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That’s the whole reason I trade the way I do. Optimize for life, not P&L. When I finish uploading this, I’m going back out in the yard. If my phone buzzes with an alert, I take the trade from my phone. Ten minutes a week and I’m done. Investing takes a little time each month, swing a little each week, day trading a little each day. No wall of monitors.

The setup I’m stealing: the exhaustion gap. A stock that’s already beaten down gaps lower on a capitulation event, longs puke, shorts pile in, then it reverses. Adobe was a clean example. Six lower highs, then an earnings gap down into a hammer candle. Buy the close, stop the low, and even at a mediocre win rate the risk-reward can be five to one.

Read, distill, steal. Now I go backtest it.

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— Michael Nauss, CMT, CAIA, CDMS

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Going deep was just asking questions the data could already answer. Same setup on 15-minute bars: more trades, just as profitable. Flip it short on the gap downs: more profitable than the long side. Same behavior, exploited more ways.

Then the humbling part. His strategy had one discretionary piece, a watchlist he built by hand every morning, years of feel he was sure no machine could touch. His first backtest beat it with a single rule. The data told him to remove himself from the equation.

That stung, but it let him automate and scale. 300 trades one year by hand. 3,500 after automating.

Before you chase a new strategy, go deep on the one that works. The juice runs deeper than you think.

Upgrade to Stats Edge Pro at $149.99/month, 30-day money-back guarantee.

— Michael Nauss, CMT, CAIA, CDMS

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The premise came from a Journal of Finance study. When a major IPO hits, the other names in that sector get sold. Facebook in 2012 is the template: Facebook itself barely moved on day one while LinkedIn, Groupon, Yelp, and Zynga sold off. I said watch Virgin Galactic and the rest of the space basket.

It happened almost to the letter. SpaceX up 19% if you got the allocation, around 8% off the open. Rocket Lab, Planet Labs, ASTS, and Virgin Galactic all got beat up. Virgin Galactic down 32% in a single day. Same chart as Facebook, twelve years later.

The logic is simple once you think about it. Planet Labs didn’t suddenly become a bad company. But if I run a space ETF, I have to own the biggest name. To buy it, I sell part of the rest of the basket. Five names to choose from became six. So I trim the other five to fund the new one. It’s not a business judgment. It’s plumbing.

Now the question is what’s next. Anthropic is rumored for fall 2026. That’s the next mega IPO, and the AI names are the basket to watch: SoundHound, BigBear.ai, Palantir. Two caveats. OpenAI doesn’t IPO yet, and Amazon and Google own big chunks of Anthropic, so they’ll move with it.

Here’s where it matters for you as a Pro member. When Anthropic lists, I’ll be calling out the exact names I’m looking to short or buy puts on, and the trades around it. I call these exploitative trades. They don’t have 25 years of backtested data like everything else we run. This is me saying here’s the study, here’s a perfect live example of it, here’s the discretionary trade I’m making off it. You see the whole process, not vibes, not squiggly lines.

The Drawdown Memo and the full system suite are built on the 25-year stuff. These exploitative IPO trades are a new layer I’m bringing to the room when rare events like this line up.

If you want the exact tickers, entries, and the short and put-option setups when Anthropic lists, that’s the Stats Edge Pro room. Upgrade to paid at $149.99/month, with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

— Michael Nauss, CMT, CAIA, CDMS

Please review the day …

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What’s below this line

Everything. Every trade for next week, across all three swing systems:

• The pullback setups

• The momentum setups

• The mean reversion setups

For every single one: the exact entry trigger, the stop loss, and the time stop. [N] setups this week.

This is not a watchlist and it is not commentary. It is the actual systematic output, the same list I am trading with my own money next week. No “keep an eye on this.” No guesswork. Entry, stop, exit, for every trade. You set your orders Sunday night and the week runs itself.

These are the systems I walked through in The 25-Year Backtest, tested across every regime since 2000, drawdowns included. What is below the line is those systems telling you exactly what to do next week.

