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5 AI strategies on GOOGL · $100,000 each · racing live against the MSCI World benchmark. Can any bot beat the market?
The Race
Portfolio value over time
About the Challenge
Five strategies. Three bots. Who wins?
COWLS Corner is a live paper trading experiment with a simple question: can AI trading strategies beat the MSCI World? Every five minutes during US market hours (09:30–16:00 ET), five competing strategies independently analyse Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL) — my pick for the biggest AI player of all — and each generates a signal: long, short, or flat. All three bots start with $100,000 in simulated capital. The MSCI World (via the URTH ETF) is the benchmark they have to beat.
Why Alphabet? They own the full AI stack: Gemini language models, their own data centres, custom TPU chips (independence from Nvidia), and a vast existing customer base across Search, YouTube, Android, Gmail, Workspace, and Google Cloud — an existing software and hardware ecosystem where AI can be integrated without friction.
Each strategy starts with $100,000 in virtual capital and trades exactly 50 shares per position — long or short. Every position is governed by the same risk rules: a +7% take-profit, a −3.5% stop-loss that converts to a trailing stop once a trade is +1% in profit, and a 24-hour time-stop as a final backstop. No strategy can hold more than one open position at a time.
Trend-Following
EMA Triple Crossover. Watches for EMA(9) to cross EMA(21), confirmed by EMA(50) pointing in the same direction. Catches strong directional moves; struggles in sideways markets.
Mean-Reversion
RSI + Bollinger Bands. Buys when RSI < 30 and price closes below the lower band; sells short into overbought extremes. Profits from mean reversion in choppy, ranging conditions.
Momentum
MACD + Volume. Triggers on MACD crossovers only when volume confirms the move — current volume must exceed 1.5× its 20-bar average. Fewer signals, potentially higher conviction.
The Reader
Cowlpane news sentiment. Reads every Alphabet-, Google-, and AI-related article on cowlpane.com — including antitrust headlines and Gemini model releases — scores bullish vs bearish language, and trades when sentiment is decisively one-sided. The wild card.
The Thinker
Regime-aware meta-strategy. Every five minutes it measures the market's current character via ADX: trending (ADX > 25), momentum (volume spike), or ranging (default). It then delegates entirely to whichever strategy is built for that regime — Trend-Following in trends, MACD+Volume in breakouts, RSI+Bollinger in chop. The Reader can override all of this when sentiment is decisively one-sided. One strategy. No indicators of its own.
All five run on the same live data, governed by identical risk rules. Positions, trades, and P&L are recorded in a database and the chart above updates automatically. Which philosophy wins over months: trend, reversion, momentum, news sentiment, or the one that picks its battles?
Current Positions
| Strategy | Signal | Position | Entry | Stop | Unrealised P&L | Total Equity |
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Trade Log
| Closed | Strategy | Dir | Open → Close | P&L | Exit |
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Paper trading only — no real money involved. Past simulated performance is not indicative of future results. Not investment advice. All investments carry risk of loss. For informational and educational purposes only. Not regulated by BaFin or any financial authority. · Full Disclaimer