Contents

• What is this?
• Agent bakeoff
• What this repo gives you
• How the runbook works
• What's inside
• Community leaderboard
• Get started
• Risk disclaimer
• More links

What is this?

In February 2026 I deposited $25,000 into a live Public brokerage account on NexusTrade and made the entire book public — every position, every fill, every model test, every bug, every failure.

Not paper. Not a backtest screenshot. Real money, documented in real time.

The live story is a blog series. Episode 10 is the write-up of this repo in action: Claude Fable 5 ran episode-10/BAKEOFF_RUNBOOK.md end to end — engine sanity checks, 16 strategy variants, walk-forward certification, a single-touch lockbox — and deployed a live momentum-options book that beat the market out of sample. Fable 5 was subsequently banned; the runbook, snapshots, and full campaign logs in episode-10/ are still here so you can run the same discipline with any model.

This repo is the open playbook. Episode 10 documents one agent's run through it. The runbook is yours to replay with whatever model you have. The agents don't just trade the account—they commit to this repo.

Agent bakeoff

Four agents received the same Episode 10 discipline. The useful result is not a single giant backtest—it is whether a fixed deploy-shape candidate cleared the frozen out-of-sample gates.

Honest headline: none of the four runs produced a clean pass under every frozen gate. Fable's strategy was deployed after a documented owner override, not because the runbook quietly moved the bars. Follow the links for fold-level evidence and every failure.

What this repo gives you

How the runbook works

The campaign is built around one idea: out-of-sample performance is the only result that counts.

flowchart LR
  A["🔍 Search<br/><small>backtests & optimization</small>"] --> B["✓ Certify<br/><small>walk-forward folds</small>"]
  B --> C["🔒 Lockbox<br/><small>single-touch confirm</small>"]
  C --> D["🚀 Deploy<br/><small>live portfolio</small>"]

Fixed by the runbook: a frozen watchlist (20 names in the Episode 10 bakeoff; 21 in Episode 11 after adding SPCX), $25,000 capital, the fold calendar, the gates, the lockbox rules, and the deploy procedure. Yours to design: signals, structures, deltas, exits, sizing — anything that clears the gates is valid.

ANET · DUOL · HOOD · LLY · GS · META · TSM · AVGO · XOM · COP · OSCR · AMAT · ADI · DDOG · OKTA · NET · APP · GLD · MU · SNDK · SPCX*

_{*SPCX was added in Episode 11; the Episode 10 bakeoff runs the first 20.}

What's inside

The discipline lives in two forms. The skills library (skills/) is the runbooks decomposed into composable agent skills on the open SKILL.md standard — the same folder runs in Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Copilot and ~15 other tools (skills/install.sh handles each tool's path + adapter). Connect the NexusTrade MCP and the agent auto-invokes the skill that fits the task, no paste required. The episode folders preserve the complete public timeline: historical indexes for Episodes 1–9, then the original runbooks and campaign logs for the reproducible campaigns.

skills/                      ← the skills library (install into ANY agent — see skills/README.md)
├── README.md                        ← index + how the skills compose
├── run-episode/                     ← entry point: /run-episode 10 (sequences the stages)
├── portfolio-certification/         ← umbrella orchestrator (the staged PASS/FAIL run)
├── walk-forward-oos/                ← the OOS certification engine
├── breadth-audit/                   ← true participation at fixed $25k
├── sweep-reoptimization/            ← re-sweep on structural change + provenance
├── options-structure-rules/         ← spread-shape rule + hard constraints
├── alt-data-indicators/             ← custom indicators (Reddit, congressional, …)
├── bug-protocol/                    ← "loudly declare" + hand-off doc template
├── deploy-gate/                     ← the gated deploy + reconcile flow
├── engine-sanity/                   ← Stage-S0 pre-flight contract checks
├── strategy-bakeoff/                ← the SEARCH→CERTIFY multi-family funnel
└── lockbox-holdout/                 ← single-touch holdout + A/B/C baselines

Each episode is a self-contained folder: the runbook to paste, plus the campaign logs from each operator/agent run.

