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u/Latter-Database-2026 3 days ago Strategy

It works but not sure why!

I have a strategy built by Claude and it works great on backtest but I have zero clue how it works. Does anyone have similar experience?
86 comments held Reddit says 0 on reddit ↗
  1. u/Otherwise_Barber4619 1 3 days ago
    How stupid
  2. u/Latter-Database-2026 OP 1 3 days ago
    Exactly me
  3. u/kenjiurada 1 3 days ago
    Y’all Quantz are just pissed that you put yourself out of a job…
  4. u/declanaussie 1 3 days ago
    Thanks for providing liquidity :)
  5. u/[deleted] 1 3 days ago

    [removed] — already gone when the archive first saw it

  6. u/One-Adhesiveness-138 1 3 days ago
    Lookahead, survivorship bias, non causal transactions, no fees, perfect execution, overfit Ask Claude to at least audit the strategy for any of the above. Also Claude should be able to give you a summary of what exactly the strategy is easy enough.
  7. u/Latter-Database-2026 OP 1 3 days ago
    That was my first guess but not much issue on performance, ran fable 5 and burned insane credit for it in the meantime
  8. u/Latter-Database-2026 OP 1 3 days ago
    had to do all the backtests again after the comments and here's claude's response: So: the mockery isn't really informative, but the one technical comment landed on the same honest caveat I already gave you — overfitting is the thing paper trading actually tests, everything else on comments has a real answer already built into this session's work.
  9. u/IgneousMaxime 1 3 days ago
    Talking to Claude makes me want to vomit sometimes. Open up the codebase yourself and trace through the transaction cost or at least get some MC simulation going as well. I'd imagine it's some mixture of transaction cost and lucky run bias.
  10. u/One-Adhesiveness-138 1 3 days ago
    Take your code to another LLM, even a free one, and see what it says.
  11. u/m0nk_3y_gw 1 3 days ago
    can also start a new Claude conversation with a fresh context window, and tell it ChatGPT created the strategy, and ask it to double-check it.
  12. u/melanthius 1 3 days ago
    So you want a golden-egg-laying goose, but are gonna be surprised at its cost
  13. u/jnwatson 1 3 days ago
    Hidden lookahead bias. What is your OOS performance?
  14. u/SirMacFarton 1 3 days ago
    Can you ELI5 what do you mean by hidden lookahead bias? I assume here hidden means unintentional? (Sorry newbie here)
  15. u/jnwatson 1 3 days ago
    It just means it isn't obvious where the cheating is.
  16. u/SirMacFarton 1 3 days ago
    Thanks
  17. u/dheera 1 3 days ago
    Example of unintentional lookahead bias: Data: OHLC data of the top 1000 stocks each day by total dollar volume Strategy: I have a momentum strategy. between 9:30am to 9:45am I look at the largest 20 movers (up or down) and continue trading them from 9:46am to 3pm -- long/short at 9:46am based on their trend, close out everything at 3pm. Can you find the lookahead bias?
  18. u/SirMacFarton 1 3 days ago
    Again sorry if my answer is so stupid; but here the strategy is making decisions only after we have observed the movements between 9:30-9:45, and only made a decision at 9:46. However we here have a hidden Lookahead bias because the candle could be Open,High,Low,Close or Open,Low,High,Close. Meaning our algo will probably chose what it thinks its the best outcome we wish for, not necessarily what actually happened.? I.e the hidden part
  19. u/Grouchy-Pea-8745 1 3 days ago
    I'm new to this but guessing that its: your universe is created using the entire day's volume, which you wouldn't know at 9:45 AM
  20. u/Sporkers 1 2 days ago
    Yes, I think this would surface breakout mid/smaller caps that might not have been in the universe evaluated on a smaller timeframe because they wouldn't have had time to pass other larger but boring stocks in volume.
  21. u/Latter-Database-2026 OP 1 3 days ago
    entries are next-bar-open after a bar-close signal confirms, not same-bar. The streaming bot was validated bit-identical to the vectorized backtest across thousands of trades.  getting the oos performance now
  22. u/Latter-Database-2026 OP 1 3 days ago
    OOS came out PF 2.15
  23. u/StrawberryMarmalade 1 3 days ago
    You should ask Claude!
  24. u/Anon2148 1 3 days ago
    This made me chuckle 😂
  25. u/Latter-Database-2026 OP 1 3 days ago
    :)
  26. u/Interesting-Soup9790 1 3 days ago
    Most stuff looks great on backtest or at least not as bad. Run it in paper then see
  27. u/Latter-Database-2026 OP 1 3 days ago
    running it from tomorrow, will share the results here!
  28. u/Automatic-Essay2175 1 3 days ago
    It doesn’t, I promise
  29. u/Latter-Database-2026 OP 1 3 days ago
    will share paper trading results tomorrow and lets scrutinize together, as i want to be very skeptical.
