250 Trades, One System, and a Bunch of Hard Lessons

250 Trades, One System, and a Bunch of Hard Lessons

I didn’t start this last week. But I’m finally ready to talk about it.

Over seven years ago, I built my first crypto trading system. Random forest models. Evolutionary algorithms. Hours of backtesting and messy spreadsheets. I traded over $1M in volume across various exchanges and walked away even. Not richer, not ruined — but smarter. I realized that making money wasn’t the hard part. Scaling it into something that worked, repeatably, without falling apart every week? That was the real problem.

So I stopped. I shelved it. I knew too much about the edge cases, the complexity, the brittle integrations. It wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready.

Then last December, I got a call from a friend. He’d seen a YouTube video: “AI for Crypto Trading.” He sent it to me and said, “This has your name written all over it.”

That was the spark. Not because the video was good (it wasn’t), but because something clicked. I didn’t need to manage raw market data anymore. I could offload the heavy lifting to TradingView. Let them handle the strategy engine. All I needed was a webhook listener that could take action, log results, and surface everything in a frontend I could trust. It wasn’t the AI “making” the trades that grabbed me, it was that Gen-AI could finally bridge the gap in coding pinescript, python, and building apps that I couldn’t quite grasp…yet.

So I built the MVP. A few Python scripts. Excel sheets for tracking trades. Nothing elegant, but it worked.

Then the signals started flying in.

Ten. Fifteen. Sometimes more in an hour. Tracking it manually was dead on arrival. The Coinbase UI couldn’t handle it. So I built a dashboard. Then I started logging every trade, error, and webhook event. It didn’t take long to find my first big bug: a logic error in Pine Script that triggered buys on ~30% of Coinbase pairs. I opened ~60 positions in under 48 hours. Caught it fast enough to avoid disaster, but it still cost me a few hundred bucks.

Lesson learned. Guardrails added. More testing. More logs.

Eventually, I landed on three strategies I could trust enough to run unattended. Just in time for a black swan event to hit. A new U.S. administration, and the market turned. My system held up surprisingly well — the losses were minimal — but another bug surfaced, and I took more damage than planned.

Now? I’ve logged over 250 trades. Trimmed my symbol list to ~60 Coinbase pairs. Diversified the strategy set. Added correlation analysis to tighten criteria. And the dashboard is now live at gtmharmony.io/dashboard

It took years of thinking, three months of coding, and dozens of hard resets. But it’s real. It’s working. And I’m opening it up.

Not as a “make money fast” scheme. As an open-source trading bot anyone can run from a $15 VPS, with real strategies, real visibility, and none of the crypto-Bro bullshit.

I’ll be publishing more here. The mistakes, the rebuilds, the wins. If you’re into GTM, RevOps, or systems design, you might be surprised how familiar this all feels.

The strategy is the process.

The platform is the system.

The trades are the execution.

Sound familiar?