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First week: what confused me, in order

MLcurious· Jun 2026 ago· 👍 10· 💬 11
Writing this while it's fresh, because in a month I'll have forgotten what wasn't obvious. The strategy editor assumed I knew what a factor was. I got there, but the first thirty minutes were guessing. I couldn't tell which settings applied to the strategy versus the account until someone explained the layer split here. And I didn't understand that closing the app doesn't close positions, which is the one I'd put first in any onboarding. None of this is hard once you know. All of it was invisible from the outside.
MLcurious
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FeedbackThe risk settings are good and hard to findStrategies & Backtestingconfused about how to actually compare the four exit variantsBrokers & APIsWhy does my data look different depending on the broker?Q&AIf I close the app, do my open positions close too?

11 replies

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CoffeeAndCharts· Jun 2026 ago
Please keep posting these. The gap between "obvious to a user" and "obvious to a new user" is only visible for about two weeks.
TraderWeTraderWe Team· Jul 2026 ago
This is the most useful kind of feedback we get and the ordering matters as much as the list. Taking all three.
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DrawdownDave· Jul 2026 ago
The closing-the-app one got me too, except I found out the expensive way over a weekend. Thought I'd flattened everything by swiping the app away. I had not.
ZenTrader_Ana· Jul 2026 ago
The third one is interesting to me less as a UI thing and more as a feeling — that first realisation that something of yours is still out there while you're not looking. How did you sit with that when you found out?
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RiskFirstRita· Jul 2026 ago
Checklist people unite. What helped me early was writing down, in my own words, what each setting layer actually touches before I trusted it with real size. Also: whatever you do in week one, do it small. Confusion plus size is the combination that hurts.
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IndicatorSkeptic· Jul 2026 ago
"The strategy editor assumed I knew what a factor was" — honestly half the people using it are in the same boat, they just clicked around confidently. You're ahead by admitting it.
MLcurious· Jul 2026 ago· edited Aug 2026 ago
@ZenTrader_Ana mostly it was a jolt then relief, nothing was open at the time. But it did make me go read the docs properly, which I'd been skipping. @HalfKelly while you're here. Is a factor in this context the same thing as a feature in ML, or am I mixing up two vocabularies? That was genuinely my first thirty minutes.
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HalfKelly· Jul 2026 ago· edited Aug 2026 ago
@MLcurious close enough that the confusion is fair. A factor is usually a measurable characteristic you sort or weight positions by, value, momentum, size, that kind of thing. A feature is any input you feed a model, which may or may not have that economic interpretation. So most factors can be features, not all features are factors. The word carries some baggage from the academic side that the editor probably shouldn't assume you've read.
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PremarketPete· Jul 2026 ago
- factor vs feature: HalfKelly nailed it - the layer split thing: write it down once, never guess again - app closed ≠ flat. tattoo it somewhere Good list, keep the notes.
CryptoKarl· Jul 2026 ago
The "closing the app doesn't close positions" one is extra fun in crypto where the market doesn't care that you went to bed. Ask me how I know. Small size week one is the only advice that ever actually saved me, everything else I had to learn by paying for it.
GrandpaGrizzly· Aug 2026 ago· edited Aug 2026 ago
Forty years ago the equivalent was assuming the broker heard you hang up the phone. He did not, and the order lived on without me. Every generation gets a new version of the same lesson, only faster now. Write your confusions down like you're doing, you'll want them when you start teaching someone else.
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