What the desk practises, taught plainly: what a strategy is, what the evidence says, what it costs, where it fails. Nothing here recommends a trade or sells a result — a page that disagrees with the desk's own business says so.
Futures — what the desk does
The instrument the desk trades, in money terms: what a contract is, what margin demands of an account, and what a backtest can prove and what it cannot.
- How a futures contract works, in money terms
A contract is a multiplier, a tick and a daily settlement. What one point of the S&P is worth in ES and MES, what margin actually is, why the account is settled every evening, and what the tax form looks like.
6 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
- Margin — day, overnight, and why the number moves
Futures margin is a deposit the clearing house holds against your losses, sized to cover 99% of one day's price moves and changed whenever volatility changes. What the day rate and the overnight rate actually are, who sets each, what happens when you fall short, and why the figure on this page carries a date.
6 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
- What a backtest can and cannot tell you
A backtest is a rejection machine, not a proof. The arithmetic of trying too many ideas, the four biases that flatter every result, and the rule the desk uses — a configuration counts only if its neighbours work too.
5 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
- Why one hand on the rack and not ten
The desk once listed eight strategies and now deals one. Why ten hands on the same index are not ten bets, how a netted account turns two hands into one position, what the search for a flat-at-the-bell hand actually found (nothing, across more than fifty-five thousand configurations), and why the honest number of strategies to run is the number that has earned it — which, in October 2026, is one.
6 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
- How to read a win rate
We tested 9,363 strategy configurations on real S&P futures data. Win rate explained 1.5% of whether they made money. Here is what to read instead.
REVIEWED AUG 2026
- What holding overnight really takes
Day margin is about $50 a contract. Overnight margin is about fifty times that, and a weekend gap goes straight through a stop. What that means for an account playing an overnight hand.
REVIEWED AUG 2026
Stocks
What fifty years of evidence say about picking stocks, which factors have held up and how badly each has hurt, and where the desk disagrees with its own business: for most people an index fund beats any desk, including this one.
- Index funds vs stock picking: what fifty years of data say
Most professionals trail the index over any long stretch, most individual stocks trail Treasury bills over their lives, and simple arithmetic says the average active dollar must lose after costs. Where that leaves a desk that trades for a living — this one included.
5 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
- Momentum, value and quality: the factors with evidence, and their drawdowns
Three patterns in stock returns have survived decades of scrutiny. Each has also lost half or more of its value in a stretch most people could not sit through. The evidence, the crashes, the cost of trading them, and what publication does to an edge.
5 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
- Earnings season: what moves, what does not, and the drift that died
Four times a year a company reports, usually with the market closed, and the stock reopens somewhere else. The premium for holding through the day, the "drift" textbooks still teach that died for large stocks around 2006, what the options market's expected move is worth, and why a stop does not work through a gap.
5 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
- Trend following on stocks — what moving-average rules did and did not do
A rule as simple as "hold the index while it is above its ten-month average" cut the worst drawdown of the last century roughly in half. It also sat in cash through stretches it should not have, signalled 180 times in 25 years, and looked far better in the backtests than it did afterward. The evidence on both sides, with the numbers.
5 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
Long-term portfolios
The slow game: three funds, when to put a lump sum to work, and the risks that only show up over decades.
- The three-fund portfolio and why it is hard to beat
Three index funds — total U.S. stock, total international stock, total bond — cost a few hundredths of a percent a year and hold most of the world's investable companies. Why that is so hard to beat, what it cannot do, and the one decision it leaves you.
4 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
- Rebalancing — how often, and what it is really for
A 60/40 portfolio left alone since 1926 would have spent most of its life as an 84/16 one. Rebalancing is the act of putting it back, and the evidence says it is risk control, not a return source — once a year, or at a 5% drift, is about as good as it gets, and most of the rest is cost.
5 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
- Dollar-cost averaging vs lump sum: the evidence
Investing a windfall all at once has beaten spreading it over months about two-thirds of the time in every market Vanguard tested. Why averaging still has a case, and the retirement-era cousin of this question — the order your returns arrive in.
5 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
- Taxes: what the account decides before the market does
Two investors can make the same trades and keep very different amounts, because the account, the holding period and the instrument set the tax before the market sets the return. The 2026 thresholds, the 60/40 rule for futures, the wash-sale rule and the crypto bill that would extend it, what brokers now report, and the strategy that works for almost everyone.
