How investing works
What the app is actually doing when you or an agent buys something: the day it trades in, the kinds of order it can place, how it keeps track of what you hold, and what can go wrong.
1. The trading day
Everything is in Eastern time, because that is the market's clock. The regular session is 09:30 to 16:00, and the app knows NYSE holidays and early closes.
Intraday strategies live inside that window. Each agent has its own session window — nothing is planned outside it — and an optional flatten before the close: sell everything this many minutes before 16:00, or before an early close. Leaving the flatten empty keeps positions overnight, which means you carry the gap risk to the next open.
Orders outside the regular session are possible but restricted: an agent can be allowed to place whole-share limit orders in extended hours. Market orders are a regular-session thing.
2. Orders
TICKERSMITH places two kinds of order, and nothing else.
- Market
- Buy or sell at whatever the market is offering now. The fill price is not guaranteed. This is what every protective exit uses, because getting out matters more than the price.
- Limit
- Buy no higher, or sell no lower, than a price you name. It may not fill at all. The gate refuses a limit more than 5 % away from the current quote, as a typo guard.
There are no stop orders at the broker. Stops and targets are enforced by the app, not parked with Robinhood — which is the single most important thing to understand about risk here. See the risks below and the exit loop.
Placing one yourself
The order ticket takes a side, the order type, a limit price if you chose Limit, and an amount. Buys can be in dollars — which buys a fractional share — or in shares. Sells are always in shares. You get an estimated quantity and cost before you send, then Review order.
Every order of yours passes the same gate an agent's order does, then your own confirmation. If the gate is disarmed, your order still goes out — after an extra confirmation that tells you every agent is halted.
3. Positions and lots
A lot is one purchase: its shares, what you paid, and the levels attached to it — stop, target, breakeven, trail, flatten time. Selling consumes lots oldest first (FIFO).
Every position shows an owner: the agent that bought it, or manual for your own. This is how agents stay isolated from each other and from you:
- an agent may only sell shares it bought;
- your own sell is limited to shares no agent owns — for an agent's position the app offers Flatten instead, which asks that agent to sell its lots at market;
- Flatten all sells every agent's open lots at market, in one click.
Nothing is recorded as a fill until the broker reports it. A live order stays submitted — never executed — until Robinhood confirms, and a partial fill becomes a partial lot. Shares that disappear from the account outside the app are marked orphaned at the next reconciliation, which runs at startup and every 15 minutes. Nothing is ever invented.
4. Paper and live
Both books are always open at once, and every order carries the book it belongs to. The paper book is local to your Mac and is fed by live Robinhood quotes, so it tracks the real market in real time.
- Paper fills happen on submission: a market buy at the live ask, a market sell at the live bid. When the spread is missing or unreasonable, the fill moves 5 basis points against you instead.
- Going live is per agent — each agent's book is part of its configuration — plus the separate Paper | Robinhood (live) toggle for your own manual orders. Switching your own orders to live asks you to confirm, naming the account.
Paper results flatter a strategy. Two reasons, both worth taking seriously before you move money: real market orders in a fast move fill worse than the bid or ask you were quoted, and a paper limit order fills immediately whether or not the market ever reaches your price. Treat a good paper record as evidence the strategy is not broken, not as the return you would have made.
5. The risks you are taking
- A stop is not a guarantee
- Exits are app-side. The exit loop checks live quotes every few seconds and then sends a market order, so a fast move can fill well past your stop. A stop limits how much you intend to lose, not how much you can.
- Nothing runs when the app is closed
- No entries — and no exits. If you hold positions overnight, or the Mac sleeps mid-session, nothing is watching them.
- Pattern day trader rules
- Four or more same-day round trips in five business days, in a margin account under $25,000, makes you a pattern day trader at your broker. TICKERSMITH's guard counts round trips per book over five business days and blocks an agent's buy when the account is under $25,000 and the count has reached three. It never blocks a sell, and it can be switched off globally or per agent. It is a conservative approximation — check your own account type's rules with Robinhood.
- The cash floor
- Money you keep aside: buys never spend into it. Sells always pass. Default $1,000.
- Daily loss limits
- Realized loss, measured for the day. An agent breaching its own limit is paused; breaching the app-wide limit disarms the gate, halting every agent until you re-arm.
- Order status can be unreadable
- If the app cannot tell what happened to a live order, it keeps polling and then pauses that agent with the reason on its card, rather than guessing. Check Robinhood before resuming.
- You are responsible for every order
- Including the ones an agent places on its own inside the caps you set.
6. Reading the numbers
Every figure is measured from what you paid: a position from its entry, the account from where the day opened, a scenario from the money put in. Gains are green, losses red, limits amber, and a model's estimates purple.
R — risk multiples
1R is the distance from your entry to your stop: the amount you decided to risk. Describing a result in R instead of dollars makes trades of different sizes comparable. A trade that hits a 2R target made twice what it was risking; a stop-out is −1R. "The stop moves to breakeven at +1R" means: once the trade is up by the amount it was risking, stop risking anything.