Episodes 1–9 predate the current repository format. Their folders preserve the runbook provenance that still exists, the outcome, an honest historical grade, and the canonical article instead of pretending missing artifacts can be reconstructed.

episode-10/
├── BAKEOFF_RUNBOOK.md             ← paste this into a fresh MCP session
├── RUNBOOK_OG.md                  ← the original (Episode 1) runbook, kept for reference
├── snapshots/                     ← baseline + incumbent seed portfolios the runbook loads
├── addendum/                       ← entry/exit redesign, deploy evidence, diagram, and bug note
├── FABLE_CAMPAIGN.MD              ← operator run log (Fable 5)
├── CLAUDE_CODE_CAMPAIGN_LOG_*.md  ← agent run log (Claude)
├── CODEX_CAMPAIGN_LOG_*.md        ← agent run log (Codex)
└── CURSOR_CAMPAIGN_LOG_*.md       ← agent run log (Cursor)

Episode 11 continues the story on the now-live book — each attempt is its own runbook:

episode-11/
├── attempt1/  RUNBOOK.md + CAMPAIGN_LOG.md                 ← certify the live book, re-optimize on FAIL
├── attempt2/  RUNBOOK.md + CAMPAIGN_LOG.md + TOTALBUDGET_BUG.md  ← repair cross-watchlist participation
├── attempt3/  RUNBOOK.md                                   ← alt-data (Reddit/WSB) on the certified book
└── …                                                       ← later focused strategy campaigns

Each new episode/attempt gets its own folder when the runbook or campaign parameters change materially.

Community leaderboard

Think your agent can beat the incumbent without moving the gates? Prove it. Fork the repo, run the campaign on NexusTrade, and open a PR under community-runs/.

Only runs that pass every current gate are ranked by mean OOS return. Failed runs stay visible—the point is reproducibility, not survivor bias. Start with the submission guide and result template.

Get started

Step 1 — Developers page

Open nexustrade.io/developers.

Step 2 — Create a free account

You'll need a NexusTrade account to authorize MCP and access portfolios, backtests, and live trading tools.

Step 3 — Connect your AI tool

Recommended: OAuth. No keys to copy, rotate, or leak. Sign in once in the browser when your client first calls a NexusTrade tool.

https://nexustrade.io/api/mcp

Cursor (recommended)

1. On the Developers page, expand API Keys.
2. Under Connect an AI tool to NexusTrade, click Add to Cursor.
3. OAuth runs automatically on first tool use.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nexustrade": {
      "url": "https://nexustrade.io/api/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Click Copy install command on the Developers page, or:

claude mcp add nexustrade --transport http https://nexustrade.io/api/mcp

Use Add to VS Code on the Developers page, or paste the MCP URL into your client's connector settings. OAuth 2.1 discovery works the same everywhere.

For scripts without OAuth support: expand Advanced: API Keys on the Developers page and pass the key in the Authorization header. See the API Reference.

Step 4 — Run it

Fast path — a personalized strategy in one paste. Run:

python3 start.py

On the first run it walks you through a few questions (defaults come from example_profile.json — mine) and writes your profile.json, then writes your ready-to-paste prompt to prompt.txt. Open prompt.txt, copy it, and paste into a fresh MCP-connected chat. Run it again any time after editing profile.json to regenerate the prompt.

No Python? Copy example_profile.json to profile.json, edit it, then paste the JSON into your agent with one line: "Build me a personalized strategy from this profile, backtest it out-of-sample, and ask before deploying."

Either way, the agent designs a strategy on your names, backtests it, compares it to buy-and-hold, and asks before risking a dollar.

• risk_tolerance — conservative · moderate · aggressive
• asset_classes — any of stocks, crypto, options
• watchlist — the only tickers the agent may trade
• capital — starting USD

Full rigor — the runbook. Want walk-forward validation, a held-out lockbox, and deploy gates? Open episode-10/BAKEOFF_RUNBOOK.md, paste the entire file into a fresh session, and tell the agent: execute top to bottom, do not ask clarifying questions. Log your run alongside the per-agent campaign logs in episode-10/.

Risk disclaimer

This repository is educational and documents one person's experiments. It is not investment, legal, tax, or financial advice, and it is not a promise of future results. Live performance, backtests, walk-forward results, and out-of-sample results can all lose money and can differ from brokerage execution because of liquidity, spreads, fees, assignment, latency, data quality, and implementation errors. Options can expire worthless and may create losses beyond the premium for some structures.

Nothing in this repository should place a trade by itself. Review every strategy, connect only accounts you control, keep manual approval enabled until you understand the behavior, and never risk money you cannot afford to lose. The scoreboard is a timestamped public snapshot; verify the current portfolio and disclosures before relying on it.

More links