TastyTrades

Short selling and futures, traded for you at tastytrade.

Read this first

This program trades a real tastytrade margin account with real money in it. There is no practice mode, no paper account and no sandbox to try it in. Every order it sends is a real order.

It sells stocks short. Shorting is not the mirror image of buying. A stock you buy can only fall to zero, so the most you can lose is what you put in. A stock you short can keep rising, and the loss rises with it, with no ceiling on it at all.

Before anybody reaches a trading page they have to read and sign the risk disclosure. It is one page, in plain language, with the real measured numbers in it.

What it actually does

Every candidate is scored, and the engine either writes down what it would have done or sends it, depending on which of three modes it is in. The mode is on the top of every page and is never hidden.

• Disarmed — it will not even look for trades. A fresh install starts here and the kill switch returns it here.
• Shadow — the whole strategy runs against live prices and writes down every order it would have sent, with the reason, and sends none of them.
• Armed — orders go to the broker. Real money moves.

Even when armed there are caps on every single order: how much buying power the program may tie up in total, how much any one name may tie up, how many shorts may be open at once, how many orders it may send in a day, and how much it may lose in a day before it disarms itself and raises an alarm.

What the numbers say so far

Measured over 72 real trades, shorting this engine's own picks came out at −0.55% per trade with no stop, and −1.30% per trade with a 3% stop. That is a loss, not a profit, and it is written here rather than buried.

Measured on 2026-09-16 across 20 names from the engine's own candidate lists: 18 of the 20 were Locate Required, and the annual borrow rates ran from 0% to 591% a year. A borrow that expensive can cost more per day than the trade is trying to make, which is why the borrow rate is a filter on this site and not a footnote.

Shadow mode exists for exactly this reason. Until the strategy's own numbers say otherwise, shadow is the mode it has earned.