Stocks (practice)
Claude runs a few well-studied investing strategies automatically, each with its own pretend $10,000, so we can see which ones actually work.
⚠️ Practice account — FAKE money only. Nothing here is real money or financial advice.
Scoreboard
Each strategy's pretend $10,000 over time
Recent trades
What each strategy owns now
News about what we own
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What is each strategy?
Tested and rejected (2016–2026 backtest, after trading costs)
49 short-term trading ideas were tested; only the dip-buy and calendar ideas held up. These didn't:
Copying Congress's stock trades — coming later
Members of Congress must report their stock trades. The free data feeds that used to collect these have shut down, and the official records are scanned PDFs, so this one is on the to-do list rather than running yet.
Words to know
- Stock
- A small piece of ownership in one company.
- ETF (fund)
- A basket of many stocks you can buy in one go, like buying a whole sampler instead of one item. SPY, QQQ and the "XL…" sector funds are ETFs.
- S&P 500 / SPY
- The 500 biggest U.S. companies. SPY is a fund that holds all of them — the usual yardstick for "the market."
- Sector
- An industry group, e.g. energy, health care, technology, banks.
- 200-day average
- The average closing price over the last 200 trading days (~10 months). Price above it = trend up; below = trend down.
- Momentum
- The tendency of things that have been rising to keep rising for a while.
- BIL / T-bills
- Very short-term loans to the U.S. government. Basically cash that earns a little interest.
- Insider
- A company's officers and directors (CEO, CFO, board). They must report their trades to the SEC on Form 4.
- 13F
- A quarterly report big investment firms must file listing the stocks they own — up to 45 days after the quarter ends.
- RSI-2
- A 0–100 score of how hard the price fell (or rose) over the last ~2 days. Under 10 = a sharp, short dip.
- 5-day average
- The average price of the last 5 trading days — used to tell when a dip has bounced back.
- Turn of the month
- The last few trading days of a month plus the first few of the next, which have historically been a bit stronger than average.
- Day trade
- Buying and selling the same day. We tested many day-trading ideas; none made money after costs.
- Benchmark
- The comparison. Here it's simply buying SPY and holding — "did the strategy beat doing nothing?"
- Paper trading
- Practice trading with pretend money in a real market. Fills are usually a bit kinder than real life.
Behind the scenes
Data: Alpaca (free IEX prices, news), SEC EDGAR, OpenFIGI. Account: Alpaca paper trading only.