Updates - BasisPoint

Last updated 9 Nov 2026

7 weekly notes, newest first. The latest is open.

4 Nov 2026 – 9 Nov 2026Latest
Clearer explanations, a strategy vault and a faster interface
- Decision questions now show the chart, headlines and alternatives before you answer Statistics in your bot →
- News readings list the articles behind them, each marked for tone
- New Vault holds every version of a strategy, with compare and switch in one place
- Strategy Lab rebuilt into four screens, with a build form that guides valid choices Strategy Lab →
- Holdings can include single shares, funds or whole industries, across more markets Markets and currencies →
- Faster loading, a refresh button in the menus, and plain-language messages during restarts
Most of the week went into showing the reference bot's reasoning in plain view. Every decision question now opens with its context first - the chart, the headlines around it and how the pick compared with the alternatives - and the news articles behind each reading are listed with the tone the bot read into them, so a claim about sentiment can be checked against the actual headlines. Each sale now states where its money goes and why, and every rule in a decision is a button that opens the figures for that case.
Strategies became easier to manage. A new Vault keeps every version of a strategy together, lets a few of them practise alongside the bot, and makes comparing and switching a short job rather than a rebuild. The Strategy Lab was split into four clear screens - practising, building your own, portfolio protection, and tools and terms - and the build form now offers only the choices that earlier answers allow, stopping at the step with the problem instead of failing at the end. Settings was reorganised along the same lines, and strategies named for testing are kept in their own folder so they are never mistaken for recommendations.
The mix itself opens up: holdings can now include individual shares, a single fund or a whole industry, and markets beyond the United States are supported, with fee profiles for each exchange. Confidence figures are now shown as realistic chances rather than near-certainties, a missing signal counts as neutral instead of distorting a decision, and the influence of each source is explained by its own record.
Under the surface, pages load faster, company figures are collected in a background job so a decision never waits on an outside data source, and a restart now explains itself in words instead of a browser error. Research continued on possible new signal sources - insider filings, legislator disclosures and analysts' estimate changes - each measured against a fair comparison before it is allowed any say.
26 Oct 2026 – 28 Oct 2026
A clearer interface, a strategy designer, and broker connections
- Home redesigned with number tiles and a "Live now" view of current activity.
- New "Design a strategy" form in the Strategy Lab, with a ten-year simulated test on the same screen. Strategy Lab →
This week focused on making the reference bot easier to read at a glance. Home now shows compact number tiles instead of repeated cards, a "Live now" view shows what the bot is working on, and long secondary tables fold away until you want them. Pages across the bot were brought to a single design standard, trade tables stack neatly on phones, and a short welcome tour introduces each bot.
The Strategy Lab gained a "Design a strategy" step-by-step form. You can start from a ready-made idea or build your own by choosing sectors, markets, companies, a picking rule, sizing, timing, a market guard, a breaker and stops, then run a ten-year simulated test on the same screen and save it to run in the Lab. A saved strategy appears in Backtesting, and a "Refine in the Strategy Lab" link reopens it in the form.
Planning views were extended with a timeline from today out to ten years and a "Next changes" view that shows how likely each change is across simulated months, with rows marked as alternatives. A new Weights view explains the share given to each part and signal source using the plan's own numbers, and a "How it's going" briefing was added to the current plan.
Several fixes landed too: charts now shade closed-market periods grey with a tooltip, keeping the red marker for times the bot was offline; short restarts no longer raise a false "bot was off" card; a simulation error caused by duplicate dates was resolved; and a formatting mistake that could stop the app from loading was fixed, with a check added to catch that class of problem.
23 Oct 2026 – 25 Oct 2026
A simpler app, clearer test verdicts and new support tools
- Six clear places in the app, with quick jump and shortcut buttons; old links still work
- New website look: Light/Dark switch, site typeface, logo and artwork behind each place
The bot app has been reorganised around six places instead of fifteen separate pages: Home, Portfolio, Plan, Results, Test and Settings. Each place has a single row of sections, a status pill, a quick jump box (Ctrl+K) and shortcut buttons on Home. Old page addresses still work, so saved links are unaffected.
The app now matches the main website: white by default with a Light/Dark switch, the site's typeface and logo, pill buttons and a large faint artwork behind each place, with cards and number tiles sitting over it. The sign-in page uses the same look, and the app can be installed to a device like a normal app.
Every backtest now ends with a plain verdict - Signal, Unclear or Mostly noise - along with a score and a one-line result for each check, shown at the top of the Backtesting place. A luck check acts as the gate, and a new check looks for stretches that may simply reflect a fortunate run.
Rule-based sales now explain themselves in words rather than showing a confidence number, naming the reason such as an underperformance exit, the end of a holding period or a trim back to target. An optional sell gate can require a set share of signals to agree before a rule-based sale goes ahead; it is off by default and switched on for the reference bot.
12 Oct 2026 – 15 Oct 2026
Hosted bots get sign-in, backups and a daily health check
- Every hosted client bot now requires a sign-in before anything responds.
- One command to set up, pause, resume, update or remove a bot, each on its own address.
Most of this week went into the setup that lets each client run their own bot safely. Every hosted bot now sits behind a sign-in screen, and we rehearsed this end to end: pages, data requests, files and live updates all refuse to respond without a valid session. A single command now handles setting up, pausing, resuming, updating or removing a bot, and each client gets their own web address. Deployments restart cleanly and roll back if something goes wrong, and there is a simple Actions page so a bot can be paused from a phone.
We also tightened the safety net around that. Hosted client data is now included in the nightly encrypted offsite backup, with a restore check to confirm the backup is actually usable. A daily watch confirms every hosted bot is answering, and sends an email if one does not. A flaw in the backup's archive check was caught by a dry run and fixed.
