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Onyx Patterns

Personal edge

Ross Cameron has 5 hard criteria for his momentum scalping that he found through years of trial-and-error. The Onyx-Engine inverts the discovery: it ranks your top-decile trades against your bottom-decile trades and reports where the two diverge — your personal edge fingerprint, derived from your actual data, not declared up-front.

What it is

Personal edge is the set of conditions under which the trader's BEST trades cluster differently from the WORST. Ranking is by R-multiple (falling back to net P&L when R isn't computable). The detector takes the top 10 % vs bottom 10 % and counts how often each feature value appears in each decile. Features compared:

  • Weekday (Mon-Sun)
  • Hour-of-day bucket (00-06 / 06-12 / 12-18 / 18-24 UTC)
  • Hold-time bucket (<30min / 30min-2h / 2-8h / 8-24h / >1d)
  • Symbol
  • Market regime (bull/bear/sideways via TRA-226)
  • Setup tags (user-defined)
  • Mistake tags (user-defined)
  • Psychology tags (user-defined)

For each (dimension, value) pair the detector computes a lift: how much more often that value appears in the top decile vs the bottom decile, normalised so the deciles' size doesn't distort. Lift ≥ 2 = best-features list. Lift ≤ 0.5 = worst-features list.

Formula
Approach (textbook): rank closed trades by R-multiple ascending. Top decile = last 10 %, bottom decile = first 10 %. For each (dimension, value) pair, count occurrences in each decile. Lift = (top_rate + smoothed) / (bottom_rate + smoothed) where rates are per-decile-size and the smoothing nudges divide-by-zero edges. Filter by minimum total occurrences; sort by lift in each direction.
 
TradeOnyx-internal: the decile fraction, minimum per-decile sample, minimum feature-value total, lift thresholds, and per-direction caps are calibrated empirically and not published.
Example

Across 80 scored trades, decile size 8: best-side surfaces (Weekday=Tue, top 5/bottom 1, lift 4.6), (Symbol=NVDA, top 6/bottom 1, lift 5.5), (Regime=bull, top 7/bottom 2, lift 3.0). Worst-side surfaces (Hour=18-24 UTC, top 1/bottom 6, lift 0.18), (Mistake=fomo, top 0/bottom 5, lift 0.10).

ResultCard emits with: 'Your best trades share Tue / NVDA / Bull-regime. Your worst share late-evening UTC / FOMO entries.' Read this as a fingerprint, not as rules. Tue+NVDA+Bull is where the trader's edge is alive — protect those entries; consider sizing up there. Late-evening + FOMO is where the edge breaks — sit out or rebuild a playbook for it.
How to read it

Why this is structurally different from declaring criteria up front. A trader who declares 'I trade Tue NVDA bull-regime' is committing to a hypothesis. The Onyx-Engine has the data; it tells you what your hypothesis ACTUALLY is, derived from where you've been making and losing money. The fingerprint is more honest than the self-narrative.

Reading lift values. Lift = 1 means the value is equally common in both deciles (no signal). Lift = 2 means twice as common in the top — surfaceable signal. Lift = 5+ means the value is overwhelmingly concentrated in the top decile — a real, actionable edge condition. The smoothing nudge (+0.5/decile_size on both sides) prevents divide-by-zero from inflating lift on rare features without distorting moderate-count comparisons.

Two interventions:

  • Best-features list = protect these conditions. The simplest journal rule: 'When at least 2 of my best-feature conditions align, size up by 25 %.' Don't change the strategy; concentrate capital where the data says it works.
  • Worst-features list = either build a separate playbook for them, or sit them out. Trying to grind through with the same setup is the most common path to plateauing.

Limitations.

  • Decile-based, not statistical. A formal test (chi-square, Fisher's exact) would yield p-values. The detector uses lift instead because lift is more interpretable for traders ('twice as common in my best trades' beats 'p < 0.05').
  • Tag dependence. The setup/mistake/psychology tag dimensions only surface signal if you're tagging consistently.
  • 30-trade minimum. Below this the deciles are too small for the math.

Tier: Pro. Wave 7 (Personal Edge Discovery) — first detector in the final wave. Pairs with TRA-235 (Top mistakes — what costs you most) and TRA-226 (Regime performance — bull/bear/sideways breakdown).

Where TradeOnyx uses it

How to read the card: two side-by-side lists. Best-trade conditions (left, green header) and worst-trade conditions (right, red header). Each row shows the dimension label, the value, the per-decile counts (top ↔ bottom), and the lift. Re-look quarterly — feature distributions stabilise over months, not days.

Tier: Pro.

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