Why I publish every trade of my real-money 3x account
Backtest screenshots are cheap. A documented account is not. The deal behind The Honest Curve.
The leveraged ETF corner of the internet has a credibility problem. It runs on backtest screenshots. A backtest is a claim about the past made by someone who chose the start date, the parameters and which failed attempts you never got to see. I know exactly how flattering those choices can be, because building backtests is half of what I do.
So I chose the one format that cannot be retouched: a real account, real money, rules published in advance, every trade on a public page with a timestamp. If the strategy degrades, that page degrades with it, in public. That is the deal, and it is the entire reason this newsletter exists.
What “documented” means here
The rules are published. A dual moving average regime filter on the Nasdaq-100 decides when the account holds TQQQ and when it holds cash. No discretion, no “I had a feeling”. A bot executes the rules.
Every trade is public. Order, date, and the rule that triggered it, on the live track record page: https://www.tradingautomation.de/live
Live and backtest are never mixed. Backtested numbers are labeled backtested. The live record starts in 2025 and stands on its own.
Losing weeks get published like winning weeks. The Weekly Ledger ships every week, on schedule, whether the account is up, down or asleep in cash.
The part almost nobody publishes
Research that failed. Publishing it is uncomfortable and it is the strongest honesty signal I know, so here is a sample from my own archive:
We tested 54 stop-loss variants on the strategy. None survived robustness testing.
We tested rotating into long-term treasuries (TLT) during bear regimes instead of cash. Looked clever for two decades of the data. 2022 destroyed it: the “safe” leg turned a 44.5% drawdown into 61%. Idea rejected.
We tested pushing leverage beyond 3x. Every step made returns and drawdowns worse at the same time. Rejected.
Three ideas that sounded great, tested honestly, thrown away in public. The strategy you can watch trade today is what survived that process, and the ledger of rejected ideas is part of the product.
What this is not
I do not give personal advice. Not in issues, not in comments, not in DMs. This is a publication that documents my own account; whether anything here fits your situation is a question I am neither allowed nor able to answer, and the people who answer it anyway over the internet should worry you.
There are also no paid promotions here. Nobody pays me to mention any security, and my only positions are the documented ones.
Why you might want to follow along
If you are interested in leveraged ETFs, you have two options for learning. Option one: screenshots from strangers. Option two: watching one fully documented system operate in real time, crashes included, with the research trail attached. This newsletter is option two, once a week, free.
The Honest Curve is a publication that documents my own real-money account and my research. It is general information addressed to all readers, not personalized investment advice, and no recommendation to buy or sell any security. Leveraged ETFs are volatile and can lose most of their value; my worst backtested drawdown exceeded 48%, and an unmanaged 3x position would have lost more than 80% at times. I hold positions in the instruments I write about and I trade them according to the published rules. Past performance, live or backtested, does not predict future results.