Edge Alchemy for Independent Traders

Different game, same physics: edge first, simple data analysis, portfolio does the heavy lifting.

I’m Kris from Robot Wealth. An engineer who fell in love with markets, found a place in the world of professional low-latency futures trading, and eventually stepped away to trade my own book.

That outsider → pro → indie arc is the lens for everything I’ll share here.

Independent trading isn’t pro trading with smaller numbers. The underlying rules of the game are the same, but the way you play is different.

While pros get paid to be specialists, indie traders are generalists.

We trade lots of different things, we’re nimble, and we’re prepared to go where the going’s good - especially if it’s not quite good enough for the pros. We never fall in love with a single trade, and we let the portfolio do the heavy lifting.

What you’ll get here

Trading is messier and more exciting than most people from my background expect. I write about that mess and how an indie trader can make a fist of it:

Edge Alchemy

1. Edge first (who pays you and why)

2. Try to disprove it (simple data analysis)

3. Size it (portfolio-level thinking)

4. Repeat

It’s not my “unique method” or anything like that (most good trading looks like this; I learned it from my mentors). I just slapped a fun name on it.

I’ll write about how indie traders can give themselves the best chance of making money.

I’ll be opinionated about what to focus on and why.

I’ll sometimes share things I traded, am trading, or am considering. You’ll see ideas that worked, and some that blew up in my face.

It’ll stay simple. I’ll try to make it actionable, though not every note will be.

I’m not here to cosplay a wizard. Everything I trade is way too simple for a Jack Schwager book. I’m here to show how a finance outsider made it to pro trading and back out again with a portable process, and how independent traders can use the same approach.

If you’re curious about the backstory…

I swapped engineering for trading, earned an equity stake, later cashed out and moved my family to the country. Now I run a simple book of low- and medium-frequency edges and teach what I learned. (People say the case study is a good read.)

Cadence & housekeeping

• Most weeks: one short note or case file you can read in 5–10 minutes.

• Occasionally: a deeper walkthrough (with code when helpful).

• Comments: open - good questions often become posts.

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