Paid members also get real-time Discord alerts the moment any of these levels trigger during the week. You set the orders Sunday, the alerts confirm when they fire. You never have to watch the screen.

If you are already a paid member, the full plan is below. If you are not, this is the post to upgrade on. The Sunday Plan is the core of what Stats Edge Pro is, and you are one click from the whole thing.

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A lot of people are holding Virgin Galactic, ASTS, and the rest of the space basket expecting everything to rally together. A study from the Journal of Finance (Hsu, Reed, and Rocholl, 2010) looked at 134 large IPOs and nearly 9,000 rival firms and found the opposite. When a big IPO completes, rival companies drop on the day. When the IPO gets withdrawn, rivals rally. The bigger the deal, the bigger the hit.

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The Facebook 2012 example tells the story. On IPO day, Facebook itself returned all of 0.6%. LinkedIn, Groupon, Yelp, and Zynga dropped 5 to 10%. People sold the social media names they held to buy the new one. It didn’t even help: Facebook got cut roughly in half over the following month.

This isn’t about business quality. It’s flows. There’s only so much money in the world, so allocating to SpaceX means withdrawing from something, and the something is usually the rival names in the same theme. SpaceX’s float is around $1.75 trillion, it enters MSCI indices on day 2 and the QQQs around day 15. Index funds and space ETFs that need to buy it may have to sell a little of everything else to do it. More downward pressure on the basket.

And the setup is stretched. The day before the IPO, Virgin Galactic ran 23% and the rest of the space names rallied hard. That’s exactly the euphoria the study warns about.

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None of this means these companies go to zero. It means if you hold them expecting a group rally, 134 IPOs of data say otherwise.

17.30% max drawdown over 25 years while the S&P drew down 57%. That comes from following flows and data instead of stories. When the systems draw down, members hear about it directly in The Drawdown Memo.

Free Starter System and 25-Year Backtest: https://www.statsedgetrading.com/the-25-year-backtest

Stats Edge Pro at $149.99/month with a 30-day money-back guarantee, or $1,499.99/year. Founding tier at $3,000/year for traders who want a 1:1 onboarding call.

— Michael Nauss, CMT, CAIA, CDMS

Please review the day trading levels and setups…

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Short answer: yes, it adds risk. And the system holds anyway, because the weekend is part of the trade.

Here’s the thing about the Swing Combo’s 17.30% max drawdown over 25 years (the S&P drew down 57% over the same stretch). That number includes every weekend since January 2000. Every Sunday-night futures scare, every Monday gap, good and bad. 16,687 trades, weekends in. The risk you’re worried about isn’t hiding outside the backtest. It’s priced into the number.

Could I exit Friday’s close instead? Sure. But then you’re trading a different system than the one that was tested. The edge was measured on a holding period that includes the weekend. Cut the weekend out and you’re flying on a backtest you don’t have. I’ve killed work over smaller changes than this. I spent 100 hours testing a daily-cadence version of the swing systems, it failed by about 1%, and it’s gone. Most of what you build as a systematic trader fails.

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And practically: exiting Friday and re-entering Monday means paying slippage and commissions twice for the privilege of feeling safer while the market is closed anyway.

The discomfort is real. After 18 years inside hedge funds and prop firms, my CMT take is simple: when comfort and data disagree, the data wins.

If weekend gaps are what’s keeping you up, the bad stretches aren’t hidden. That’s what The Drawdown Memo exists for, and paid members get it the moment a real drawdown starts.

Free 25-Year Backtest PDF: https://www.statsedgetrading.com/the-25-year-backtest

Stats Edge Pro at $149.99/month with a 30-day money-back guarantee, or $1,499.99/year. Founding tier at $3,000/year for traders who want a 1:1 onboarding call.

Please review the day tra…

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Chapter one is Kristjan Kullamägi, known online as Qullamaggie. He turned $5,000 into $100 million at his peak with a 25 to 30% win rate. Seven or eight of every ten trades lose. Sit with that.

