#1 — Project genesis + architecture

2026-03-25 (Session 1) through Sessions 2-3

Verdict: positive · ✅ engineering success

Rebuilt the scalper's 116 systemd services as ~16 Docker containers with a central data curator, DuckDB storage and ZMQ IPC — 49 unit tests passing and 4 strategies fully ported.

Hypothesis — what it tests

Whether collapsing 116 duplicated systemd services into ~16 containers with one central indicator curator cuts resource use and kills backtest-vs-live code divergence.

Description

The predecessor 'scalper' system had grown to 116 systemd services across 10 OANDA accounts, holding 99 concurrent API connections, wasting ~7.4 GB of RAM on duplicated data, and running separate indicator code in research versus live (no training/live parity). FX-Core was designed in one session as its containerized successor: a single data curator computes every indicator centrally and publishes over ZMQ to ~16 strategy containers, with DuckDB as storage and a Docker-socket Telegram kill switch. Sessions 1-3 delivered the shared library (pair config, DB schema, ZMQ protocol, broker adapter, indicators extracted verbatim from scalper for bit-identical output), all 4 legacy strategies (Impulse, Strength, Session Fade, NEAT), dashboard, telegram bot, and the full Docker stack. This is an engineering milestone, not a market experiment — its theme in the audit table is 'Measurement: the apparatus itself can lie', because a unified apparatus was the precondition for every later experiment.

Key result

116 systemd services → ~16 containers; 99 OANDA connections → 1 curator; ~7.4 GB duplicated RAM eliminated; 49/49 unit tests passing; curator smoke test green; 4 strategies fully ported

Indicators

P&FZigZag S/RATR(14)MTF Momentum Confluence (MTFMC)Asian RangeKalman currency strength

Algorithms

Docker Compose containerizationZMQ pub/sub IPCDuckDB storageKalman filter (currency strength)

Code

lib/pair_config.py lib/db.py lib/zmq_protocol.py lib/broker_adapter.py lib/oanda_adapter.py lib/indicators.py lib/strategy_base.py lib/sizing.py services/curator/main.py services/portfolio_mgr/main.py services/dashboard/main.py docker-compose.yml tests/unit/test_indicators.py tests/unit/test_pair_config.py tests/unit/test_db_schema.py tests/unit/test_zmq_protocol.py

Interactive version (search, filters, figures): the experiment explorer.

#2 JPY exposure bug fix →

This page is one experiment from the audited record behind the book The Edge That Wasn't — get the book · about the project.