A complete automated trading system, run on live memecoin data in paper mode, then shut down on purpose. Here is exactly what the numbers said.
We ran two strategy configurations and 93 real trades. Both lost money. Then we backtested the three most-cited "winning" fixes against the data. All three failed. The reason is structural, not a parameter.
A stop-loss cannot work on these coins. When they dump, the price gaps roughly 80% in a single tick, so a stop set at -18% fills at a median of -84%. There is no liquidity at the stop price. This is a property of the asset, not a setting.
An event-bus architecture in TypeScript, around 330 tests, with a hard and un-bypassable risk gate. Live trading stayed off the whole time and needed a manual code edit plus a runtime flag to enable. By design, no automated path could turn it on.
pump.fun launches around 28 tokens a minute. Enriching every one is how you light money on fire. A free local pre-filter rejected over 99% of candidates before a single paid call.
First-configuration snapshot. A second configuration added 55 more trades, for 93 total. The pre-filter pass rate held near 0.6% throughout.
Cohort B entered earlier and exited faster, the deliberate experiment after Cohort A showed where the money leaked. Earlier entry raised the win rate, and lost more money.
We logged the exact on-chain price path for every scalp trade. Here is every hard-stop exit. The dashed line is where the stop was set. The bars are where it actually filled.
17 hard stops. Median fill -84% against an -18% trigger. These coins do not slide through a stop. They gap from above the trigger straight to -80% or worse in one tick, because there is no order book at -18% to sell into.
We backtested the usual advice against the real trade data. Each one targeted the wrong layer.
We generated the trading wallet with a trading service's "generate wallet" button. That means the service generated and held the private key. It was drained from the first hour: a small amount siphoned to one address every 72 minutes, automated, for 9 days, starting essentially at funding.
Native SOL can only move with the private key. A "click to generate" wallet from any service means they hold your keys. Generate the keypair yourself, offline, on a clean device, and use non-custodial signing. Cost of this lesson: $12. Cost if we had funded it for live trading: a lot more.