Ross Cameron's published rules encode cleanly into a machine — and priced faithfully at 1-minute resolution, on survivorship-free data with real costs, they have no positive expectancy. The edge, if it exists, lives in a layer the published rules don't capture.
Granted, not re-audited: that Ross Cameron makes money trading — taken at face value from his own published, broker-verified statements. That was never the question.
Tested: only whether his published rules, handed to a machine, reproduce that result. They don't. The violinist is real; the sheet music doesn't reproduce the performance.
Gate 1 — the claim in writing: we encoded the published momentum day-trading rules; the large majority of the rule set mechanizes cleanly. Gate 2 — real data: survivorship-free, point-in-time US equity data — including the tickers that later died. Gate 3 — real costs: commissions, slippage, and honest fills at 1-minute resolution. Gate 4 — pre-registered pass/fail: written down before results. Gate 5 — reopen bounty: published below.
| Figure | What it is | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 41 days, 0 trades, equity flat at $99,802.50 | The live clone on a real-time feed (paper account) traded nothing for its entire run | Real, but inconclusive on profitability — zero trades is zero P&L signal. We use it as the hook, never as the verdict. |
| −$20,584.83 net · profit factor 0.632 · 34 of 37 trades stopped out | The faithful rebuild of the best-documented entry pattern, priced over years of honest data | MEASURED — the evidence seat of the verdict |
| 0 for 12 · profit factor 0.000 | The twelve setups the rules themselves call textbook — the faithful robot lost all twelve | MEASURED |
| 99.95% of gross profit = one lucky all-day hold | What little the backtest made came from a single position held all day — not breakout edge | MEASURED |
| A second detector we built produced this scarier number — and failed our own fidelity audit (it dropped rule components and hardened one filter to always-pass) | EXCLUDED — our artifact, not his edge. It appears nowhere in the episode or this verdict. Publishing a number your own audit killed is the exact sin this channel exists to expose. |
It does not claim Ross Cameron doesn't trade profitably (granted above). It does not claim the 41-day zero was "discipline" — zero trades supports no such story, in either direction. It does not claim no human can trade this style — only that the published rules, executed mechanically at the resolution a machine can see, don't carry the edge.
Pre-registered before publication: (1) instruments that can see below the one-minute bar, tested under the identical honest-friction floor; (2) a clean-label re-run of the faithful detector; (3) a real scanner-fed ticker universe replacing hand-labelled setups. If any of these clears the floor, the update ships here first.