5 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
Crypto
Perpetuals, pools and staking — the mechanics and the arithmetic, written before the desk's own crypto area opens so nobody learns them from a sales page.
- What a perpetual future is and how funding works
A perpetual is a futures contract with no expiry, held near the spot price by a payment that changes hands every hour or every eight. The mechanism, the arithmetic of what it costs to hold one, where liquidation actually happens, and where a U.S. trader can and cannot do it.
5 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
- Spot vs perps vs on-chain: where a trade actually happens
The same "buy bitcoin" can be a coin in your own wallet, a claim on an exchange's balance sheet, a leveraged contract that never delivers a coin, or a swap against a formula with no counterparty at all. What each one is, who holds what while the trade is open, what happens when the venue fails, and the question to ask before pressing the button — whose asset is it at 3 a.m.?
5 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
- Holding your own keys: what a signature proves, and what nobody should ask you for
A crypto wallet is a key, not a vault, and the recovery phrase is the key to the key. Why there is no password reset, what "sign a message" proves against what "sign a transaction" does, how 2024's $494 million of drainer thefts were taken, why the desk wallet's key lives at wallet.tradersoth.com and what its password is not, and the short list of things TOTH will never ask you for.
15 MIN · REVIEWED NOV 2026
- The vault: hash-based keys and what they protect
The TOTH Vault parks funds in a program account that only a hash-based signature can spend from — a one-time key under a Merkle tree, so one address serves 256 spends and a used leaf is refused. What a hash-based signature is and why it signs once, what the vault address is and is not, what the program does and does not do, what a spend costs, and what to do when a signed spend is waiting.
10 MIN · REVIEWED NOV 2026
- Liquidity pools and impermanent loss, with the arithmetic
A pool is a formula, not a market maker. What x · y = k does to your deposit when the price moves, the loss table every liquidity provider should know by heart, and what the Uniswap v3 data said about who actually came out ahead.
5 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
- Staking — what you earn, what you risk, what is taxed
Staking pays you in the token for helping run its network. The yield is newly issued coins plus fees, it is quoted in a currency whose price is the real risk, part of it can be destroyed by a mistake, and in the United States it is income the day you can spend it. The mechanics on Ethereum and Solana, with the figures as of October 2026.
6 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
- Post-quantum on a token vs in a wallet: what the words can and cannot mean
A quantum computer large enough to run Shor's algorithm breaks the signatures Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana all use, and no token on those chains is "quantum-safe" by itself. What the threat is, what NIST standardised and when the old algorithms are disallowed, what each chain is doing, what a hash-based vault and a signed attestation each protect, and the honest claim a token can make.
6 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
Risk, the common thread
The part every market shares: sizing from the stop, the drawdown that decides whether you survive, and the streaks arithmetic promises you.
- Position sizing from the stop, not the account
The size of a trade follows from two numbers — how much of the account you are willing to lose if the stop is hit, and how far away the stop is. Margin has nothing to do with it. The formula, a table of what it gives, and why the mathematicians who solved optimal betting stop at half of it.
5 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
- Drawdown is the number that decides whether you survive
A 50% loss needs a 100% gain to get back to even. The recovery table, how long a losing streak arithmetic promises you at any win rate, why the worst drawdown in a backtest is a floor and not a ceiling, and the gambler's-ruin formula that turns bet size into a probability of going broke.
5 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
- How to read a track record (and the ten ways it lies)
Every performance record you will ever be shown — including this desk's — was assembled by someone who wanted you to look. The regulators' required disclaimers, the biases the academic literature has measured, the arithmetic of small samples, and ten questions that catch most of it.
7 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
- Leverage: the arithmetic of being wrong
Leverage does not change the odds of a trade; it changes what being wrong costs, and the cost is not linear. The recovery table, why a futures contract is leverage whether or not you call it that, what a daily-reset leveraged fund does over a month, what a margin agreement lets the broker do, and why the people who solved optimal bet size stop well short of the maximum.
6 MIN · REVIEWED OCT 2026
Education, not advice. Nothing on this page recommends buying or selling anything, and nothing is a promise of results — every figure is hypothetical. TOTH does not provide investment advice. New to the vocabulary? The glossary has plain definitions.