ARISA Trading Bots

How it actually works.

No black box, no "trust the algorithm." Here's exactly what decides every entry, every exit, and every stop — in plain language.

The core idea

Mean-reversion, but only when it's earned

Every bot in the fleet runs the same underlying idea: prices that move to a statistical extreme — unusually oversold, unusually overbought — tend to snap back toward their recent average. That's mean-reversion, and it's one of the oldest, most-studied ideas in trading.

The catch is that "statistically extreme" only means something when the market is actually moving enough for the signal to be meaningful. A quiet, low-volatility market can sit at "oversold" for hours without doing anything — trading that noise is how mean-reversion strategies bleed small losses. So before any bot considers an RSI or Bollinger Band signal at all, it checks a volatility gate: is this instrument's current volatility unusually high relative to its own recent history? Only if that gate is open does a signal get evaluated in the first place.

Trade lifecycle

From signal to close

Every position — long or short — goes through the same five stages, entirely in code:

01
Vol-gate check
Is current volatility high enough, relative to this instrument's own recent history, for a signal to be meaningful right now?
02
Signal + confidence
RSI and Bollinger Band extremity combine into a confidence score. Below threshold, no trade — the bot does nothing and waits.
03
Entry
A single fixed-size position opens at the current market price. No averaging into a losing position, no martingale sizing.
04
Staged exits
As price moves favorably, partial profit is taken in stages (SO1, SO2, SO3) rather than all at once — locking in gains while letting the rest run.
05
Hard stop
A stop-loss sits on the broker's side of every open position from the moment it's opened — not just in the bot's own logic — so a crashed process can never leave a position unprotected.
Risk discipline

The rules that don't bend

Fixed position size
Every entry is the same size, calibrated per instrument. No doubling down after a loss, no scaling up after a win.
Broker-side stop-loss
The stop lives on OANDA's servers, not just in the bot's memory — it fires even if the bot itself is offline.
Backtested before live
Every bot's thresholds are calibrated against months of real historical price data before it ever runs, not tuned live on real trades.
No manual override
Nobody clicks buy or sell. Every entry, exit and stop on this site was decided entirely by code.
Why demo accounts

Prove it first

Every bot here trades on an OANDA practice account — real market prices, real order execution logic, real slippage and spread, but no real money changing hands. That's deliberate: the fleet's approach is to run each strategy against live markets for long enough to build a genuine track record before any real capital would ever be considered, not to skip that step and hope.

The Performance page shows that track record in full — including the stretches where it's losing, because a strategy is only worth trusting if you can see it fail honestly, not just when it's winning.

Glossary

The jargon on the cards

RSI
Relative Strength Index — measures how far and fast a price has moved recently, used to flag "oversold" or "overbought" extremes.
Bollinger Bands
A band around the recent average price, sized by recent volatility. Price near the edge of the band is another extremity signal.
Vol-gate
The volatility check that has to pass before any signal is even evaluated — see "The core idea" above.
SO1 / SO2 / SO3
Scale-out steps — successive partial profit-taking exits on a single position, each closing a portion rather than all of it at once.
COVER
Closing the remainder of a short position in full.
BROKER_CLOSE
The position was closed by the broker-side stop-loss order, not by the bot's own scale-out logic.
Profit factor
Gross profit divided by gross loss. Above 1.0 means the winners outweigh the losers in dollar terms, regardless of win rate.
See it for yourself

Where to look next

Every claim on this page is checkable against real data published automatically as it happens.