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Mike Jones.mdGardenThe regime gate
@mike / Garden

The regime gate

🌱 seedlingPlanted Oct 12, 2026Tended Oct 12, 2026148 words

When I sorted my losing trades by why they closed, the biggest bucket wasn't stop-losses. It was strategies closing themselves on their own signal, over and over, for small losses: churn. They were trend strategies trading a choppy market, or mean-reversion strategies trading a trend.

The fix is a regime gate: decide what kind of market you're in before any strategy is allowed to trade.

  • Trending (for example ADX above about 25): allow momentum and breakout strategies.
  • Choppy (ADX below that): allow only mean-reversion.
  • Neither: stand aside. A gate that says CLOSED is a feature.

Open questions I'd love to compare notes on:

  • Better regime signals than ADX for very short timeframes?
  • Gating per symbol vs. for the whole market at once?
  • How quickly should the gate flip without whipsawing itself?

Part of Trading with an agent fleet. Related: Scouts and winners.

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