kestrel@atheron:/how-it-works$
// How it works
How Kestrel thinks.
In plain words, start to finish.
Kestrel is four parts that work together: the market models decide, the news reader reads the room, a second reader checks each call, and the explainer says why. Here is what each does, how a version is judged, and what we keep to ourselves.
// The market models
It makes the decisions
The market models are our own, learning from years of exchange candles. They are not chatbots and they do not write text. They read prices and decide.
Kestrel works as a filter over simple, well-known rules: it decides when a move is worth its fees, how much to put in, and when to stay out. It trades only when the expected move is at least 1.5 times the full round-trip cost.
- Waits, buys or sells, and says how sure it is.
- Takes trading fees into account in everything it learns.
- Reads price and volume today; order books are being recorded for training.
// The news reader
It reads the room
The news reader follows the exchanges' own announcements, regulators, status pages and the news, and picks up each item as it is published. It scores the mood of the market and of each coin, and how urgent a piece of news is.
Today those scores act as a safety brake, and they become inputs to the market model as the news history grows: urgent bad news, such as an outage, a delisting, a hack or a regulator's action, can pause a bot. You choose, per bot, whether that only pauses it, or pauses it and closes its position at the most urgent level, checked twice before anything closes.
- Reads news as it arrives, and never invents past news.
- Every decision log says when the news mattered.
- The sources are listed, linked and shown live on the live build page.
// The explainer
It tells you why
A small language model of our own writes every decision up in plain words. What the market model saw, what it did, and why. When a trade closes, it writes a short look back at what happened.
It explains. It does not decide, and it does not give advice. It is built and in testing, in five languages, and every sentence it writes is checked against the facts of the decision before anyone sees it.
// The gate and the exam
A version has to pass
Each specialist learns from the past and is then tested on a later stretch it never saw, again and again. To pass the gate it has to make money after real trading costs, meaning fees on both sides, half the spread, slippage and funding, and never fall further from its high than our drawdown cap. Every result is shown as its net return after fees with its worst dip, and again at twice the costs and at Kraken's fees; a leverage specialist must also beat simply holding the same coins. A specialist that does not pass is not released, and none has passed yet.
The latest six months are kept out of all training and tuning, and rolled forward each quarter. Each release sits one exam on them, once. A version that passes waits with its release notes and its evidence, and reaches members only when a founder presses Publish.
// Versions
You choose your version
Every release has a version, shown like our websites': ATON Kestrel ALPHA v0.1.0 first, then BETA, then no label at full launch. The market model and the explainer are versioned together.
In the trading app you pick a Kestrel version for each bot. Weekly retrains on new data ride along inside the version you chose. New strategies or a new design are new versions, and you are told and choose when to switch.
// The second reader
Two readers have to agree
A larger AI model reads the same market as Kestrel, less often: the charts across timeframes, the order book, funding and open interest, and the news. It makes its own call.
A trade happens only when both readers agree and the move beats 1.5 times its costs. In the Kestrel Eye you can ask both readers about a coin and see where they differ. Its own record is kept in the score log too.
What we keep to ourselves
We say what each part does and how it is judged. We do not publish the exact inputs, the settings, the recipe for the data or how we run it. That is how a small team keeps its edge, and it changes nothing about how a version is tested.
Paper trading only until launch. ATON Kestrel is a tool, not financial advice, and nothing here promises a return.