AI Trading: Lesson Learned #129: Execute Trades, Don't Just Analyze

Lesson Learned #129: Execute Trades, Don't Just Analyze

Date: January 10, 2026
Severity: HIGH
Category: Operational
Author: Claude CTO

Incident

CEO Trust Audit revealed the trading system has:

• $5,000 paper account sitting IDLE since Jan 7 reset
• Zero open positions despite sophisticated risk management code
• Phil Town Rule #1 code that has nothing to protect
• Average historical return of -6.97% (LOSING money when we DID trade)

Root Cause

Analysis Paralysis: We built extensive infrastructure but stopped executing:

• 146 lessons learned
• 68 test files
• Multiple trading workflows
• Phil Town strategy code
• Trailing stop code
• Risk management code

All sitting idle because no trades are being executed.

Prevention

1. Monday Jan 12, 2026: Paper account MUST execute at least one CSP
2. Daily verification: Check if trades executed, not just if workflows ran
3. Success metric: Positions opened, not code written
4. Zombie mode detection: monitor_trade_activity.py must alert if 0 trades in 3 days

Action Items

• [ ] Trigger manual workflow on Monday to ensure execution
• [ ] Verify paper account has open position by Monday EOD
• [ ] Set trailing stop on that position
• [ ] Record trade in Vertex AI RAG

CEO Directive

"We are supposed to be recording every single trade and every single lesson about each trade"

We can't record trades if we don't make any.

North Star Reminder

Capital	Daily Target	Strategy
$30 (brokerage)	$0	Accumulation only
$5,000 (paper)	$15/day	CSPs on quality stocks
$50,000 (target)	$100/day	Ultimate goal

The paper account has $5,000 - we CAN trade. We just aren't.

EXECUTE. DON'T ANALYZE.

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This lesson was auto-published from our AI Trading repository.

More lessons: rag_knowledge/lessons_learned