What I’m stealing as a systematic trader. He runs three core setups: breakouts, episodic pivots, parabolic shorts. That’s multiple systems. He does intuitively what we quantify at Stats Edge, diversifying across systems instead of assets so something is always working while something else isn’t.

He started as a day trader and found swing trading as profitable on far less time. He spends one to two hours a day. Our members need 15 to 20 minutes a week. If you don’t have that, “I don’t have time to trade” is a cope.

His returns are lumpy. He has a regime filter that sends him to cash for long stretches. With a 25% win rate, there will be clusters of losers and months of red. Anyone who claims they win every month is lying. That’s exactly why The Drawdown Memo exists.

And the part I loved most: “None of this is mine.” He found it all, stole it, made it work for him. Same process here. Read, distill, backtest, and if it survives, it ships to Pro members.

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One gap he exposed: the episodic pivot, a big gap on real news in a forgotten name. We don’t have much there. I’m going to test it.

Free Starter System and 25-Year Backtest: https://www.statsedgetrading.com/the-25-year-backtest

Stats Edge Pro at $149.99/month with a 30-day money-back guarantee, or $1,499.99/year. Founding tier at $3,000/year for traders who want a 1:1 onboarding call.

— Michael Nauss, CMT, CAIA, CDMS

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— Michael

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Here’s why. Getting one strategy to work means you survived all the snake oil, learned the lessons the hard way, and built something that prints money. You’re in a tiny group. Nobody in your town does this. So you get proud, and you get calcified. You start thinking the way you trade is how trading works. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I watched a trader build an entire identity around shorting low-float small caps. It worked, until locate fees went through the roof and the edge got swept out from under him. Not because his strategy was bad. Because the market changed. He’s now talking about getting a job. If he’d spent even a little time on one uncorrelated strategy, something to the long side keeping him green each month, he’d have runway to adapt instead of starting from zero.

That’s the why behind a second strategy. Not “make more money.” That’s obvious. The real question is what hole are you plugging. Is your capital sitting idle in the afternoon while you only trade the open? Do you get killed when the market rips because you only short? A second strategy fills a specific gap. Start with the gap, not the strategy.

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Dave and I disagreed on the next part, which made it a good episode. He argues you should go deep, that the best traders squeeze enormous juice from one universe. I argue you eventually hit diminishing returns and should go wide before an external shock forces you to. We’re both right depending on your account size and your goals. A 25-year-old with $10k should go nuts chasing returns. A 50-year-old with $10 million optimizing for a smooth equity curve is playing a completely different game.

17.30% max drawdown over 25 years while the S&P drew down 57%. That number exists because we run ten uncorrelated systems, so no single one dying ends the business. When one draws down, members hear about it directly in The Drawdown Memo.

Free Starter System and 25-Year Backtest: https://www.statsedgetrading.com/the-25-year-backtest

Stats Edge Pro at $149.99/month with a 30-day money-back guarantee, or $1,499.99/year. Founding tier at $3,000/year for traders who want a 1:1 onboarding call.

— Michael Nauss, CMT, CAIA, CDMS

Please review the day trading levels and setups below. Our Discord bot will notify you in real-time whe…

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It triggered around $58.50 on a textbook bull flag. But the reason it stood out is the bigger picture. Zoom out and that zone has been a wall for years. Support a while back, then resistance, rejecting price over and over. Now it’s breaking through it. A clean breakout above a level that’s held for years is worth more than any single-day pattern.

The plan is simple. Buy the breakout, hold with a stop loss below the setup, exit next Monday. That’s the rhythm. The time stop does the work so I’m not married to the trade.

The alpha isn’t in the names everyone’s watching. It’s in the boring ones nobody mentions. U-Haul’s parent isn’t getting talked about on Fintwit, and that’s the point. The system doesn’t care what’s exciting. It ranks setups and flags the ones with edge, exciting or not.

17.30% max drawdown over 25 years while the S&P drew down 57%. That comes from following the ranking into boring names, not chasing what’s loud. When the systems draw down, members hear about it directly in The Drawdown Memo.

