AI trading agent backtest: 1,155 decisions in 77 days for $0.09, still trails buy-and-hold

nikola_mr64990 · x · 2026-09-23

A developer ran a full AI trading agent backtest: 77 days, 1,155 decisions across 3 strategies (momentum, contrarian, macro) and 5 assets (BTC/ETH/SPY/QQQ/XAU) for a total cost of $0.09 (Ling-3.0-flash-VL is free on OpenRouter), completing in 87 seconds with 1.1s per call and zero failures.

Workflow: daily investment digests were fed one at a time to Jev 1.13 via OpenRouter along with current holdings; the model output buy/sell/hold probabilities and confidence, and the program executed against real hourly Binance candles, computed NAV and reconciled.

Results were promising but not magic: momentum returned +6.71% vs +13.2% for equal-weight buy-and-hold, while the other two strategies returned −1.0% and −10.3%. The bigger win was presentation: Ling-3.0-flash-VL turned a design mock into a dynamic dashboard (NAV curve, position bars, decision feed) from a screenshot alone, then playwright frame-by-frame screenshots (390 frames) were compressed into a 13-second video summarizing 95 days of news and market action.

Original post →

More from coding & agent

coding & agent channel →