Every printed order is executed. Nothing else ever is.
Nothing on the sheet is skipped; nothing off the sheet is bought. An unavailable instrument is excluded only through the written venue rule and recorded as such.
One purpose: make discipline visible
Upwave tests whether a small, systematic process can be followed exactly for three years, with every decision traceable to a frozen rule and a dated record.
It is not a watchlist, a trading dashboard, or a research lab. There are no live prices, alerts, discretionary ideas, or intramonth decisions. If the system trails its primary benchmark after 36 live months, net of costs, it retires and the capital goes passive.
The two laws
Every screen, order, fill, and report exists to keep these commitments.
£2,000 at risk. Only that, ever.
If the account read £0.00 tomorrow, no bill changes. Top-ups follow a pre-written schedule, never a losing month.
One month, four moments
The machine does the analysis. Ola checks venue facts, executes the printed sheet, and records what happened. Total human time is about 30 minutes a month.
PC Saturday: run the screen
Friday-close data passes through the frozen gates. The run writes the funnel, league, order sheet, and cycle record. Missing data fails closed and is counted.
PHONE Saturday: confirm new names in the SIPP
Open each new buy candidate from inside the Trading 212 SIPP. Record whether the ticket opens and whether fractional shares are supported. This is a rule check, not a judgement.
T212 Monday: execute and capture
Execute the sheet from top to bottom at market, then capture the fill quantity and price. Nothing is added, skipped, reordered, or improved by hand.
PC Rest of month: stay blind
Import the fills, generate the Paper, and close the loop. There is no price monitoring or intramonth trading except a forced corporate event.
Every detail has one home
The explainer gives the shortest trustworthy path. The detailed rules, machinery, instructions, and monthly evidence remain on their authoritative pages.
Record mapone question · one source
| Question | Page of record | What lives there |
|---|---|---|
| What are the rules? | PRD | Purpose, frozen constraints, milestones, outputs, and non-goals |
| How does it work? | Architecture | Pipeline, modules, data contracts, invariants, and publishing |
| What happened this month? | Cycles | Order sheet, funnel, league, Paper, and provenance |
| What do I do next? | Runbook | The exact PC, phone, and Trading 212 sequence |
Canonical records remain markdown in git. These pages make the same evidence easier to
read without creating a second source of truth.
Plain-English glossary
Reference definitions stay here for first-time reading, but no longer interrupt the main path.
Money words
- Market cap
- Share price × shares outstanding: what every share in the company is worth at the current price. The minimum is £20m in the UK and $75m in the US.
- Enterprise value (EV)
- Market cap plus debt, minus cash: the approximate price of buying the whole business and taking on its balance sheet.
- EBIT
- Profit from running the business before interest and tax. It is the operating earnings used in the value gate.
- EBITDA
- EBIT with depreciation and amortisation added back. Upwave uses it only to judge whether net debt is manageable.
- EPS
- Profit per diluted share. Upwave requires positive EPS that is higher than the established prior-year figure.
- TTM
- Trailing twelve months: the latest four reported quarters combined.
- Free cash flow (FCF)
- Cash left after operating costs and investment. The quality gate requires it to be positive.
- Net debt · net cash
- Borrowings minus cash. A negative result means the company has more cash than debt.
Ranking words
- EV/EBIT
- Enterprise value divided by annual operating profit. Lower is cheaper. Upwave keeps the cheapest 30% of qualifying names within each country.
- 12-1 return
- Total return over the past year, excluding the most recent month. It is the primary momentum ranking input.
- 6-month relative strength
- The stock’s six-month return minus its home benchmark. Positive means it beat that benchmark over the same period.
- 200-day average
- The average of the last 200 daily closes. Price above it passes the trend gate; the same rule is checked monthly for exits.
- Composite rank
- The average of value percentile and momentum percentile, weighted 50/50. The pooled UK and US league position drives buys, holds, and sells.
Market mechanics
- Bid–ask spread
- The gap between the current buy and sell prices. Upwave refuses a measured spread above 3%.
- Liquidity
- How much value trades each day. The floor is £75k in the UK and $500k in the US.
- Benchmark
- The comparison yardstick. WLDS is the primary three-year opponent; a global all-cap tracker is secondary.
- Market order
- An instruction to trade immediately at the available market price.
- Slippage
- The difference between the screen price and the executed fill. It is recorded, not hidden.
- SIPP
- The Self-Invested Personal Pension where the account lives. Trading 212 exposes no SIPP API, so execution and venue checks are manual.
- REIT · SPAC
- Property vehicles and acquisition shells whose accounts do not fit the operating company rules. Both are excluded.
- Forced corporate event
- Suspension, delisting, or takeover: the only permitted reason for intramonth action.
Five questions the rulebook answers
Does the system really wait if a holding falls below its 200-day average mid-month?
Yes. The 200-day rule is evaluated on screen day, and that monthly check is the stop. Between rebalances the system deliberately does not monitor prices. Only a forced corporate event can trigger intramonth action.
What if fewer than 12 stocks qualify?
The unused slots stay in cash. The rules are never loosened merely to become invested.
Why can’t the weather label change what it buys?
Because the label is evidence for the three-year review, not a decision input. Letting it change orders would create an override valve.
What counts as failure?
Process failure is a breach of the no-override rule. Performance failure is trailing the primary benchmark after 36 live months, net of costs; that outcome retires the system.
Why so much ceremony for £2,000?
The £2,000 is tuition, not the prize. The experiment tests whether a small, boring, fully recorded process teaches more than discretionary monitoring.
Where the system stands now
M1–M5 are built and reviewed. The M6 dress rehearsal is under way: the Saturday leg ran on live data on 25 Jul 2026 (screen, venue checks, availability import — 12 buys, £0.04 remainder). The Monday paper-fills leg, the owner sign-off, and the final calibration checksum complete it.
CURRENT · PHASE A
Paper · £0
Cycles 1–3 run the complete process with no capital.
LOCKED · PHASE B
Half live · £1,000
Only after three clean paper cycles.
LOCKED · PHASE C
Full · £2,000
Only after six consecutive compliant live cycles.
Current statuspublished 25 Jul 2026
| BUILD | M1–M5 built and reviewed · M6 rehearsal: Saturday leg complete 25 Jul |
| TESTS | 293 passing |
| CAPITAL | £0 at risk |
| NEXT | Rehearsal Monday leg (paper fills + Paper), sign-off, final checksum · Cycle 1 on Saturday 1 Aug 2026 |
| FREEZE | Parameters v1.0 · next amendment window 22 Jul 2027 |
Next safe action: complete the rehearsal's Monday leg (notional fills, then the
Paper), record the owner sign-off on the funnel and sheet — including the IMPP
near-net-cash EV reading — then freeze the final pre-Cycle-1 field mapping.
No parameter tuning and no capital.
Open the operator runbook