Notes on signals, scoring and the beta
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I have had the same conversation about a dozen times now, and it always arrives at the same sentence: “Wait — so that number isn’t the stock?”
No. Not one number on TradeDM is about the stock. Every chart, every tile, every ratio is measuring one thing: how our signal did. The reason so many people are surprised by that is completely reasonable, which is why it is worth writing down properly.
The person I had in mind was 68, retired, comfortable with a browser and a spreadsheet, and completely uninterested in installing anything. If the answer to “how do I trade my signals automatically?” required opening a terminal, the answer was useless.
So I asked for something specific: a self-contained document containing everything an AI would need to interface with TradeDM and Alpaca on a client’s behalf and follow their trading instructions. One file. Hand it to an assistant; the assistant does the rest.
Grok wrote it. Then I showed that document to three other frontier AIs and asked each for its own version, adapted to its own platform.
None of them could produce one that worked.
The Trade Card is one file that turns a chat window into a trading desk. You fill in six blanks, attach it, and type “execute today’s trade card.”
The interesting thing about it is not the API calls. It is that the document has two readers who need completely different things, and only one of them is a person.
The obvious question after watching an AI place a day’s worth of trades from a file is whether TradeDM is trading your account.
It is not, and the interesting part is how it is not. The answer is not a policy or a checkbox in your settings. It is an endpoint that does not exist.
Point an AI assistant at API documentation and ask it to do something useful, and it will. It will also do it slightly differently every time, invent conventions that look reasonable, and make one or two mistakes that are obvious to anyone who knows the domain and invisible to anyone who does not.
We published a file to fix that. It is on GitHub, it is Apache-2.0, and it is a couple of hundred lines of Markdown.