Thirteen years is a long time to devote to a problem. In the world of trading, where most systems appear and disappear within months, the duration alone says something.
The journey began not with the search for "signals," but with the observation of behavior. How does the market react when news comes out? How does the crowd behave when fear or greed prevails? The market, in this view, is a mirror of mass psychology — and mass psychology has recurring patterns.
Over the years, the code became simpler, not more complex. This is counter to most people's instinct. The tendency is to add rules, filters, exceptions. But real maturity came through subtraction — through trusting a clean, robust pattern instead of constantly "improving" it.
The hardest part was not technical. It was human. Learning not to interfere. Letting the system work through the bad periods without "fixing" it out of panic. The transition from the role of creator to the role of observer.
Today, after 15+ years of historical testing and 2+ years of live operation, the goal is not "inspiration" — it is discipline, periodic review and silence. The real optimization, in the end, was not in the code. It was in the human behind it.