Aligrithm is an independent research publication on systematic trading, quantitative research, market microstructure, and adaptive systems. Long-form essays, code notebooks, and architecture breakdowns across eight pillars, built for traders who care more about how markets behave than about hype.
More about the publication →Read in order. Each pillar walks you out of one trap with one new ability. The newest article is the worst place to begin.
A discretionary trader without rules expresses skill laced with bias, and the two feel identical inside. Rule-bind sizing, exits, and re-entry, keep discretion for real reads, and test which is which.
A near miss feels like a stolen win, not a loss, which breeds revenge trading: re-entry sized by anger, timed by impatience. Break the loop with cooling-off rules and automation, not willpower.
A working system is boring to run, and that's the barrier. It stops paying you in control and thrills, and the emptiness is the edge: every reward removed was a channel a bias used to cost you money.
Active trading pays you in the feeling of control, disconnected from whether the market moves your way. Near misses and fast feedback amplify it, so the most engaging styles are the least profitable.
Selling winners early and holding losers late is one asymmetry: prospect theory makes you risk-averse in gains and risk-seeking in losses, inverting a positive-skew edge into the blow-up shape.
Get-even-itis is holding a broken loser to avoid crystallizing the loss, and the break-even you await recedes faster than price can chase it. Set the exit when calm and let the rule sell.
Your brain runs savanna firmware on a market problem. Loss aversion, pattern-seeing, and herding kept your ancestors alive and lose money now. Knowing it doesn't help; route around it with a rule.
An expert with twenty years of feel loses to a rule on an index card: knowledge isn't the bottleneck, consistency is. The rule stops your mistakes and exploits everyone still making theirs.
You can't control whether a trade wins, only how much you lose when wrong. Recovery is brutally asymmetric, so size, stops, and correlation decide survival more than any signal.
Score the universe, sort it, buy the top slice and short the bottom in equal risk. The broad market cancels and you hold only the spread between winners and losers.
Traders kill good systems in normal drawdowns and ride dead ones on hope. Write the kill rule before the pain, tie it to the drawdown envelope, and treat it as a dial, not a switch.
The single perfect equity curve doesn't exist. Smoothness is assembled from several rougher, uncorrelated systems whose drawdowns fall at different times, and even that fails in a crisis.