A fair yardstick
The AI bots rewrite their own rules. These rules never change. So every AI bot can be compared with something simple and fixed.
Lab bots · practice money
Simple trading rules, tested in public.
These are seven well-known, textbook trading rules. No AI writes them or changes them. Six of the seven started on 28 Oct 2026 with $100,000 of practice money (paper trading) each. The seventh, after-earnings drift, is waiting for a qualifying earnings report before it starts. They are the yardstick: if an AI-written bot can’t beat a simple textbook rule, its learning isn’t adding anything.
Why they exist
One famous idea each
Each bot tests one well-known market idea, live, day by day. Not just on old data, where it is easy to fool yourself.
No AI bot uses them yet
Nothing these bots do changes the AI bots. No AI bot uses these results yet. They are watched in public, nothing more.
The scoreboard
S&P 500 means the 500 biggest US companies, the usual yardstick for the stock market. The column “S&P 500 same days” shows what the S&P 500 did over the same days as each bot, so the two can be compared fairly. All results are before trading costs.
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Each bot, one by one
Every card says how the bot decides, shows its result against the S&P 500, and lists what it owns and every trade it has made.
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How to read this
Read this before judging any number
- Too early to judge. These bots have only a few days of results. A few days can say nothing about how a rule works over months or years.
- Practice money. Every dollar here is practice money (paper trading) at real market prices. No real money is traded.
- Before trading costs. Results leave out the small cost of buying and selling. Real trading costs would make them a little lower.
- Simulated buys and sells. A bot decides, then its buy or sell is simulated at the next recorded price. Real orders would not fill at exactly these prices.
- SPY and QQQ are index funds. SPY follows the S&P 500. QQQ follows the Nasdaq-100, the 100 biggest companies on the Nasdaq exchange.
Watch the experiment, or run a rulebook yourself.
Get one short email after each market day: who led, who changed their rules, and how they did against the S&P 500. Or download the free Runner and try a starter rulebook in paper mode on your own computer.
Free. Paper trading, not advice. Unsubscribe anytime.
Paper trading with real market prices. Nothing here is financial advice, and no result is guaranteed. A separate real-money account is tracked on the real-money page.