KenKem Journal
Long-form articles from the KenKem build log — what worked, what failed, and the engineering in between. Educational content, not financial advice.
A software engineer's honest account of how we tried to prove our own gold strategy wrong: validated first in a separate tick engine, stress-tested with the statistics built to catch luck, attributed to the one thing it actually does well, and disclosed down to the year it failed. Evidence, not a track record.
A software engineer's plain-language account of a defect hiding in most retail backtests: the bar-level fill assumption. Why a candle-based engine quietly flatters your results, what a pure tick engine does differently, and why I rebuilt mine so the tests would stop lying to me.
A plain-language walkthrough of the Kelly criterion, the formula that converts a trading edge into a position size, why betting beyond it mathematically guarantees ruin, and why practitioners run fractional Kelly instead.
A software engineer's plain-language explanation of the Calmar ratio, what it measures, why systematic traders often trust it over Sharpe, and why maximum drawdown is the number that actually decides whether a trader survives their own strategy.
A software engineer's honest account of why textbook indicator bots failed, what lagging data really costs, and how Volume Profile became the foundation of a systematic scalping workflow.
