TheStrategicEdgeAI

I built The Strategic Edge AI to help traders turn an idea into clear rules, code and a test they can review.

The full EDGE workflow has four parts:

Evaluate: examine the idea and the market conditions it depends on.

Design: define the entries, exits and risk rules.

Generate: turn the specification into TradingView Pine Script or NinjaTrader 8 NinjaScript.

Evolve: analyze the backtest evidence and identify what to test next.

You compile and run backtests in TradingView or NinjaTrader, then bring the results into Evolve for analysis. Each version still needs independent testing.

A useful starting question: could someone else follow your written rules and identify the same

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.
A strategy can backtest well, forward test well, and even trade profitably live for a while. Then it starts losing. At that point, how do you know whether you’re just experiencing a normal drawdown… or whether the edge has actually disappeared?

Stopping after a few bad weeks could mean abandoning a perfectly good strategy at the worst possible time. But blindly trusting historical results forever seems just as dangerous. My mind has gone to a few of these issues:

Things like:
Is the strategy still behaving within its historical drawdown range?
Has trade expectancy materially changed?
Are the market conditions it was designed

I’ve been spending a lot of time building and testing automated strategies lately, and I’ve run into a problem I didn’t expect. It’s incredibly easy to make a backtest better.

Change the stop. Add a filter. Remove a bad session. Adjust an indicator. Change the target.

Do that enough times and eventually the equity curve starts looking pretty damn good. But at what point are you actually improving the strategy, and at what point are you just teaching it the answers to the test?

The weird part is that a slightly uglier backtest almost feels more believable to me now.

For people who develop and test strategies, how do you personally decide when optimization has crossed into overfitting? Wha

I recently launched a pretty niche AI SaaS for traders.
The product works. Payments work. SEO is set up. Demo is done. All the stuff I thought would be the hard part is basically finished.

Now I’m learning the actual hard part: distribution.
I can go on Reddit or X and literally find people publicly describing the exact problems we built the product to solve.

But there’s a weird line.

Reply too softly and nobody knows your product exists.
Pitch too hard and you’re the annoying SaaS guy dropping links everywhere.

DM people and now you have platform spam rules to worry about.

So I’m curious how other founders handled this in the beginning.

When you had zero audience but knew who yo

Not just “oh I’ll change this part of it”

But straight up delete it and pretend it never existed.

For me, a big net profit doesn’t mean much if I see something ugly underneath it.

There’s multiple aspects that make me suspicious like all the profit coming from a short time period, the drawdown is out of proportion, a few monster trades carried the profit, the strategy falls apart when the market change, or it requires the stars to align to execute a “perfect” trade.

I’m curious what everyone else sees as an immediate dealbreaker.

One of the trickiest parts of trading futures isn’t just finding a setup, it’s what you do after you get punched in the face a few times.

Some traders cut size in half until they get their rhythm back. Others keep size exactly the same, arguing that changing it mid-stream just messes with the edge.

Personally, I’ve found sticking with consistent size (but having hard daily/weekly guardrails) keeps me from chasing or trying to make it back faster.

Do you size down after a cold streak, or stay steady no matter what? Have you noticed one approach keeps you more consistent long term?

I’ve noticed most traders tend to break down on one side of the equation. Stops — taking the loss feels like admitting defeat, so the trade gets “just a little more room.” Targets — the second you’re up a bit, you take it off early instead of letting it reach the plan.

Both habits wreck otherwise good setups. For me, holding winners has always been tougher — fear makes me grab green too quickly, while losers somehow feel like they deserve “more time.”

Do you find it harder to cut losers or hold winners? And what’s actually helped you stick to the plan?

I chased new indicators instead of testing rules. I thought wide stops = safe stops. Wrong. I underestimated time-of-day filters.

The edge wasn’t a secret setup. It was discipline + guardrails.

I’ve been testing and running futures strategies that basically boil down to two camps: 1. Short setups into weakness – fading failed pushes when the market shows cracks. 2. Momentum setups into strength – stacking into directional moves once the market confirms trend and velocity.

Both work if managed right, but the psychology is totally different: • Short setups feel great when you nail the turn, but they punish you hard if you’re early. • Momentum setups feel “safer” following strength, but they can chop you up if trend stalls.

Do you lean toward shorting weakness or pressing momentum, and why?

I’m curious where most traders here find their edge because I’ve seen both styles work,