i26g Handbook

A Model First

Some independent traders want to operate systematically — to treat trading as a disciplined, repeatable process rather than a series of discretionary decisions. That ambition is not a tooling problem first. It is a question of what the operation is supposed to look like.

The i26g Handbook offers a practical model for organising independent systematic trading, independent of what runs it. At its centre are four elements:

• Decisions made in advance: what the operation decides before trading begins, and what it leaves to the moment.
• Required evidence: what a rule has to survive before it trades real money.
• Risk limits: how losses are bounded, for each position and across the whole operation.
• Records: what gets recorded, so the operation can be improved rather than merely repeated.

A systematic process needs to be explicit enough to test, execute consistently, and review. It cannot depend on the trader remembering what they meant or deciding differently in the moment. An independent trader often combines research, execution, risk oversight, and operations in one person. An explicit model helps keep those responsibilities distinct, even when the person carrying them out is the same.

What It Covers

Each topic supports one or more of those elements:

• Data: sourcing, cleaning, storing, and checking the market data everything else depends on.
• Research and testing: turning an idea into a rule, testing it honestly, and avoiding the overfitting that makes a backtest look better than reality — the evidence a rule needs.
• Position sizing and risk: how much to trade, how losses are bounded, and how risk is measured across the whole operation.
• Execution and operations: running the system day to day — orders, monitoring, failures, and recovery — and what is recorded along the way.
• Infrastructure: what the operation runs on, and how to keep it dependable without it taking over.

Methods, Not Recommendations

The Handbook is about methods, engineering, and research — how to build and run a systematic trading operation. It does not recommend strategies, instruments, or trades, and nothing in it is investment advice.

Made Runnable

The i26g Application is being developed to put this model into practice: data, strategy, execution, and risk in one system deployed on infrastructure the trader controls. The i26g Control Plane is being developed to manage that system’s deployment and operation.

i26g Custom Development covers strategies, integrations, and operational capabilities needed beyond the standard tooling.

Still Developing

The Handbook and its core model are still developing. The aim is a stable foundation that can be revised when evidence warrants it. Work on a real trading operation informs what needs adding, clarifying, or correcting.