The charts that judge results
- Equity curve
- Account value against where the day opened.
- Drawdown
- How far below its own high-water mark the account currently is — the number that tells you whether a strategy is survivable.
- Daily P&L and the P&L calendar
- Each day's result as a bar, and as a heat map across the month.
- Performance
- Trade statistics and the distribution of results, which shows whether a record rests on many small wins or one lucky one.
Deposits are never counted as gains. In a scenario with recurring contributions, the return is measured against everything put in, and a day's move has that day's deposit taken out of it.
7. Watchlists, charts and workspaces
The desk is a workstation: two workspaces — Trade for your own investing and orders, Agents for the agentic view — each a docking layout of widgets you add, stack, float, and save by name. Widgets follow a symbol link group or the selected agent, so picking a ticker in one updates the rest.
The widget catalogue covers market data (chart, watchlist, quote board, symbol, key stats, news, earnings, heat map, comparison, session clock), your account (balances, positions, orders, closed today, activity, order ticket, equity curve, drawdown, daily P&L, P&L calendar, performance) and agents (cards or table, what an agent is doing now, its lots, runs, caps, timeline and equity, approvals, model spend, runtime and gate).
The chart library has candlesticks, OHLC bars, Heikin Ashi, line, area and a baseline against a datum; VWAP, SMA, EMA, Bollinger overlays; an agent's own levels and buy/sell marks; and volume, RSI, MACD and ATR panes.
A watchlist is the names you follow — last price, change, volume, whether you hold it, which agents may trade it — and it syncs across your Macs. Turning on Manual buys for a name means your own buy orders for it pass the gate's allowlist. An agent's universe can be a watchlist too, local or one in your Robinhood account.
There is no Level 2, no time and sales, and no options chain, because Robinhood's Agentic Trading connection does not expose that data. TICKERSMITH trades stocks, long only.
8. Scenarios: asking about the past
A scenario answers "what would have happened". One question at a time, nothing written to disk, nothing that touches your account. While one is on screen the whole app shifts to a warm archive tint with a banner above the top bar, so a simulated past is never mistaken for your money.
The kind offered today is an investment: up to 10 symbols, a starting amount that buys at the first open, and daily bars as far back as the market data reaches — days before that are noted, not invented. The dotted comparison line is SPY.
- Money over time
- Add a recurring amount on a cadence — weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly, yearly — and it buys at the first session of each period. "$100 a month for ten years", with the starting amount free to be $0 so the whole position is built from contributions. Every benchmark is bought on the same schedule, and a dashed cost-basis line shows the money in against what it grew to.
- Reinvested dividends
- On by default, and the honest setting. The run uses a total-return series, where every payout is bought back into the stock — what a holder who never took the cash out actually made. Benchmarks are measured the same way. Turn it off for price only, which makes a well-paying stock look worse than it was, because the cash it handed you is nowhere in the numbers. If the broker cannot serve the adjusted series the run falls back to price-only and says so, rather than quietly claiming dividends it did not have.
- Watch speed run
- Plays a finished scenario back: the curve draws itself day by day with trades popping in as markers, at 0.5–8× with pause, rewind, a scrubber and keyboard control. The tables stay hidden while it plays so the ending is not given away.
The rule strategies, in one line each
These six are the classic daily regimes. They run on code alone — no model, no API key, no cost.
| Strategy | What it does |
|---|---|
| Golden Cross | Own the stock while the 50-day average is above the 200-day. |
| MACD Crossover | Follow medium-term momentum: long while MACD is above its signal line. |
| RSI(2) Mean Reversion | Buy sharp dips inside a long-term uptrend, sell the bounce. |
| Bollinger Band Reversion | Buy a close below the lower band, exit at the middle band. |
| Donchian Breakout | Turtle-style: buy 20-day highs, exit on 10-day lows. |
| Supertrend | A volatility-trailed trend line: long while price holds above it. |
All eleven strategies, including the intraday and model ones, are in the agents documentation.
9. Costs and news
TICKERSMITH itself places no commissions — your broker's terms apply. The running cost is the models, and only for model strategies. Jev is a fraction of a cent per typed decision; a Model analyst pass on a general model costs cents; a TradingAgents run costs tens of cents to a few dollars per symbol. Every call is booked in a ledger against the agent that made it, and a call whose estimate would cross one of your caps is refused before it is sent. There is a notification at 80 % of the month.
The News feed is the day's market headlines from CNBC, MarketWatch, Yahoo Finance, Nasdaq, Investing.com, Seeking Alpha and Business Insider, plus Robinhood's headlines for each watchlist symbol. It refreshes when the app opens and every 30 minutes. Stories naming a watchlist symbol lead. A headline opens in a reader view, which pulls the story text out of the page and hands it to the app as plain text, never HTML. Paywalled or bot-blocked pages show the summary and a link to the original.