Paper trading, not investment advice. Every account and book on these pages trades paper money: the Alpaca paper accounts DAILY ($1,000,000 from Sep 30, 2026), INTRA1 ($100,000 from Sep 30, 2026) and INTRA2 ($100,000 from Sep 30, 2026); the simulated books SIM-TT ($100,000 from Sep 29, 2026), SIM-V2B ($100,000 from Sep 28, 2026) and SIM-V2B-TOM ($100,000 from Sep 28, 2026), filled at the official close; and market-analysis's ledgers, one contract per position against a $100,000 reporting equity. No real money is at stake. Positions, trades and P&L are published the same day, as the engines record them, with each number's source and cost model labelled. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security, and nothing is tailored to you. Each strategy is a pre-registered experiment, read once on a date or at a trade count fixed in advance; until then its record says little either way. I may hold or have held positions in securities shown here. Markets can and do lose money.

Trade

QQQ · Noise area

Opened Nov 3, 2026, closed Nov 3, 2026, in INTRA2.

The trade

Account: INTRA2
Strategy: Noise area
Book: noise
Symbol: QQQ
Asset class: equity
Side: long
Exposure: long
Status: closed
Opened: Nov 3, 2026
Closed: Nov 3, 2026
Quantity: 42
Entry price: 688.102857
Exit price: 686.212381
Exit by: signal
Book value at entry: $47,361.82

Record Trade journal

Cost model

Alpaca paper fills, with no commission; Alpaca's SEC and CAT fees, charged by the day, are left out. Commission is estimated at $0.007 a share a side, the rate at the owner's own broker: the net P&L is the P&L less it; the P&L, the return, the P&L in basis points of the book and the R multiple are before it. The rule book's day return is the rule's own replay on SIP bars, after the research's own costs: $0.0035 a share a side in commission for the noise area and $0.007 for the other rules, and a cent a share of slippage on every fill except a resting limit order's and the noise area's exit at the close.

Result

Entry value: $28,900.32
Exit value: $28,820.92
P&L: −$79.40
Dividends: —
P&L with dividends: —
Costs: $0.59
Net P&L: −$79.99
Return: −0.27%
Of the book: −16.8 bp
R multiple: —
Held: 29.9 minutes

Entry and exit

Role	Date	At (ET)	Side	Qty	Asked	Price	Rule's price	Close	Slippage	Against the close	How	Why	The rule's numbers
entry	Nov 3, 2026	11:00 ET	buy	42	42	688.102857	688.10	—	+0.0 bp	—	—	long in: 688.10 > band 687.69	8 trigger numbers at 11:00 lb 677.8257769223491 px 688.1 ub 687.6901346614618 pos 1 vwap 685.550378708646 reason long in: 688.10 > band 687.69 symbol QQQ 1 number fills 1
exit	Nov 3, 2026	11:30 ET	sell	42	42	686.212381	686.39	—	+2.6 bp	—	signal	long out: 686.39 < max(band 688.43, VWAP 685.91)	8 trigger numbers at 11:30 lb 677.0931711032944 px 686.39 ub 688.4263115964034 pos 0 vwap 685.9109152321997 reason long out: 686.39 < max(band 688.43, VWAP 685.91) symbol QQQ 1 number fills 1

Orders

Role	Side	Kind	Qty	Limit	Model price	Status	Filled	Average	Sent (ET)	Filled (ET)
entry	buy	market	42	—	688.10	filled	42	688.102857	11:00 ET	11:00 ET
exit	sell	market	42	—	686.39	filled	42	686.212381	11:30 ET	11:30 ET

Path while held

Span: 31 minutes
High: 688.69
Low: 685.64
Best point (MFE): +0.09%
Worst point (MAE): −0.36%
Bars from: SIP 1-minute bars

The rule's own trade

The rule replayed on its own bars, beside the account's fills.

Matched the account: yes
Entry: 688.0794 at 11:00 ET
Exit: 686.42 at 11:30 ET
Exit by: —
The rule's day: −0.2%
The rule's trades that day: 4

side: 1
symbol: QQQ
exit_min: 690
entry_min: 660

Notes

the noise-area rule on SPY and QQQ: checks on the half hour 10:00-15:30, out at the close

inputs

open.at: 10:00:05
leverage: 1.223073762004712
open.note: QQQ: open 684.41, previous close 681.09, leverage 1.22, 42 shares a leg
open.open: 684.41
open.event: open
prev_close: 681.09
open.shares: 42
open.symbol: QQQ
sigma_10:00: 0.0020423625940685125
open.leverage: 1.223073762004712
open.prev_close: 681.09