The rules were written first.
“Day 0” is the day the first real dollar follows the same public model — not a date, a threshold. This page is the commitment: the methodology, the broker, the capital rules, and the exact conditions that would end the launch, all set down beforeany money is at stake. It lives in version control, so you don't have to take our word for when it was written.
There is no real money yet
Everything Uptogain has published so far is a paper track record — a simulated account, no real capital, hypothetical results. Day 0 has not happened. We are publishing its rules ahead of time precisely because a launch judged against criteria invented afterwards is worth nothing. When real money does go in, you will be able to hold the outcome against exactly what is written here.
See the live paper record, week by weekWhy there is no launch date on this page
A date you can slip is a promise you can quietly break. We refuse to headline one. Day 0 arrives when the conditions below are met and not a day before — so what we commit to is the conditions themselves.
No countdown
We will never publish a specific launch day. A missed date reads as a broken commitment even when the delay was the responsible choice — so the honest thing to publish is the bar, not the calendar.
Written before, in git
This page and the launch runbook it draws from are committed to version control. The commit history is the timestamp: it proves these rules predate the money, which is the whole point.
Verify it yourself
You do not need to trust us. The model is public, the paper record is append-only, and these criteria are fixed in advance. When Day 0 comes, check the real account against every line here.
The methodology we commit to
What the real account will actually run — decided now, not chosen to flatter a result later.
The same public model, for everyone
Day 0 puts real money on the exact blend already published at /strategy — a ~60% total-market core plus a ~40% trend sleeve of roughly 15 liquid ETFs. No private version, no per-follower tuning. Whatever the real account holds, the public model holds.
1.0× unlevered — the honest number
The paper account ran at 1.4× while it was being built; the real-money launch runs the unlevered 1.0× blend. At 1.4× the designed worst case is roughly −45% and retail margin costs ~7–9%/yr in interest that eats most of the levered gain. The defensible product is the one without borrowed money.
Monthly rebalance, nothing intraday
Positions are inverse-volatility weighted and reviewed once a month — a handful of trades on the first trading days of the month. No day-trading, no overnight bets, no discretionary overrides.
Built to trail in a rising market
Backtested 2005–2026 the blend returns ~9.4% CAGR at a 0.89 Sharpe with a −33.8% maximum drawdown — designed to give up a slice of a bull market in exchange for far shallower crashes. Backtest figures are hypothetical and benefit from hindsight.
The broker and the capital rules
Small, isolated, and patient by design. The goal of Day 0 is to prove the published model can be traded faithfully with real fills — not to chase a return.
A new, isolated broker account
A brand-new, separate real-money Alpaca account pointed at the live endpoint — never the paper account, never the intraday agent's account. Its keys live only on the trading box, out of git and out of any note.
Small, patient capital
$5,000–$10,000 of the operator's own money — an amount that can sit untouched for at least six months and can absorb a ~30% drawdown without forcing a sale. This is a fidelity test, not a growth account.
Config kept separate from paper
The real run uses its own environment block, its own script, its own baseline file and its own tracker cron. The paper record keeps running, untouched, alongside it — so both series stay independently verifiable.
Success, and the conditions that end it
Success at Day 0 is not beating the market — it is fidelity: the real account tracks the public model within the tolerances below, with clean reconciliation. Anything outside them is a pre-committed halt. These are copied unchanged from the launch runbook, written before funding.
| Trigger | Threshold | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Tracking error vs the published model | > 30 bps for two consecutive rebalances | Halt and diagnose — usually a data or fill problem, not a strategy problem. |
| Per-rebalance slippage | > 15 bps | Halt and diagnose — a liquidity or order-type issue. |
| Equity / position reconciliation break | > $1 unexplained, surviving a full day | Halt. The books must match the broker to the dollar. |
| Account drawdown | > 30% | Within the strategy's designed range (backtested max −33.8%) — NOT an automatic kill, but re-confirm nothing is broken before ever adding capital. |
Dry run before a single order
The real script runs in shadow mode first, placing no orders — it must print gross exposure near 100% (1.0×, not 140%), the ~15 expected targets, a ~60% core and ~40% sleeve, and read the live account's equity correctly. Only then does it go live.
One seed trade, watched, revertible
The first live rebalance runs once, in market hours, with a fill reconciliation on every order. Any of the halt conditions flips the account back to paper mode immediately — the rollback is a one-line config change, written down before launch.
Judged over months, not weeks
The weekly check compares the real account against the S&P 500 on total return and drawdown. Trailing a rising market is expected behaviour for this blend, not failure — the number that actually de-risks the launch is slippage, not weekly return.
How these rules can change — and how they can't
Until the first real dollar goes in, these criteria may still be revised — but only by publishing a new, superseding version, with the previous one left visible beside it. We never silently edit a rule. Once Day 0 begins, the criteria in force are frozen for the launch.
This mirrors how the track record already works: if a number or a rule is ever wrong, we add a correcting version and mark it — the mistake stays on the record next to its fix, so the history can always be audited.
Uptogain publishes a model portfolio and its rules for general information. We are not a registered investment adviser, we do not manage your money or take custody of it, and nothing here is personalized advice or a recommendation to trade. The same public model is shown to everyone; every decision and every trade is yours.