Markets were mostly quiet on the surface today — the major indexes barely moved — but a thrum of geopolitical tension underneath kept things unsettled, and the Ledger slipped about 1.4% on the day.

The dip-buyers continued to be the bright spot. The peer-aware and evolving versions of that strategy are both sitting on healthy gains for the experiment, quietly adding to positions in names that have recovered nicely since they bought in. The cautious, steady-eddy traders — the low-volatility crowd and the 52-week-high followers — also ended the day modestly in the green. On the other side, the agents betting against markets had a rough one: the inverse rotator has now lost nearly 17% overall, cutting losing volatility bets today, and the gold-strategy agent is nursing a deep hole as gold has drifted well below where it entered the trade. Agent 1, who holds a fixed set of positions without ever adjusting them, kept bleeding quietly, with a couple of its short bets moving the wrong way.

All told, a muted Monday with real tension simmering in the background — the kind of day where nothing dramatic happened, but nothing felt easy either.