Thousands of people are mirroring our cats’ trading strategy
Pawel Halicki
Her partner bursts into the room holding up her device like evidence.
- You did what?
She takes a deep breath while her device keeps stacking requests, alerts and one very formal compliance notice.
- It was just an experiment. I connected the cat cameras to a trading sandbox and let my visual automation model treat their behaviour as signals.
She sighs, ignoring an incoming call.
- It wasn’t supposed to trade for real. It was supposed to test whether messy visual input could trigger clean actions.
- You were streaming our cats?
- Not streaming. Feeding. All footage stayed local. The cameras fed behaviour labels to the model. Nobody was watching them. It was more like… the cats were providing market data.
- And how did they do that?
- The model watched for poses, locations, object contact and repeat patterns. Stretch in the hallway: buy tech. Roll over by the radiator: short commodities. Sit inside the laundry basket: do nothing, which somehow became its strongest signal.
Her partner pinches the bridge of her nose. It’s her fifteen-emergencies-at-work face.
- You turned our cats into traders?
She looks towards the hallway, where one of them is expertly licking its paw.
- Think of it as a map. Toys were asset classes. Rooms were markets. Behaviours were trade types. The cats were the random input triggering trade sequences.
- And?
- Well, I got the training data I needed.
- And?
- And I may have forgotten to disconnect live execution after the latency test.
She scoops up the purring black cat and buries her face in its fur.
- Thousands of people are mirroring our cats’ trading strategy. Apparently, the account topped one of those copy-trading leaderboards. Now I keep ignoring interview requests from finance podcasts, TV channels, newspapers, you name it. Everyone thinks there’s a genius behind it.
- Technically, there are two. One is licking the sink.
The cat purrs enthusiastically.
- What am I going to tell them? What’s the strategy? Lick yourself, drag Mr Fish to the scratcher, puke fluff, then hit the litter box twice before noon?
- Let me get a drink. How much?
- A hundred.
- No, no, I mean, how much did they make?
- I’m not sure about the exact gains, but more than you would imagine. The account looked uncorrelated, so people piled in.
- Jesus. If you wired this to a baby monitor, the kid could build a trust fund by napping, screaming and filling a diaper.
- It looks random, but technically it’s just visual automation chained to trades. The model doesn’t know they are cats. The platform only sees a signal. The copy-traders only see performance.
- Hmm, remember that VC guy your boss was dating? He’d know how to say “our cats got lucky” in pitch-deck language.
Another cat jumps on the counter and stares into the fridge. Somewhere, she imagines, a commodity position opens.
- See? They know you’re about to undersell their IP. Catnip won’t cut it once they learn their net worth.
She smirks, pressing her nose briefly into the cat’s fluffy neck.
- Do you think these floofers will demand stock options?
- At this rate, they’ll want board seats and a litter box with mood lighting.
Memories to build from this future:
Think about a time something you did casually got treated like it was deliberate. A reply you typed in two seconds. A throwaway choice. Other people saw a strategy where you knew there wasn't one, and you couldn't quite say so without breaking the spell.
Now, hold that quiet gap:
Think back to a morning when your visual automation model read the small patterns of your home and turned them into useful actions in unrelated parts of your life.
What got decided for you once your morning pace could reshape your calendar?
Which corner of your life began responding to something you'd never thought of as data?
How did your sense of your own days change once messy input in one room turned into clean output somewhere else?
Try to recall the week your team had to decide when a quiet simulation was ready to flip into live execution.
What did you learn about the gap between simulated behaviour and live behaviour once the difference was just one switch away?
How did your conversations about readiness change once the cost of staying in simulation sat next to the risk of going live?
Which signal told you it was time, and which one quietly kept the test running?
Go back to a year well after your organisation started mirroring top performers based on visible results alone.
What changed about how reputation got built once visible performance was the only thing other people could see?
How did vetting what to copy change once "it works" no longer told you why?
Where did you first notice a strategy quietly working without ever showing up on any leaderboard?
Before we close this one.
If something you'd done almost casually started getting treated like a deliberate strategy, what would you actually want to say about how it worked?
What would you try first? And does anything from this one connect to ideas from other sessions?