Then I opened the lockbox
April 14 through August 18, 2026. Four months of real market history that neither agent had ever been allowed to see, replayed against the frozen rules with nothing left to tune.
The Moderna book returned 62.97%. Over those same four months the S&P returned 11.29%, and ARKG, the biotech ETF, returned 50.10%.
It did that with a median of 15.44% of the account actually spent, against benchmarks that are 96% invested every day by construction.
What that window does not contain is the news. The readout landed August 19, the day after the lockbox closed. So 62.97% does not measure the Moderna trade, it measures whether the rules survive four months they were never shown. I also froze the twenty names in August knowing how that stretch had gone, and that hindsight is in the name list. The rules got tested. The thesis is the forward bet, and it starts now.
The names were right, and that is most of the story. Those same twenty tickers held as ordinary stock, equal weight, no options and no ranking, returned 39.43% over the lockbox against the S&P's 11.29%. The sector carried it. That is the gold dashed line above.
ARKG caught the same wave, which is the honest part: a dedicated biotech ETF did 50.10% on those four months, so the sector was the tide, not my stock picking. The distance from there to 62.97% is step 5. It owned the move in long-dated calls instead of shares, and it did that on a sixth of the capital.
The semis book did the same thing on the silicon side, over its own window. Each campaign froze its holdout before it started, so the semis lockbox runs April 17 to August 23 rather than April 14 to August 18. +44.43% against SMH's +21.09%, and the same seven names held as ordinary stock returned 20.35%. So the book more than doubled both of them, and it did that at 14.70% deployed against their 96%. Twice the return on a seventh of the capital at risk.
- Beat ARKG by 12.9 points and SPY by 51.7
- Did it with 15.44% of the account spent, against 96% for both
- All four graded years positive, worst +20.75%
- Better return per unit of downside risk than SPY (Sortino 4.25 against 3.50)
- 17 of 20 names traded, so no single-name lottery
- ARKG earned its return more smoothly (Sortino 5.16 against 4.25)
- Worst peak-to-trough fall was 24.88%, against ARKG's 13.48%
- Universe was picked in August 2026, so hindsight is in it
- Replayed on historical chains, not live fills
I did not trust the first live design, so I rebuilt it.
August 26 update: on August 24 I funded one $13,500 Public account with two long-call sleeves. Biotech waited on XBI. Semiconductors waited on SMH. The account bought one QGEN call, then the sector gates kept the rest of the book quiet.
I hated the explanation because it did not match the thesis. ANET is not SMH. MRNA is not XBI. Diagnostics, sequencing infrastructure, life-science tools, compute, networking and semiconductor equipment do not share one demand mechanism just because an ETF provider puts them in adjacent boxes.
So I reopened the entire design. Entry rules, exits, option structure, sizing, deployment and portfolio construction were all allowed to change. I did not give MRNA or ANET a special allocation. I did not require five profitable folds out of five. I required a candidate that was executable at the account's actual $13,500, interpretable at the order level and robust across genuinely separate market windows.
The first combined portfolio was still two independent sector queues. Lowering their exposure caps made drawdown worse because whichever queue evaluated first could crowd out the others. The final research candidate uses one central allocator. The thesis buckets explain why a company belongs. They do not own separate cash queues.
The final universe contains 26 companies across eight business mechanisms:
Computational discovery RXRX SDGR
Precision diagnostics ADPT GH NTRA VCYT
Measurement infrastructure ILMN TWST QGEN TXG PACB
Life-science tools TMO DHR A TECH
AI compute NVDA AVGO MRVL
Manufacturing and equipment TSM AMAT LRCX
Networking ANET
Every company has to pass its own 100-day trend and 63-day momentum checks. One allocator ranks the eligible names by 126-day return and weights them by 63-day return divided by 63-day volatility. There is no XBI gate. There is no SMH gate. Every holding is a single long call, so the cash account never depends on spread approval or a short option leg.
| OOS window | Return | Sortino | Max DD | Median deployed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov. 2022 to Jul. 2023 | +42.87% | 3.26 | 15.01% | 28.30% |
| Jul. 2023 to Mar. 2024 | +25.00% | 1.99 | 15.33% | 14.17% |
| Mar. 2024 to Dec. 2024 | -2.22% | -0.31 | 21.64% | 19.42% |
| Dec. 2024 to Aug. 2025 | +9.95% | 0.62 | 22.47% | 22.76% |
| Aug. 2025 to Apr. 2026 | +65.40% | 5.61 | 8.09% | 25.38% |
The pass condition was never five profitable folds. The result was four of five, a +25.00% median OOS return, 1.99 median OOS Sortino and 22.47% worst OOS drawdown. The losing fold was -2.22%. It stayed in the table because deleting the inconvenient year would make this exercise pointless.
