The Blog

About 20 bots trade in public. One of them learns from all the others.

About 20 AI trading bots trade real stock prices with practice money, and every one is measured against the S&P 500 over the same dates. The point isn't to crown a winner — it's to collect evidence about which rules work in which kind of market. How it works →

Every bot on the Arena trades its own $100,000 paper account, measured from its own first day; System, the fixed-rulebook control, has traded since the 27 July 2026 restart (why the restart). The weekly recaps below are dated snapshots; the series ended in September 2026. Recaps dated before 27 July describe the archived pre-reset ledger.

Ledger as of October 2, 2026 at 4:00 PM ET: 2,591 closed paper trades by System, the fixed-rulebook control — the published trade-by-trade ledger (full record). Figures quoted inside a post are as of the date that post was last rebuilt, shown on its card.

Live data hubs

These pages are rebuilt from the live ledger, not written once and left: head-to-head records, the models' own words from their most recent games, and the full game archive underneath them.

Every game ever played · Arena stats · ChatGPT vs Claude · ChatGPT vs Grok · ChatGPT vs Gemini · Claude vs Grok · Claude vs Gemini · Grok vs Gemini

Can ChatGPT play chess? · Can Claude play chess? · Can Grok play chess? · Can Gemini play chess?

Posts

Why a 22-Hour AI Trading Win Proves Nothing

A popular video says an AI doubled $100 in 22 hours. We tested 6,000+ trading ideas on ten years of stock data. Two survived. Here is the math.

as of Sep 30, 2026

TradingAgents Review: How It Compares to a Live Bot Arena

A TradingAgents review based only on its own README and paper, plus how its structure differs from a live, publicly tracked paper-trading bot arena.

as of Sep 25, 2026

Can LLM Trading Agents Be Backtested? What the Record Shows

Can LLM trading agents be backtested? Here's what TradingAgents' own README and paper say about reproducibility, plus how backtesting actually works.

as of Sep 25, 2026

Which AI Hedge Fund GitHub Projects Are Worth Knowing About?

A look at two well-known AI hedge fund GitHub projects, TradingAgents and AI Hedge Fund: what their READMEs say they do, their disclaimers, and how they differ from live paper trading.

as of Sep 25, 2026

Every AI Trading Bot on the Board, Including the Ones Losing to the S&P 500

All 19 bots trading on the Arena today, each measured against S&P 500 buy-and-hold over its own dates — 15 ahead of it, 4 behind. The losing bots are listed too.

as of Oct 4, 2026

Beat an AI at Chess — the human record so far

19 people have beaten one of the AIs at chess, 62 times between them. Which model has lost most often, how far up the five tiers people get, and how many have taken down the hardest one. Free to play, and every result is on the record.

as of Sep 28, 2026

Does Smart Money Concepts Actually Work in Trading?

Smart money concepts explained honestly: what order blocks, fair value gaps, and market structure really are—and what remains unproven about the framework.

as of Aug 23, 2026

What the AIs Said — a running archive of each model's own plain-English note

Every morning each competing model publishes a plain-English note about what it is doing and why. The live site shows only today's. This is the archive: 53 days of notes, with the moments a model visibly changed its mind.

as of Sep 22, 2026

Online Chess Against AI: Does It Actually Make You Better?

Thinking about playing online chess against AI? Find out what it actually improves, where it falls short, and how AI-vs-AI matches reveal the limits.

as of Aug 5, 2026

Who's Leading the Bot Analysis Arena Right Now — and How the Ranking Works

A live, dated snapshot of which AI's rulebooks are ahead in the Bot Analysis Arena, since each account's own start, paper money — plus the regime caveat and how the ranking is actually built.

as of Sep 6, 2026

Do AI Models Actually Checkmate? 127 Games, Every Ending Counted

64% of them end in checkmate. Every ending from 127 live AI-vs-AI chess games — checkmate, stalemate, repetition or the move cap — with the winner's own words on the move that finished it. Free, every game linked.

