AUGUR

The core edge is structural: regime classification keeps AUGUR out of choppy, indecisive days where most retail traders get whipsawed. On trending days, trailing stops let winners run far beyond fixed targets. On range-bound days, credit spreads collect premium with ATR-buffered boundaries that historically contain price action 99.7% of the time. The combination of knowing when to trade and how to trade each regime is what drives the win rate.

Starting with a small account ($800-$1,500) means each early win is a large percentage of equity. A single $168 win on an $800 account is a 21% return. This creates an exponential ramp in the first few weeks that flattens as the account grows and position sizing stabilizes. The equity floor (no drawdown below initial capital) also prevents death spirals that would occur in real accounts, making the curve appear smoother than reality.

These backtests assume perfect fills at theoretical prices. No transaction costs, commissions, slippage, or bid-ask spread friction is modeled. No partial fills or liquidity constraints beyond the 10-contract cap. The regime thresholds were tuned with the benefit of hindsight on historical data, which introduces a degree of overfitting risk that only live trading can validate.

Backtests prove the logic is sound, but live markets introduce latency, liquidity, and regime shifts that no simulation captures perfectly. AUGUR's architecture is designed for live execution with safety rails: daily stop limits, weekly circuit breakers, kill switches, and an equity floor. The transition from backtested edge to live P&L is where systematic strategies are truly validated.