On the reference bot itself, we added a separate owner configuration with its own mix of themes alongside the unchanged product default. The bot's allocation now leans on how each part is doing: weaker areas shrink back toward the index core and then to cash, while the core itself stays steady. Names that look stretched are not bought fresh, and neither are names where the underlying signals mostly disagree with each other. Existing holdings are left alone by that rule.
Finally, there is a clearer exit path. A holding whose signals turn weak enough can now be sold at the next planning run, even if it has not been held for the usual minimum period, and the guard against buying into names trading near their highs was made stricter.
6 Oct 2026 – 10 Oct 2026
Strategy Lab, More Broker Options and Steadier Operations
- Strategy Lab: build and try strategies in a sandbox, off by default Strategy Lab →
- Indicator library, signal combinations, sizing methods and exit rules
The main piece of work this week is the Strategy Lab: a sandbox inside the reference bot where a strategy can be put together from building blocks and tried out before it goes anywhere near a live setup. It now includes a library of common market indicators, ways to combine signals, methods for deciding position size, exit rules such as stops and trailing stops, and a catalogue of ready-made example strategies. Options and futures are supported as study tools, with calculators for pricing, margin and contract details. Everything is explained in a built-in glossary, with a check that no term is left undefined. The Lab is switched off by default and can be turned on from its own tab.
The Lab also has a practice account that mirrors the mechanics of real trading, including short positions, borrowing limits, margin calls and settlement, plus a daily run that produces simulated orders and remembers its state between runs. Price and economic data are refreshed before each evening run, and a warning appears if the data looks out of date. Alerts can be sent when a margin call or a safety breaker is triggered.
The bot can now work with a wider range of markets and reporting currencies, and the broker connection layer was reworked so that different brokers can be plugged in. Practice connections for Trading 212 and Alpaca now sit alongside Interactive Brokers, with shared pacing and careful retry behaviour. Settings for funds, themes, regions, risk rules and rebalancing schedules can be carried across into a client's own configuration.
On the operations side, there is a health watchdog that reports a problem once and again on recovery, one-command deployment with backup and rollback, nightly backups stored off-site with a restore check, and clearer loading and retry states across the interface. A quality pass fixed several issues, including hand-entered options, futures and share positions that were not being priced or expired correctly.
28 Sept 2026 – 3 Oct 2026
Backtesting arrives: build, test and compare strategies in plain words
- New Backtesting page: describe a strategy in plain words and replay it over long historical data. Backtesting →
- "Real, or luck?" checks presented as plain questions, one strategy at a time.
The main piece of work this week was a new backtesting area in the app, found under More > Backtesting. It lets you describe a strategy in plain language, replay it against long-running historical data, and keep a record of the versions you try. A companion set of checks asks, in ordinary questions, whether an outcome looks like a genuine effect of the rules or simply chance.
We also made historical comparisons fairer. Projections now re-weight across the holdings that actually existed at the time rather than shortening the window, and dollar-priced holdings keep a full five-year history by using exchange rates over the same period. The replay of the reference bot's own rules now includes the stricter checks we use elsewhere, such as counting fees properly and allowing for information arriving a day late.
One strategy experiment combining a broad index fund with a smaller leveraged portion was prepared and then withdrawn before it was ever used in paper trading, at the owner's decision. The reference bot returned to its diversified settings.
Elsewhere, every add-on in the bot can now be switched on or off individually, with drift alerts, a weekly summary and a plainly worded scorecard. A new glossary defines every term used across the app and links from headings, tables and forms, and a split view lets you keep up to four pages open side by side.
23 Sept 2026 – 28 Sept 2026
A clearer reference bot: simpler pages, safer checks and daily updates
- Simpler site: Summary and Long term pages, full glossary, and an Ask panel for questions.
- Every chart now supports time ranges, zoom, pan, hover readouts and buy/sell markers. Statistics in your bot →
This week the reference trading bot, which runs entirely in paper trading, was rebuilt around a much simpler layout. The main view is now a short Summary page plus a Long term page, with a glossary entry for every term used and an Ask panel that can read what is on screen and answer questions in plain words.
Charts were overhauled across the board. Every chart now has the same time range buttons, supports panning and zooming, shows readouts on hover, marks buy and sell points, and can switch between showing amounts or percentages. Periods when the bot was not running are shaded so gaps are obvious rather than hidden, and dates and times can be shown in either of two time zones.
The holding plan setup was widened to include a broader mix of fund types, with monthly rebalancing, pausable short plans and a scheduled daily plan on trading days. Several safeguards were tightened: approval requests can be practised with a labelled test plan that can never trade, the minimum holding time now only protects positions bought for their own plan, and buying logic was fixed so a plan cannot commit more than the cash available.
A number of bugs were also closed, including a first check-up that kept postponing itself on a new account, a chart that only loaded if another page was opened first, and conversion handling that did not fully account for charges. Weekly notes and daily summaries are now sent out automatically, and updates to this site are signed so their origin can be verified.

Any percentages shown are internal development measurements. Reflects internal paper-trading development metrics, not investment performance or a guarantee of future results.

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What changed, week by week

Clearer explanations, a strategy vault and a faster interface

A clearer interface, a strategy designer, and broker connections

A simpler app, clearer test verdicts and new support tools

Hosted bots get sign-in, backups and a daily health check

Strategy Lab, More Broker Options and Steadier Operations

Backtesting arrives: build, test and compare strategies in plain words

A clearer reference bot: simpler pages, safer checks and daily updates