About Midas Lab

Midas Lab is the publishing brand for a small trading-bot research project I've been working on. The bot is called midas. The lab is where I write about it — engineering notes, results, things that broke, things that worked.

This is a personal project. Not a fund. Not a product. Not advice.

What you'll find here

• Posts — engineering and research writing. Architecture, the data layer, how I handle backtests, what I picked and why.
• The Logbook — an honest archive of how the bot has actually performed. Wins, losses, the trades I can't yet explain. The opposite of cherry-picked screenshots.
• Occasional thinking-out-loud about markets, with the standing caveat that I'm not a portfolio manager and nothing I publish should drive what you do with your own money.

What you won't find here

• Buy/sell signals. I'm not licensed to give investment advice, and I'm not building a product around selling alerts.
• Hype. Some weeks the bot does well. Some weeks it doesn't. The writing reflects that.
• The proprietary numbers. The general shape of the strategies, yes. The specific thresholds and parameters that make them work, no.

Why "Midas"

Because the myth is about a guy who got exactly what he wished for and immediately learned why that was a problem. Most retail trading projects have a version of that arc. The name is a reminder.

About the author

Published under the pen name Fixel Smith. Writing here is personal and does not reflect any current or past employer.

Disclaimers (the important part)

Everything published by Midas Lab — including this website, The Midas Logbook, the RSS feed, and any social-media account associated with the Midas Lab community — is provided strictly for entertainment and educational purposes. It does not constitute investment, financial, tax, or legal advice, and should not be relied upon as such. The author is not a registered investment adviser, broker-dealer, or licensed financial professional in any jurisdiction.

Past performance, including any backtest, paper-trading, or live-trading result referenced in the Logbook or elsewhere, does not predict and does not guarantee future results. Trading involves substantial risk of loss. Always consult a licensed financial professional qualified to advise on your individual circumstances before making any trading decision based on information published by Midas Lab.

The author has no general affiliation with any broker, exchange, or trading platform referenced in the Content. Tools and products named in posts are referenced for technical context only.

The full disclaimer governing all Midas Lab content is available at /disclaimer and supersedes the summary on this page.

Following along

The RSS feed covers both Posts and the Logbook. Social accounts for the Midas Lab community will be linked from this page as they go live.