Free Starter System and 25-Year Backtest: https://www.statsedgetrading.com/the-25-year-backtest

Stats Edge Pro at $149.99/month with a 30-day money-back guarantee, or $1,499.99/year. Founding tier at $3,000/year for traders who want a 1:1 onboarding call.

— Michael Nauss, CMT, CAIA, CDMS

Please review the day trading levels and setups below. Ou…

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What’s below this line

Everything. Every trade for next week, across all three swing systems:

• The pullback setups

• The momentum setups

• The mean reversion setups

For every single one: the exact entry trigger, the stop loss, and the time stop. [N] setups this week.

This is not a watchlist and it is not commentary. It is the actual systematic output, the same list I am trading with my own money next week. No “keep an eye on this.” No guesswork. Entry, stop, exit, for every trade. You set your orders Sunday night and the week runs itself.

These are the systems I walked through in The 25-Year Backtest, tested across every regime since 2000, drawdowns included. What is below the line is those systems telling you exactly what to do next week.

Paid members also get real-time Discord alerts the moment any of these levels trigger during the week. You set the orders Sunday, the alerts confirm when they fire. You never have to watch the screen.

If you are already a paid member, the full plan is below. If you are not, this is the post to upgrade on. The Sunday Plan is the core of what Stats Edge Pro is, and you are one click from the whole thing.

Read more

I am not going to pretend it was not ugly. It was. Real selling, real damage, real red across nearly every name on the screen. My own account took the hit alongside it, because I had positions on. There is no system that wins every day, and anyone who tells you they have one is lying to you.

But I want to tell you what I did about it after the close.

Nothing.

I did not move stops. I did not exit early. I did not size up to “catch the bounce.” I did not size down to “be safer.” I did not stare at the overnight futures wondering whether to override what the system was telling me.

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I read the numbers, I let the regime filter do its work, and I shut the laptop.

That is not because I am tough or zen or unusually disciplined. It is because the decisions for yesterday were already made.

The Investing system runs monthly. Its next decision is at month-end. Whatever happened yesterday gets baked into the rotation then, not now. The Swing Combo has its orders sitting at predetermined levels. If a stock hits its stop, it exits. If a name in the buy zone gets cheaper, the buy-limit fills cheaper. That is the system. The Day Trading system was flat by the close, which is the rule on every day, including this one. The regime filter on the broader market is what it is, and Monday morning it will be what it is, and either we are trading or we are sitting.

None of those decisions were mine to make yesterday. They were made the day I built the systems. Yesterday I just ran them.

This is the part of systematic trading that almost nobody talks about when they advertise backtests and CAGRs and Sharpe ratios. The headline number is not what makes the system valuable. The fact that the decisions are already made is what makes the system valuable. On a day like yesterday, when discretion is the worst possible advisor in your head, the systematic trader has nothing to override. There is no impulse to wrestle. There is the plan.

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Will the systems take losses out of yesterday? Almost certainly. Some open swing positions will hit stops. Some monthly Investing names will be down meaningfully when month-end comes. If a system enters a real-time drawdown, The Drawdown Memo will go out, the way it always does.

That is already in the data. It is in the backtests I publish. The Starter System I gave away last week shows a 26 percent worst drawdown across 26 years, and the way you get to a 26 percent worst drawdown is through days like yesterday. The honest version of this work is that the drawdown is not a bug. It is the cost of the returns. You stay through it, the system keeps running, the math compounds. You quit during it, you lock in the worst of it and miss the recovery.

I will tell you what worries me much more than days like yesterday: not having a plan and getting hit by a day like yesterday. That is how retail accounts die. The system is the plan. Yesterday the plan ran. Monday it runs again.

Sunday Top 3 lands tomorrow at the usual time.

If you are running the Starter System yourself, or you are a Pro member running the full set, the message is the same.

Trust the rules you backtested. They were built for days like yesterday, not in spite of them.

Michael

Michael Nauss, CMT, CAIA, CDMS. Founder, Stats Edge Trading.