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Igor Ganapolsky
Igor Ganapolsky

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AI Trading: Day 85 - 18 Lessons Learned (January 21, 2026)

Day 85/90 - Wednesday, January 21, 2026

Today was a wake-up call. Two critical issues surfaced that could have derailed our entire trading operation. Here's what went wrong and how we're fixing it.

18 lessons learned today (6 critical, 5 high priority)

SOFI Position Blocked All Trading - Buying Power Crisis

  1. SOFI260213P00032000 (short put) was open with -$685 market value

Strategy Violation Crisis - Multiple Rogue Workflows

On Jan 21, 2026, the trading system LOST $70.13 due to executing trades that VIOLATE CLAUDE.md strategy mandate. The system bought SPY SHARES and SOFI OPTIONS when it should ONLY execute iron condors

Position Imbalance Crisis - Orphan Long Puts

Portfolio lost $329.42 (-6.59%) due to position imbalance:

SOFI Position Held Through Earnings Blackout

SOFI CSP (Feb 6 expiration) was held despite Jan 30 earnings date approaching.

CTO Failure - Stale Data Led to Misinformation

CTO (Claude) gave CEO incorrect P/L information multiple times:


Tech Stack Behind the Scenes

Our AI trading system uses:

  • Claude Opus 4.5 - Primary reasoning engine for trade decisions
  • OpenRouter - Cost-optimized LLM gateway (DeepSeek, Mistral, Kimi)
  • Vertex AI RAG - Cloud semantic search with 768D embeddings
  • Gemini 2.0 Flash - Retrieval-augmented generation
  • MCP Protocol - Standardized tool integration layer

Every lesson is stored in our RAG corpus, enabling the system to learn from past mistakes and improve continuously.

Full Tech Stack Documentation


Auto-generated from our AI Trading System's RAG knowledge base.

Follow our journey: AI Trading Journey on GitHub

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