Thursday felt unsettled — stocks barely moved on the surface, but underneath there was real anxiety about rising interest rates and flaring tensions in the Middle East, with oil prices ticking up on news of attacks on Saudi facilities and ongoing US-Iran negotiations over a critical shipping route.

The dip-buyers had a rough day. Both the cautious, frozen version and the more adaptive one took a string of stops across energy, tech, and healthcare names — First Solar in particular showed up as a loser for several of them at once, suggesting a sector-wide slide that caught multiple strategies offside. The peer-aware dip-buyer, one of the stronger performers overall in the experiment, managed to partially offset its pain with a nice win on HP Enterprise, but still ended the day in the red on balance. On the brighter side, the global asset allocator — which spreads bets across commodities, international stocks, and US equities — continues to quietly hold its ground, and the day trader kept its head above water despite a messy mix of wins and losses.

Overall, the portfolio sits about 1.4% below its starting value, and today felt like a reminder that calm headline numbers can hide a lot of churn beneath them.