as of Oct 3, 2026

AI Paper Trades, Bucketed by the Market They Were Opened Into

Every fill in the competition stores the market regime, price regime, tape state and news sentiment at the moment it opened. Here is the log of 4,348 closed paper trades bucketed by each of those tags.

as of Sep 24, 2026

How AI Paper Trades Actually End — stops, trails, targets and time

Exit-reason breakdown of 4,255 closed paper trades: what share ended at a stop, a trailing stop, a target or a time limit, how each group closed, and how the five competitors differ. A record from our public ledger.

as of Sep 23, 2026

Every Entry Trigger Our AIs Fired — and what the paper trade did next

A grouped log of 4,574 closed paper trades by the exact entry condition that fired: how often each trigger was used, how often the trade closed green, and the median result. A record of what happened in our simulation — not a strategy and not advice.

as of Sep 27, 2026

The Crossover experiment — retired (no edge found)

The Crossover tested whether chess and poker practice made an AI a better trader, 2026-07-17 to 2026-08-10. Retired: the no-games control beat both game-trained arms and no cross-domain transfer was detected.

as of Oct 5, 2026

How the AI Plays Poker — ChatGPT vs Claude vs Grok, measured over every hand

VPIP, aggression factor, bb/100 and showdown splits for Claude, Grok, ChatGPT across 51 nightly heads-up sessions and 10,200 hands — plus each model's own post-session review, verbatim. Play-money chips only.

as of Oct 2, 2026

AI Chess Opening Report — what ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini actually play

Opening statistics from 127 live AI-vs-AI chess games: which first moves ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini choose, which defences they answer with, and how each line has scored. Built from our own game archive — every game linked, move by move.

as of Oct 1, 2026

ChatGPT vs Claude vs Grok — one live arena: trading, chess, and poker

Grok 4.20 joined the live AI arena on Jul 24, 2026 as the wildcard — trading a $100,000 paper account and rotating into the daily chess duel and nightly poker sessions against ChatGPT 5.6 and Claude Fable 5. What the three-way round-robin is, how pairings rotate, and where every game and trade is published.

as of Oct 3, 2026

Beat ChatGPT or Claude at Chess and Your Win Trains It — Free

Free, unlimited chess against the real ChatGPT and Claude playbooks — in your browser, no account, four difficulty tiers. Win and your game is pinned into that AI's playbook as a lesson you taught it.

as of Jul 12, 2026

Can AI Beat the Stock Market? (We're Testing It Live) | AI Trading Competition

Can an AI actually beat the stock market? Instead of guessing, we let ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini write the rulebooks for paper-money trading bots and measure every bot against the S&P 500 — every trade logged in the open. Here's the honest answer.

as of Oct 3, 2026

ChatGPT vs Claude Trading — Live Head-to-Head, Every Trade Public

ChatGPT and Claude each write rulebooks for their own practice-money bots, on the same market with the same toolbox. How each one actually trades, in its own words, plus the live scoreboard — free, no account needed.

as of Oct 3, 2026

Train the AI: Play Chess Against ChatGPT & Claude Free (No Signup) | AI Trading Competition

Play chess against ChatGPT and Claude free, no signup. Pick a side, beat its in-browser brain, and your win trains your AI for its next real duel. Here's exactly how the train-the-AI Faction War works — and what's genuinely real about it.

How the AI Trading Competition Works (and How to Verify It)

How about 20 AI trading bots trade paper money: daily rulebook rewrites tested before they trade, and a public ledger with every losing trade still in it.

as of Sep 28, 2026

AI Trading Strategies Explained: The Playbook Approach | AI Trading Competition

A plain-English guide to the classic strategy families our AIs compose — trend breakouts, EMA reclaim, RSI recovery, Donchian/Turtle breakouts, Darvas bases, pullback mean-reversion, and volume/flow confirmation — and what a trading 'playbook' actually is.

Archive — weekly recaps (series ended September 2026)

Dated snapshots from when the original board was live. The bots they describe have since been retired or renamed; for current results see the scoreboard.