Demeter · goddess of the harvest
This was not built for one big right call. It was built to get through many seasons.
If we are not certain, we do not plant. If it is not ripe, we do not reap. We never eat the seed.
Why this exists
Someone names a stock. It was on YouTube, or in a paper, or from a person on television. The reasoning sounded solid and the speaker was certain. You buy, you wait, you lose.
That person was not necessarily acting in bad faith. They are human, so they are wrong sometimes. Everyone goes looking for the equation that wins, and the moment you believe you have found it is usually the most dangerous moment of all.
So what is worth trusting? That question is where Demeter started.
Wherever a market appears, people build indicators for it. Rates, currencies, prices, inventories, sentiment — as stock markets appeared and then crypto markets appeared, the indicators multiplied, and we have been making decisions by watching them ever since.
And no indicator moves alone.
The dollar rises, copper wobbles, and a few weeks later semiconductor orders thin out. It is not only indicators that are tied to one another. News, elections, wars, a whole country deciding at once to stop spending — all of it is caught in the same net. Some of these patterns have repeated for a century; others formed yesterday.
Can a person watch all of those indicators?
No. Five, maybe six. On a day when rates and currencies and oil and inventories all move at once, even those slip past.
A machine can. It can hold 2,649 of them at once and recalculate, every day, what is connected to what and by how much. It does overnight what a person could not finish in a lifetime.
So Demeter does not name stocks for you.
It reads the net instead. And when the net does not say something clearly, it does nothing. The six seasons below are that method — the discipline of doing nothing.
Farming principles
This is not a metaphor. Each of the six seasons is something the engine really does, and every number beside them is a real value recorded today.
You look at the soil before you sow. We do not assume that a link which held yesterday still holds today. It is drawn again from scratch, every day.
When A and B move together, it is usually because of C. We count only the links that survive once the third cause is removed. Plain correlation makes the whole world look connected.
We look for past periods when the indicators lined up the way they do today, then look at what actually happened next. Not a forecast — a precedent.
Links surviving the latest run: 679,323 · the oldest data point is from 1913.
"This indicator should affect that instrument." That is a hypothesis a person wrote down — nothing more. Demeter does not take it on faith. It scores it against the data.
Only what passes is allowed to move money. Hypotheses that come back weak, or come back contradicted, stay on screen but cannot buy a single share. That holds even for the ones we wrote ourselves.
Not everything goes into one field. A single account is divided into plots with different horizons.
Watches gaps that open intraday. If it is wrong, it cuts the same day.
Rides out the shift as market conditions turn over.
Watches slow structural moves. It is rarely touched.
Because the plots run independently, one being wrong does not shake the rest. The days plot can be losing while the months plot carries on untouched.
What is not ripe does not get reaped. A strategy has to clear eight gates before it goes live. A good backtest alone does not get a single dollar.
| 01 | Checks for look-ahead bias: the score must collapse once the right answer is mixed into the data. |
| 02 | Retrains every quarter, walking backward through history, with a gap left between each window. |
| 03 | Tested on five or more years of out-of-sample data, with enough non-overlapping trades to trust the result. |
| 04 | Profit still holds up even when trading costs are doubled. |
| 05 | Reports an overfitting score alongside a benchmark for comparison. |
| 06 | Ranked against randomly shuffled, fabricated data to see where it truly lands. |
| 07 | Why it makes money has to fit in three sentences. |
| 08 | Runs on live money, and the result must not diverge from the calculation. |
We have tested 168 so far.
The number that cleared all eight gates is 0.
A strategy that has not cleared them does not touch your money.
Most die at gates three and four. What looked good in the backtest disappears once costs are doubled. Lower the bar a little and a few would have passed. We did not lower it, and we did not delete the failures.
We publish this table partly as a warning: be careful with anyone who hides theirs.
Wheat goes eight months in the ground before anyone picks up a sickle. A farmer does not get to move the harvest forward. Demeter is 7 days into trading real money. So there are no profit screenshots here yet. Here is exactly what the field looks like instead.
| Item | Now | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Live trading | 8 days · 9 fills | Started September 8, 2026. Real money, real orders. |
| Cumulative return | -2.02% | 8 days is not long enough to judge performance. |
| Strategies past validation | 0 / 168 | No strategy has cleared all eight gates yet. |
| Validated indicator links | 138 / 375 | Only these are allowed to move money. |
| Out-of-sample window | 9.6 yrs avg | Tested only on periods never used for training. |
What moves the live account today is not a strategy waiting at the gates but the basic discipline — diversification, the cash floor, stop-losses. The gates choose what may be added on top.
Sellers rarely write their own numbers down like this. But hiding them would cast doubt on the seven gates above as well. That seems the worse trade.
Even in a lean year you do not eat the seed. The machinery for not losing was built before the machinery for earning.
The cash floor is never invested, whatever the signal says. You set the ceiling on any single order and the daily loss limit yourself, and the engine refuses anything past that line.
Every fifteen minutes it checks for signs of intrusion. If something looks off, only new buying halts. Selling and stop-losses keep running — a false alarm must never force your positions closed.
An order the engine did not create does not go out. Insert one directly, and it is refused for lacking a signature.
Demeter is a program, not a service. You install it on your own computer and it runs there. Your account keys stay on that machine, encrypted, and the key that unlocks them lives in the vault your operating system manages. Copy the file elsewhere and it will not open.
