Stocks were mostly flat on Wednesday — the broad market barely moved, though tech dipped slightly and smaller companies nudged upward, while gold and oil had a rough day.

The dip-buyers continued to be the quiet stars of the experiment. The two more sophisticated versions of that strategy — one that watches what its peers are doing, one that learns and adjusts over time — both had tidy winning days, picking up small profits on several positions that finally hit their targets. The options trader, Agent 6, remains the portfolio's biggest overall gainer despite a bruising day of stopped-out bets across a wide range of companies; that strategy wins infrequently but big, and today was a reminder of the "frequently losing" part. On the other side, the traders betting *against* the market — holding positions that profit when stocks fall — are quietly bleeding, and the gold-and-silver strategy is sitting on a painful loss as gold slid more than three percent today.

Overall the portfolio is up about one and a half percent from where it started, which feels like a reasonable place to be on a day when not much happened and the world news was mostly noise.