What Is 23HourTrader? (And Why I Test Everything — Even the Moon)
I trade futures. Micro Nasdaq, mostly — the MNQ. I trade the overnight, the sessions most people sleep through, which is where the name comes from: the market barely rests, and for a stretch there, neither did I.
But this site isn't a highlight reel of winning trades. There are plenty of those accounts already, and most of them are selling you something.
This is something different. This is a place where I test what actually moves the market — and tell you the truth about what I find.
I'm a quant who likes being out of the box
Here's the tension I live in, and it's the whole point of 23HourTrader.
On one side: I want to be a quant. I want the data. I want to know whether an edge is real or whether I just got lucky and told myself a story about it. I'd rather run seven years of history and find out I was wrong than keep believing something comfortable.
On the other side: I don't think in straight lines. I'm drawn to the cyclical stuff — the zodiac, the seasons, the moon phases, the idea that timing and alignment might leave fingerprints on how people behave. And markets are just people behaving. I don't think that's silly. I think it's untested.
So I test it.
The moon example (this is the whole philosophy in one story)
People love to say the full moon makes markets crazy. More volatility, wild swings, chaos.
So I pulled seven years of Nasdaq data and checked. Every full moon. Every new moon. Every phase in between.
The honest answer? On the Nasdaq, the full moon is basically noise. The range on full-moon days was slightly smaller than average, not bigger. If you'd been trading "full moon = big moves," you'd have been trading a myth.
That's the kind of thing I'll tell you here — even when it's the un-fun answer. Because here's what most trading-astrology content gets wrong: they claim the connection and never check. And here's what most quant content gets wrong: it's so allergic to anything unconventional that it never looks in the interesting places at all.
I look in the interesting places. Then I check. Then I tell you the truth.
What I actually found does move the market
While the moon was busy being noise, the data pointed at real things:
- Options-expiration days compress the range — hard. On triple-witching days (the big quarterly expirations), the Nasdaq's range shrank by nearly half. The market goes quiet and choppy, not wild. That's a real, usable edge: don't expect a trend day, expect a grind.
- The turn of the month runs wide — but not in one direction. The first trading days of a month move more than a normal day, but they chop rather than trend. Wide and two-sided. Knowing that changes how you'd trade them.
- Mondays lean up. Not by a lot, but consistently more than they lean down.
None of these are secrets whispered by the cosmos. They're patterns in human behavior — fund flows, rebalancing, options mechanics — that show up when you actually count. That's what a quant does. I just got there by being curious about the weird stuff first.
What you'll find at 23HourTrader
Three things, and they all share the same DNA:
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Research, done honestly. Studies like the ones above. I'll show you the finding and how I checked it. When I write a monthly preview, I'll write it using only what was knowable at the time — then come back and show you what actually happened, and where I was right or wrong. Blind, then reconciled. No cherry-picking.
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Tools that make trading make sense. I'm building dashboards that show what the market is actually doing — the range regime, the key levels, whether it's a trend day or a chop day — in a way you can feel, not just read. And they don't have to look like a grim black terminal. Mine happens to run on a racing theme; the market has its fast tracks and its tight ones, and reading the conditions right is the whole game. More on the themes later.
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Learning, out loud. I'm teaching myself quant trading, Python, and data analysis by building real things instead of paying for courses I'd forget. I'm going to show that whole path — the wins and the bugs and the "wait, that number's wrong" moments — because if you want to learn this, you shouldn't have to go broke or get a degree to do it.
What this is not
I'm not selling you a course. I'm not promising you'll get rich. I'm not going to tell you the stars guarantee a green day.
I want to make most of this free, and the rest affordable. If something I build genuinely helps you, you can support it. But the knowledge itself? That should be open.
The one belief under all of it
Sharpen your edge by telling yourself the truth.
The market doesn't care about your story. The moon doesn't owe you a big candle. The only thing that actually makes you better is looking honestly at what happened and adjusting.
That's what I do here. Quant rigor, curious about everything, honest about the results — with a little cosmic curiosity along for the ride.
Welcome to 23HourTrader. Let's go find out what's real.
— 23HT