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Trade $50 of real money for a week and report honestly

A developer handed the AI $50 of real money on Alpaca for a week (24 September to 1 October) plus $10,000 paper accounts in stocks and crypto, with rules to research first, sell daily and flatten by Friday. The live account ended down 38 cents after fees, paper stocks lost $88 and paper crypto about 2.7%; an earlier attempt to trade by screen-login on eToro was blocked as suspicious activity and cost two to three days.

This only partly worked. Read what happened before you try it.

How it works

  1. Owner first tries eToro by screen login; the platform blocks the bot session as suspicious
  2. Owner switches to Alpaca API
  3. Sets rules: research first, sell daily, flat by Friday, stop-losses about 1% below buy
  4. Bot trades SPY live and index funds and BTC/ETH on paper
  5. Weekly results: live -$0.38, paper stocks -$88, paper crypto about -2.7%
  6. Bot adds a Friday self-review session to itself

Why it’s worth knowing

The agent traded real money for a week and its own post-mortem blamed its decisions, not the market.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on dev.to. See the original ↗

Upgraded prompt

A ready-to-use prompt for this idea, built from research on what makes AI agents do the job right: who the AI should be, the exact steps, and a check to make sure it was done the way you wanted.

1Who the AI should be
2The prompt, with the steps
3The check when it’s done
Upgraded prompts are coming soon.

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Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.