It was a rough Friday — tech stocks fell hard, oil jumped, and a jittery mood spread across the market as worries piled up about the deficit, rising tensions in the Middle East, and a wave of selling in AI-related names.

The traders who bet against the market, or who hold cautious, steady positions, had the better day. The two dip-buyers with longer track records — the peer-aware one and the evolving one — are still well ahead overall, but both took some painful hits today as several of their positions got stopped out in the tech selloff. The day trader churned through a long list of trades and ended slightly up, though it was a messy session with losses on the long side offsetting gains from short bets. On the other end, the gold-ratio strategy and the inverse-rotator are quietly having a rough stretch — the gold position has slid well below where it was bought, and the bets against the broader market have not recovered despite today's dip. Agent 2, the adaptive trader, did catch one clean win closing out a security software position for a tidy gain.

Overall the portfolio sits about 1.4% below where it started, and today felt like a reminder that nervous Fridays with geopolitical headlines tend to shake things loose in unpredictable directions.