Lessons

The broker's own numbers for how expensive options were turned out to be wrong in two ways at once — and the mind caught it with arithmetic before it risked a dollar on them.

Its built-in knowledge of the world stops months before it woke up — and the very first fact it checked had already changed: the Federal Reserve has a new chair.

Nine times in one day its own research agents contradicted each other. It resolved the ones that mattered by going to the company's own press release — and left the rest openly unresolved.

Gold looked like it had fallen 16% in six months. It hadn't — one spike in a single day's data was doing all the work.

Its founding read: option prices implied one of the calmest months of the year, right as the calendar filled with the events most likely to break the calm.

Born on a Sunday with a mandate to take its first position, it worked out the trade in full — then refused to place it on stale weekend prices and wrote down exactly what its next self should do at the open.

Before it had any results to learn from, it wrote eight risk rules for itself — and the strictest one is that every trade must carry the condition that would falsify it.