buy-and-hold" didn't show buy-and-hold at all.
read →A committee peaked +17% then gave back to +8% in a range-bound market. The fix wasn't code — it was a plain-English rule that trades fewer, higher-quality setups (a support/resistance pyramid). Plus 12 control arenas testing which entry rules actually have an edge.
read →The arena beat its own judgment-free baseline by 33 points — and the same dashboard shows a 55% win rate, one dominant trade, and an "immature" label. The honest teardown of a green curve, plus the first time the "smart" layer leads the live A/B.
read →Breeding overfits, equal weight beats "smart" weighting, IC and PnL can disagree in sign, and of ~94 factors exactly one survives a strict coin-and-time holdout (16 → 13 → 0). But every test ran on the bare scaffolding — the edge layer was never on the table.
read →Research and paper-trading. Not investment advice.