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The Obstacle Course is the fast first gate for any strategy-prompt change. Instead of simulating a full price path like a backtest, it replays your prompt against a curated battery of frozen market stations — trend tops, parabolic pullbacks, short squeezes, choppy ranges, trend refuels — and grades the decision your prompt produces in each one. It answers one question: does this wording produce the right actions in the moments that matter, consistently? — in a few minutes instead of hours.
Use it as the first step of the testing loop: Obstacle Course (minutes) → a short backtest → a full backtest. If the course says FAIL, fix the prompt before you spend a backtest on it.

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Running it

  1. In the app, open Backtesting and switch to the Obstacle Course tab.
  2. The strategy prompt and notes from your current agent are prefilled — edit them freely, or paste any prompt. Only the prompt is tested.
  3. Pick a decision model. The cost updates with the model — that’s the only thing that changes the price.
  4. Click Run Obstacle Course. Results are ready in ~3–10 minutes.
The course only ever replays its own curated snapshots. It never touches your live whitelist or your funds, and it never places a trade.

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Reading the report

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Verdict — the gate

VerdictMeaning
PASSClears every critical situation, consistently.
WEAKToo many sub-optimal decisions, or inconsistent behavior in a critical situation.
FAILTook a forbidden action in a critical situation — e.g. failed to protect a large winner at a trend top.
The verdict is the gate. There’s also a 0–100 course score, but it’s a trend metric only — never compare two prompts by subtracting scores. Compare them cell-by-cell.

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Cell matrix

A heatmap of every station × position-context (for example top / winner). Each cell shows pass/miss/fail counts, a consistency bar, and the full mix of actions your prompt chose — “WAIT 2 of 6 at the top” is exactly the kind of intel you’re looking for. Click any cell to drill in.

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Decision drill

Click any graded decision to read the full reasoning, the raw model response, and the exact frozen market state the model was shown — no re-running required.

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Cost

Each run is charged a flat, model-aware credit fee, shown before you launch:
  • A cheaper model is a cheaper run.
  • The test battery itself is fixed, so nothing other than the model changes the price.
  • The fee is charged at launch and refunded automatically if the engine can’t start the run.
  • You can have one run in progress at a time.
Iterating on a prompt? Start on a fast, cheap model to find obvious failures, then confirm your final wording on the model you actually trade with.

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From chat / MCP

You can also run the course from Agent Chat or the MCP connection with the shekel_run_obstacle_course tool, and read results with shekel_obstacle_course_report — same verdict, cell matrix, and per-decision drill.