  30. u/Automatic-Essay2175 1 3 days ago
    Even by making this post, you are not skeptical enough. Claude did not magically create a strategy that works this well. It’s just not how this works.
  31. u/Latter-Database-2026 OP 1 3 days ago
    i agree, and thanks for your comment! i want to know what the faults are as i paper trade
  32. u/Automatic-Essay2175 1 3 days ago
    There’s a lot more you could do to investigate this than paper trading
  33. u/One-Adhesiveness-138 1 3 days ago
    A day is not going to give you a definitive answer
  34. u/Dull-Ad893 1 3 days ago
    fuck around and find out why
  35. u/Latter-Database-2026 OP 1 3 days ago
    Paper trading on Alpaca tomorrow, let’s see
  36. u/Dull-Ad893 1 3 days ago
    thats not how you find out, paper trading doesn't account for fills, slippage and fees. go live
  37. u/Latter-Database-2026 OP 1 3 days ago
    if it hold PF of 2 for 1 month then i will surely go live, if not will start working on next strategy
  38. u/x___tal 1 3 days ago
    Start with paper brother you'll notice. If slipage is a problem or high speed then consider.
  39. u/L3g3ndary-08 1 3 days ago
    Underrated comment. You won't get actual fills and you won't truly know if your strategy works. For someone who has gone down this path, I can almost gurantee this dude is going to lose money.
  40. u/trunksta 1 2 days ago
    Some truth to this but definitely wouldn't skip paper trading, gotta make sure it's working as designed first
  41. u/Realistic-Hippo8107 1 3 days ago
    Ask Claude why! Lol
  42. u/Real_Step_5664 1 3 days ago
    has anyone actually pulled their funds out of these accounts that need money in and got their money??..
  43. u/Lost-Hand-5219 1 3 days ago
    What??? lol
  44. u/Real_Step_5664 1 3 days ago
    ok what I mean is. .. when u get offered to sign up somewhere and bots help trade. I guess I was just wondering if anyone actually utilized that tool on here and managed to make money off of it.. cuz I've read everywhere it's mostly scams.. not this thread itself.
  45. u/Lost-Hand-5219 1 3 days ago
    Don’t use a brokerage that you wouldn’t trust with normal trading.
  46. u/SagansCandle 1 3 days ago
    If you're not sure why, then the answer is either luck or error.
  47. u/Lost-Hand-5219 1 3 days ago
    This type of post reminds me of how simple-minded the general population really is. The complete lack of scrutiny of an impossible result and the absence of any attempt to investigate how such a result was obtained make me wonder how we ever got this far as a species.
  48. u/Latter-Database-2026 OP 1 3 days ago
    i mean, do you have to know what the strategy is when it works? 😂
  49. u/Lost-Hand-5219 1 3 days ago
    Wow. Again, the complete lack of curiosity on your part is NOT good quality to have. I guess I’ll help you out a little. The first step in this process is for you to define what “works” actually means. The immediate flaw you need to come to terms with is that your current standard of “it works” seems to be that Claude prints out a chart showing the numbers going up. That is a VERY fragile definition of something working.
  50. u/_beracah_ 1 3 days ago
    LH is right. In even the shallowest analysis, not touching on any algotrading actual metrics, it can succeed (and frequently does) because of a bug that happens to favorably coincide with market conditions. Or a limitation in analysis that seems to work, but when it hits live, totally wipes out the algo. One of those is partial fills, volumes, or mistakes with limit prices that allow your account to get scorched in the real market. What does it mean to "work"? That plot isn't it.
  51. u/Goal_Pleasant 1 3 days ago
    Which prompt do you used?
  52. u/Latter-Database-2026 OP 1 3 days ago
    thanks for the suggestion, used Atlas(ChatGPT) and data from a different source but the results are PF +/- 0.13 different, will try again on Gemini
  53. u/TheGratitudeBot 1 3 days ago
    Thanks for saying thanks! It's so nice to see Redditors being grateful :)
  54. u/Goal_Pleasant 1 3 days ago
    Cool, I will try your strategy to ask a Claude to create an algo for XAU
  55. u/Latter-Database-2026 OP 1 3 days ago
    yes, do it! ask it generate flowchart in with exact mathematical terms and keep on feeding it data. backtest on sonnet and strategy generation on Fable
  56. u/clisztian 1 3 days ago
    What do you mean “it works”? Because you see equity curve go up and think “yes, me get rich now”. You vibe coded something and now are asking Reddit to reverse engineer it for you? Do you really think it would be that easy to build a working strategy with an edge using Claude? You are in for a world of pain if you ever run this with real money. I assume you’ll just take the easy way out, ask Claude to find mistakes… and the in the end did you really learn anything?