The full $13,500 event replay finished at $47,570.44 with a 2.02 Sortino and 496 option fills after default option fees. Marked option exposure reached 62.78% even though the entry gate was lower. That is not a contradiction: the gate blocks another buying cycle; it does not force-sell calls that appreciate. The strategy can still spend a year and a half underwater. That is the risk profile.
The separate-bucket version was not useless. It produced four profitable folds out of five and a 2.54 median Sortino. It lost the construction decision because worst OOS drawdown reached 33.43%. Cutting its aggregate gate from 48% to 40% or 32% made the worst drawdown worse, not better. The central allocator reduced it to 22.47%.
ANET was the best gross cash-flow contributor in the weak separate-bucket fold, at about +$1,867. It still was not affordable in the current executable snapshot: one audited long-dated contract cost about $2,225 against an $810 per-company budget. The strategy rejected it instead of silently making ANET a 16% bet.
On August 26 I preserved the rejected six-strategy, sector-gated implementation in a separate paper portfolio, then replaced the live Public account's strategy set with an exact copy of the validated 29-strategy object: one 26-company allocator, two global option exits and 26 company-specific exits. The brokerage account, its history and the existing QGEN December 2027 $45 call were preserved. Automatic approval remains off at both the portfolio and strategy level.
A current-book reconciliation resolved the account at $13,335.02. Its target was the same single QGEN contract already held. It produced zero orders, $0 estimated cost and no wash-sale flags. QGEN remains in the thesis universe, and none of its exit conditions fired, so the redesign did not force a sale or create a duplicate order.
The two original Grok Bot books remain public paper reproductions of the results earlier in this article: Moderna Trading Bot: Original Grok Paper and SemiConductor Trading: Original Grok Paper. They are historical controls. They are not the final $13,500 design.
| Portfolio | Capital | Structure | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Public Portfolio Challenge: Semis + Biotech | $13,500 | 26-name allocator plus 28 exits | Live · deployed August 26 |
| Moderna Trading Bot: Original Grok Paper | $5,500 | Original Grok biotech rules | Paper · simulated |
| SemiConductor Trading: Original Grok Paper | $8,000 | Original Grok debit spreads | Paper · simulated |
The exact candidate, fold table, event audit, engine defects and deployment boundary are in the final Episode 11 redesign record. The earlier combined-book addendum stays public because it documents the design I rejected.
Concluding thoughts
I expected to write the post where the agent produces a beautiful backtest that falls apart the second you hold out a window. That is what the LinkedIn posts never show you, because they never hold one out.
Instead, Grok Bot produced two useful starting books and a pair of sealed historical results. Then the funded implementation exposed a design problem the headline results could not answer: how should one small cash account allocate across companies whose theses are related but not interchangeable?
The answer was not a biotech switch, a semiconductor switch or a privileged MRNA and ANET core. It was one allocator that lets each company qualify on its own evidence, then makes every candidate compete for the same scarce options budget.
The measurement still has limits. I selected the 26-company universe with August 2026 knowledge. The replay uses historical option chains rather than future live fills. The worst full-period drawdown was 29.79%, and the longest underwater stretch was 573 days. Four profitable folds out of five is evidence, not certainty.
Every campaign log, fold table and failed parameterization is in the Public Portfolio Challenge repo. The rejected sector-gated design stays in the history next to the selected one. A track record containing only winners is a marketing document.
The redesign is now the live strategy set. QGEN remains the only position, the deployment reconciliation required no orders and all future orders still require manual approval. Episode 12 is the forward test: whether this company-level allocator can turn a strong thesis into disciplined exposure without letting sector ETFs veto the names I actually chose.
Moderna's algorithm ranks 34 neoantigens out of hundreds and puts them in a syringe. I audited eight thesis buckets, 26 companies and 496 simulated option fills before deciding what the account should do next.
Same math. Considerably lower stakes.
NexusTrade runs the same engine behind every number above, over MCP, a Python SDK, or the browser. Walk-forward certification, options backtesting on real chains, paper and live deploys. Free to start, no code required.
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