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DM Dave Mabe On Ditching Hourly

“They're not good at trading itself. Like Claude's never made a trade, right? And so I think a lot of people get caught up. I see a lot of traders in this situation where because Claude is so good at programming, they think it's like some oracle that's good at everything.”

Ditching Hourly · Agency Business · November 2026

“They're not good at trading itself. Like Claude's never made a trade, right? And so I think a lot of people get caught up. I see a lot of traders in this situation where because Claude is so good at programming, they think it's like some oracle that's good at everything.” — Dave Mabe, Ditching Hourly

Context

Systematic day trader and former CTO Dave Mabe on the central mistake he sees among traders using AI: assuming a model that writes good code must also be good at trading.

Transcript

Ditching Hourly Around 31:14 into the episode
Dave Mabe

Right. And that's a, it's a really, it seems like it should be really easy. Hey, look at this chart and come up with code that trades stuff like this, but it's actually quite hard to do that.

Jonathan Stark

Doesn't sound easy to me. It sounds like it sounds very hard, but I do have the intuition and the experience that at least the frontier models are unbelievable at spotting patterns that the naked eye can't see.

Dave Mabe

Right. So, but what they aren't good at is like, so they're not good at trading itself. Like Claude's never made a trade, right? And so I think a lot of people get caught up. I see a lot of traders in this situation where because Claude is so good at programming, they think it's like some oracle that's good at everything.

Jonathan Stark

Yeah, it's a God.

Dave Mabe

Right. So they end up having Claude do all sorts of things. Like, you know, the classic example is, okay, Claude, you know, give me a strategy that works.

Jonathan Stark

Well, that would be the right, that's where I would start.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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