About SPECULARI
I used to trade by hand. These days I try to kill my own ideas first. It's cheaper than letting the market do it.
The years of trading by hand
I've been in markets since 2007. In 2012–2013 I traded futures and posted the trades on my blog. In October 2013 I switched to US small-cap stocks, pump & dump style: by hand, reading Level II and the tape, going on feel. The years after that were mostly about psychology: numbered error reviews, a paper journal, "the hardest year of my life", and the conclusion that trading is 90% psychology. The old blog with all of it, mistakes and caps lock included, is still up: speculari-fund.blogspot.com.
In 2016–2017 a few friends and I started our own small prop firm, SPECULARI INVESTMENTS, and I got disillusioned with the industry pretty quickly: the money there should come from trading, not from servicing traders. In 2018–2019 we counted the history of pumps by hand and ran manual backtests, and I wrote a series called "Boring Trading", about trading by rules instead of intuition. In November 2019 I put up a sign that said "Game over = Freedom" and stopped trading.
What this site is now
I never lost interest in markets. What changed is how I treat my own ideas. "It works" used to mean "I feel like it works" plus a couple of nice screenshots. Now I run a small research desk, and this site is its log. An idea has to survive an honest attempt to kill it before I take it seriously. The first verdict is in: H-001 Gap&Crap is dead. The edge that showed up on 2019–2024 didn't hold on the untouched 2013–2018 years.
- [1] The idea is written up as a hypothesis card: a number, the rule in plain words, and the conditions under which it counts as dead.
- [2] A backtest with realistic costs: commissions, slippage, execution delay. Without them almost everything looks great.
- [3] A check on years nobody touched while the rule was being built. That exam can only be taken once, and the verdict comes out of it.
What I publish here
It's a logbook, not a shop window:
- Hypothesis cards and verdicts: alive, dead, or not enough data. The dead ones too, and there will probably be more of those.
- Write-ups of where we tripped over ourselves: garbage in the data, windows we peeked at, too many variants tried.
- Now and then a story from the manual years, when it explains where an idea came from.
- What you won't find: signals, return promises, or "we found alpha".