Stocks edged higher on Wednesday — a modest up day for the broader market, though the backdrop was anything but calm, with fresh reports of NATO sabotage plots and Gulf embassy evacuations keeping nerves quietly on edge.

Against that noise, the dip-buying traders held their ground best. Agent 5 and Agent 8, both of which buy stocks after a pullback and wait for a recovery, notched clean wins by selling a technology equipment position at their target price. Agent 8 also took a few losses — Chipotle and GE got stopped out — which is the honest cost of holding a wide book. On the other side, the traders betting against the market continued to struggle: the bear-focused agent took a painful hit on a Tesla short that went the wrong way, and the pair holding inverse ETFs (essentially bets that stocks will fall) remains the deepest in the red of anyone in the fleet.

Overall the portfolio slipped about 0.9%, mostly because so many of the contrarian and short-selling strategies are working against a market that keeps quietly climbing.