The first ninety days are a measurement.
A desk with no live record should not be promising a return. It should be promising a process with numbers attached, published whether or not they flatter it. That is what December starts.
What happens, and when.
Every date below is a commitment the desk can keep on its own. None of them depends on capital arriving, which is the point: the track record starts before anyone is asked for anything.
Paper day, then a clean account
A full session on delayed data to prove connectivity, order construction and the flatten. Not a performance test — a plumbing test. Then the Tradier Pro account is funded and the books are pointed at it.
Live at one contract
Five books, one contract per signal, full bracket on every entry. No scaling, no discretion, no exceptions for a high-conviction setup.
First live month
Every fill reconciled against the resting-limit assumption nightly. The output is a slippage number per book, in cents, not a profit claim.
First honest report
Broker statements, replay comparison, and a written list of where the model was wrong. This is the document a future investor actually needs.
Section 475 election
Filed with the 2026 return, effective 1 January 2027. December 2026 is the only month of wash-sale exposure — a deferral, not a tax.
Scale, hold, or stop
Decided against the gates below, not against the P&L. A book that misses its gate is suspended regardless of how much it made.
The gates, set before launch
Written down now so they cannot be moved after the fact. Each is measured per book, over a minimum of 100 live trades.
If resting limits fill materially worse than assumed, the desk does not have a smaller edge — it has no edge. The adverse case loses $70,717 across the same 9,251 signals. A 90% fill rate is not a formality; it is the difference between those two worlds.
Where $20,000 goes.
Formation is not trading capital, and trading capital is not a runway. The split below keeps the contingency untouched: it is held, not spent, because the first quarter exists to find out whether the assumption holds.
| Use of funds | Amount | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Trading capital — Tradier, LLC name | $18,000 | 90.0% |
| Formation, trademark, DBA | $975 | 4.9% |
| Domain and business email | $50 | 0.3% |
| Tradier Pro, 12 months | $120 | 0.6% |
| Contingency — held, not spent | $855 | 4.3% |
| Total | $20,000 | 100% |
$18,000 against a $14,101 floor
Coverage is 1.28× — the account can carry every book's worst concurrent premium and its worst drawdown at the same time, with $3,899 left over. That surplus is the buffer for the one thing the replay cannot tell you: whether live fills arrive when the model says they do.
The $10,000 version
A starter desk puts $8,000 to work across the three smallest floors — SIGMA-S, SIGMA-Q and WICK — at 1.40× coverage and a modelled $3,773 a month. It is a smaller version of the same desk, not a different one, and it steps up to the full five at roughly five months of half-rate performance.
Three cases, and none of them is a promise.
The backtest case is the replay rate. The base case is half of it — the discount a reasonable reader applies to a hypothetical number. The stress case is a quarter of it. All three assume the $18,000 stays in the account and no capital is added.
| Case | Net / month | 12 months | 24 months | 36 months |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Backtest — the replay rate | $7,426 | $107,112 | $196,224 | $285,336 |
| Base — half the replay rate | $3,713 | $62,556 | $107,112 | $151,668 |
| Stress — a quarter of the replay rate | $1,857 | $40,284 | $62,568 | $84,852 |
Compounded from $18,000, net of Tradier fees, gross of tax and of the founder's time. The stress case still survives; the adverse-fill case does not, which is why it is shown separately on the framework page. Hypothetical in all three columns.
Base case. A 41% annual return on the deployed capital is a number that should invite scepticism, not close the conversation.
Sum of the five books' worst drawdowns, treated as if they arrive together. In practice they do not, which is what diversification buys.
At the base case the desk recovers its entire $975 formation cost in a bit over three weeks of trading. At the stress case, about seven.
The record comes first.
Nothing on this site is for sale. When there is a live record worth reading, the structure changes at $1.5M of firm commitments — and not a dollar before.