Maya's Trading Journal

Every rule Maya runs has been tested against seven years and 3,308 trades of real market data, including four separate double-digit drawdowns. This article walks through what those drawdowns actually looked like while they were happening, including two that turned into the best years on record, and makes the case for checking the backtest yourself instead of trusting fear when the account is red.

If You Can't Backtest It, You Don't Have a Strategy Why every rule Maya runs has already been tested against seven years of real market data, and what that means for you the next time your account is in a drawdown. If you're reading this while your Maya account is down and hasn't moved in the right direction for a few weeks, this article is for you specifically. Not for someone shopping around for a trading system.

Why Maya Trades Straight Through FOMC, CPI, and PPI

Why Maya Trades Straight Through FOMC, CPI, and PPI What ten years of data said about sitting out the big macro days, and why it surprised us. Ask almost any options trader what to do on a Fed decision day and you will hear the same advice: stand aside. Wait for the dust to settle. Do not let a CPI print or a press conference blow up your book. It feels like common sense, and common sense is exactly the kind of thing we test before we trust it.

Markets are recovering. When does Maya start trading again?

Maya has been in Cautious / Paused stance for about a week now, and a few of you have asked what she's waiting for. Fair question. Here's the full picture. What Maya has been doing while markets sold off Maya wasn't sitting still during the selloff. She was actively cutting losers early before they could turn into bigger losses. That's not lucky timing. That's the exit system working exactly as designed. When a trade hits a stop, Maya closes it.

Most YouTube indicators promise 90% win rates on a three-month backtest. A real trading system has to answer a completely different set of questions before a single trade opens: what is the market regime right now, how stressed is the environment, how much capital should actually be deployed, and what triggers the exit when things go wrong. Here is the difference, and why it matters more than any signal.

That TradingView Indicator Is Not a Trading System An arrow on a chart answers one question. A real trading system answers all of them, before you ever open a position. There's a formula that has completely taken over YouTube's financial content. Someone pulls up a chart, drops an indicator on it, and shows you 8 trades from the last three months where the arrows pointed up right before the stock moved higher. "90% win rate," the title says.

Win rate gets all the attention. Risk of ruin is what actually determines whether you're still in the game three years from now. We walk through the coin toss that makes it click, the formula traders ignore, and what three live accounts of different sizes taught us during the worst 60-day grind the Nasdaq has seen in years.

Risk of Ruin: The One Number That Determines Whether You're Still Trading in Year 5 It's not about finding better trades. It's about surviving long enough for your edge to work. When I was first learning to trade, I was obsessed with win rate. If I could just get my win rate above 60%, I figured everything else would take care of itself. More wins than losses, simple math. What could go wrong? A lot, it turns out.