Licence
The list price is $3,500 a year. For those joining now it is $1,500 for the first year. There is a reason for the discount.
List price $3,500 · $2,000 off
Roughly US$1,100, depending on the rate on the day. Payment is by PayPal. One charge, no subscription, nothing renews on its own.
The last gate asks "does the calculated return survive real execution?" Slippage, partial fills, sitting in the queue — you only learn these by running.
One account shows one set of execution conditions. With several accounts of different order sizes across different brokers, we learn much sooner how far live trading drifts from the calculation. Early-bird members are the people building that record with us, and the discount is their share of it.
What improves the model is "did this link hold under these conditions?" — not who made how much. All that leaves your machine is an anonymous, aggregated validation result, and only if you have agreed to it. Turn it off and everything still works.
Questions
Alpaca for US stocks and ETFs, and Kraken for crypto. You open those accounts yourself and paste the API keys into Demeter once. The keys stay on your machine — there is no path by which they reach us.
We chose Alpaca because it is API-first and needs no gateway program running in the background. Interactive Brokers requires TWS to stay open, which does not fit a program that lives on your own computer. Kraken was chosen over cheaper venues because its fees and its regulatory standing in the US are the best balance we found — we are not going to hand you a venue risk to save a few basis points.
If you want another broker supported, say so in the form below. That is how we decide what to build next.
You do not have to. Waiting until there is a record and paying list price is the safer choice.
There is exactly one reason to buy now — you find it interesting to join before a thing is proven, and that seat costs 60% less. We are not going to invent another reason for you.
Both macOS and Windows work. Install, sign-in and live operation were verified on real machines of each. Windows 10/11 (64-bit); it also runs on ARM Windows.
Planning to run it on Windows? Mention it in your application and we will confirm it works before you buy.
Download and double-click. A dmg on macOS, an installer on Windows. The operating system blocks the very first launch; the download section tells you the two clicks that get past it. If you get stuck, reply to the email and we will help.
It only has to stay plugged in. The screen can sleep, the machine can be locked. Demeter holds the system awake by itself and lets the display sleep normally.
Why it matters — stop-losses and trailing stops are checked every five minutes. US market hours and 24/7 crypto mean the hours you are asleep are exactly the hours it trades. If the machine sleeps, nothing is protecting the position.
A restart is fine. Demeter comes back by itself after a reboot, and if the engine or its storage stops, it brings itself back on its own.
One thing no program can override: closing a laptop lid forces sleep unless an external display is attached. On a laptop, leave the lid open — a desktop that stays plugged in is the better setup.
Keys are held encrypted on that machine, and the key that unlocks them lives in the vault your operating system manages. Copy the file elsewhere and it will not open.
We cannot see them either. There is no path by which a key reaches our servers. For your exchange we recommend issuing keys without withdrawal permission.
Release it in the settings on the old machine, then register it on the new one. If a failure or a wipe stops you releasing it, tell us and we will release it from our side.
Renew and the early-bird price stays. If you do not renew, the program stops placing new orders. Existing holdings and records stay where they are for you to wind down yourself.
An expired licence never force-sells anything. No one's position should be liquidated over someone else's billing.
Not daily. You do have to set the loss limit and the cash floor yourself, and you are alerted on a large loss.
We suggest once a week. One screen shows the whole state.
Within 7 days of payment, and provided you have not yet collected the licence key, in full.
Once you have opened the one-time link and taken the key, a refund is not possible — a key that has left cannot be recalled. So ask anything you want before collecting it. There is no hurry.
Yes. Mention it in your application, or reply to the payment email with your business registration details.
Sign up
Register before you buy, and later you simply enter your key in the program and sign in. You sign up with an email and password and confirm the email is yours. You log in with that password plus an authenticator app (2-step).
Download
Once installed, every screen, indicator and dataset runs. But not a single buy order goes out until you enter a licence key — paper (practice) or live. Download it, look around, and take a key when you have decided.
| macOS · Apple Silicon M1 and later · macOS 12+ | |
| macOS · Intel Intel Macs · macOS 12+ | |
| Windows · x64 Windows 10/11 · also runs on ARM64 via emulation | |
| Windows · ARM64 Snapdragon / ARM PCs — native build |
There is no Apple-registered developer signature yet, so macOS blocks the very first launch. Use either way below.
After moving it into Applications, copy the line below into Terminal and it opens on a double-click.
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Demeter.app
Everything runs inside this computer — your account keys never leave it.
There is no code-signing certificate yet, so Windows stops the first run. It does not mean a virus — it means a program Windows has not seen before. Two clicks and it installs.
From the next version on, the app notifies you and updates itself. Everything runs inside this computer — your account keys never leave it.
How you receive it
Put your email in the form below and we will send payment details.
It opens once and expires after 72 hours. The key itself is never stored on our server — if you lose the link we simply make another.
Follow the install guide, then enter the key in the settings screen and it binds to that computer. After that it keeps running for up to 45 days even with no internet.
Pay by PayPal and we email your licence within a day. $1,500 for the year.
Terms of sale
What you are buying, what we promise and what we do not. The important parts are up front; the rest opens if you want it.
Contact
Before you buy or while you use it — either is fine. A place where the writing snagged, a claim you did not believe, something missing that you need: that becomes the next version. We reply within one business day.