That's sort of the secret sauce. But, having a platform like this is more than 75% of the solution. The rest is more around trend following.

It’s also stunningly easy to convince yourself you have a profitable algorithm when you actually have a money loser.

Gaining 0.5%/day 60% of the time and breaking even 39% of the time looks great until you run into the 1% of the time where you lose 50%.

Yes, 100%. Like I said in the article there. I once lost like 40% in a few minutes in the pre-market because my app didn't have the correct sell logic. Honestly, I don't even know if I had the correct logic that would have even saved me, because the market was falling so quickly I probably could not have even for the fills I wanted. So, I've moved to breaking things into tons of small bets and really trying to manage risk.

I tend to frame it as the secret sauce is 99% of the solution, and the platform/API-interaction is trivial, as the term is used in science.

Yeah, you could look at it like that too. But you need to have a platform before you can even do something like this. So, that's why I framed it like that.