  57. u/Latter-Database-2026 OP 1 3 days ago
    is it not working when equity curves go up? go up= goood, go down= bad?
  58. u/smthyjas 1 3 days ago
    Have it make an html tool that looks like trading view and then have it put the trades entries and exits on the chart. You should be able to tell at that point a little bit of how the strategy works. You could then ask it to screenshot random trades to make sure it is a valid trade.
  59. u/Latter-Database-2026 OP 1 3 days ago
    doing it now, thanks
  60. u/caseywh 1 3 days ago
    is the strategy purely price based? if yes, very likely curve fit. did you test the strategy on any price data outside the window you “trained” on?
  61. u/Latter-Database-2026 OP 1 3 days ago
    its a mix of Vwap, netdrift and gex gate for trade entries
  62. u/caseywh 1 3 days ago
    Run it forward on paper but do some sensitivity analysis on your entry/exit price - and focus on the unfavorable variance. Paper fills are typically optimistic and are without market impact as size scales
  63. u/BeerAandLoathing 1 3 days ago
    I think I’ve turned my Claude into a pessimist. I can’t get it to give me anything that survives proper testing, and more often than not, it tells me an idea is ‘killed’ way before I’m willing to give up on it.
  64. u/Latter-Database-2026 OP 1 3 days ago
    been through the same thing, it doent work if you ask it to generate ideas, you have give it some direction, i have had great results with net drift and gex gate, get data from some api providers, try different angles.
  65. u/TieOk7165 1 2 days ago
    Gave it everything, added the make no mistake part , came back with your stuff happens but it’s worthless. Told just do whatever, told me nah trading just doesn’t work.
  66. u/equiltonio 1 3 days ago
    Wrap it up bruh 😭😭😭
  67. u/IndependenceCute2553 1 3 days ago
    Would be happy to help, first what type of strategy is this? Mean revers / Trend following? What timeframe and how do you model execution on your backtest?
  68. u/Paulynom 1 3 days ago
    Because it doesn't
  69. u/AssPinata 1 3 days ago
    When those that don't know choose to fight back, why not let them learn the hard way?
  70. u/1cl1qp1 1 3 days ago
    It's probably because your regression is picking up on phase shifts in the quadrature.
  71. u/tenuki_ 1 3 days ago
    I’m kinda at the point where the internet ain’t worth it anymore.
  72. u/Backrus 1 3 days ago
    Lookahead / data leakage, that's all you need to know..
  73. u/Wonderful_Shape8021 1 3 days ago
    Run permutation tests
  74. u/OrangePineappleMan7 1 3 days ago
    Ask Claude?
  75. u/Tiki_Torch169 1 3 days ago
    Funny enough when I’ve spoken to quants a lot of them also seem to be in the realm of “we have an idea of why it might work we just don’t why it does work”
  76. u/powerexcess 1 2 days ago
    It does not work, it might seem like it does This is why llms cam be dangerous Paper trading in time tell u if it does or does not work.  But not "why". And so it is not the right step to iterate. You need to look at what it does. Read the code. At the very least ask claude tk break the algo in steps and understand every single line. How do u treat nans, ffilling, bfilling, reindexing, what do u do around weekends The cost assumptions, biases, overfitting risks, slippage, execution assumptions. Then the core hypothesis, etc etc Getting a black box algo and putting it live based on a backtest is so so far from how trading works. I am saying this as someone who trades with deep nns. The more u understand what the algo does the more hopes it will work. No understanding = no hope.
  77. u/hellokitty2469 1 2 days ago
    How did you even create the strategy if you don’t know the variables you dumped into it?
  78. u/[deleted] 1 2 days ago

    [removed] — already gone when the archive first saw it

  79. u/Sporkers 1 2 days ago
    It's a stupidly straight equity curve and 2026 has been wild so it not real, it's some artifact of a poor backtest.
  80. u/NuclearVII 1 2 days ago
    If Claude could give you alpha, do you think anthropic would've sold you a sub?
  81. u/One-Adhesiveness-138 1 2 days ago
    Anthropic is selling shovels at this point, you can dig with an idea where to find, or even potentially get lucky by random (very unlikely)
  82. u/j_lyf 1 2 days ago
    Whats the freuqency? What data source you using?
  83. u/herewiigoagane 1 2 days ago
    You could share the source with me so I can run it in my own custom engine to see if the results add up to what you are seeing on your end
  84. u/stt106 1 2 days ago
    There is only one way to find out in practice…
  85. u/Key-Relation-8795 1 2 days ago
    Ask Claude or Chat these two questions at the end. It’ll go from “this works” to explaining why many of its own backtests are BS.
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