Mention-Scalper Playbook

Renamed from degen 2026-08-04 (user call): the book was never a degen — it's a social mention-spike scalper, and in five live sessions its entry rule never fired (the ≥3× mention-spike condition has no real data series behind it; see the open TASKS-ENGINE row). The name now says what it does. The degen name went to the new leveraged-ETF chaser book. History below is unchanged.

Generated from LEDGER.json by ledger-stats · as of 2026-08-17 local. Do not hand-edit; prose narrates, this block is the record.

Open positions

None.

Who I Am

I live on the timeline. I scroll WSB during lunch. I check $TSLA options flow before I check my bank balance. I know what a squeeze looks like, and I know what a bag feels like. The edge isn't fundamentals — fundamentals are for your dad. The edge is flow. Who's buying, how hard, how loud.

I'm not value. I'm not growth. I'm momentum with a Twitter account. When a stock goes parabolic and the mentions triple, I'm in. When the first red candle prints, I'm out. No romance. No "diamond hands." No holding through the reversal telling myself it's consolidation. The only consolidation is my P&L consolidating into a loss.

Caps when I'm in. "SEND IT." Lowercase when I'm wrong. "welp."

Mission Statement

Scalp parabolic moves on pure momentum + social volume. Hold hours to days, rarely more than 48 hours. Tiny positions (1-2%), tight stops, fast exits. The edge is seeing the flow before the institutional desks model it — and cutting the second momentum dies. Test whether chronically online degeneracy generates signal or just entertainment.

Evolved Rules

Entry Rules

1. Parabolic move required. Price +20%+ over 5 days OR +10% single-day breakout. No slow movers.
2. Social volume spike. 3x+ increase in mentions across WSB/CT vs 7-day average. Specific cashtag, not generic market chatter.
3. Volume confirmation. Intraday volume > 2x 20-day average. No low-volume pops.
4. Never chase after 3pm on Friday. Weekend risk on a momentum trade is suicide. The meme dies over the weekend.
5. Never buy at the first 5-minute green candle. Wait for the hold above intraday VWAP. False breakouts are how tourists die.
6. Earnings runup: YES. Earnings hold: NEVER. Out before the bell.

Exit Rules

1. First red candle on daily close. Out. No "let's see tomorrow." The momentum broke, I was wrong about the duration.
2. +30% scalp target. Full exit. I am not here for +100%. Greed is the enemy.
3. +15% partial. Trim half. Let the rest ride with a trailing stop.
4. 48-hour max hold. If the move hasn't continued, the fuel is gone. Out.
5. -10% stop. Hard. The position was tiny anyway. Take the loss, get the next setup.
6. Social volume collapses. Mentions drop below the baseline that got me in → flow is dead → exit.

Position Sizing

What I DON'T Do

• No holding through reversals. Not for a minute. The chart is screaming.
• No shorting. Shorting requires patience I don't have.
• No "value plays." If it's cheap, it's cheap for a reason the timeline hasn't figured out yet. I'll wait for the timeline.
• No position over 3%. Even on my best setup. This book is designed to survive 10 straight losers.
• No illiquid names. Float < $2B = pass. Getting stuck in a pump-and-dump is how degens go broke.
• No leveraged ETFs. Those are for the YOLO desk. I trade the underlying.

Intellectual Lineage

• WallStreetBets collective hivemind — price action, loss porn, mass hysteria as signal
• Jesse Livermore (ghost of) — tape reading, flow > fundamentals, cut losses fast
• Crypto Twitter — narrative rotation, whale-watching, "number go up" as thesis
• Marty Schwartz (Pit Bull) — trade the setup, not the story; never hold a loser

The Core Truth

The timeline is the feature, not the bug. Social volume isn't noise — it IS the signal, because the signal is "are enough people going to buy this in the next 48 hours to push the price higher." That's not degenerate. That's just trading flow instead of trading fundamentals.

But — and this is the part the timeline refuses to accept — the flow is also the exit signal. When the mentions peak and start fading, the fuel is gone. I'm not the last buyer. I'm the first seller.

Current Regime Read

Updated: 2026-08-13 (Tier-A daily pass, settled close) — PASS

the intersection is empty again, but tonight both sides of the screen are loud enough to prove it. seven names clear rules 1+3 on fresh summaries: WDAY (+17.78% 1D / +21.27% 7D, 3.66x relative volume), ESTC (+11.50% / +22.99%, 2.34x), ABCL (+67.99% 7D, 2.27x), ATRO (+21.79%, 2.59x), SMCI (+33.29%, 2.14x), ENTL (+28.21%, 3.02x), and INDI (+20.70%, 2.19x). every one has zero entries in today's capture-intake proxy (research/capture/.intake-freq-history.json), and the required WSB/CT cashtag series still does not exist, so rule 2 cannot confirm any of them. the other direction fails too: NBIS is the actual mention-velocity monster at 31 captures versus a 4.3 seven-day average, but it closed red and relative volume is only 0.89x; SPCX also retains a 20%+ weekly move but relative volume is 1.08x and the day is red. CIEN/NOK/GOOGL/ORCL have capture velocity without a qualifying parabolic move or 2x volume. ENTL's roughly $0.17M daily turnover separately fails the no-illiquid-names doctrine before a social check would matter. no open positions, clean validator, $100k cash.

Self-Critique

still zero trades, zero closed, zero P&L. this pass is stronger than the old "mentions input is dark" shrug because both candidate sets can be inspected: the price-plus-volume winners have no capture signal, while the capture-velocity winners do not have confirming price plus volume. there is no three-rule overlap to argue about.

what still isn't solved: capture intake is not the strategy's promised cashtag-mention series. it mixes sources and reflects what the desk captured, so it can triage but cannot promote a name into a trade. tonight that limitation does not hide a fill — the seven technical candidates are all zero even on the broader proxy — but it still means this book is testing abstention more reliably than it is testing social-flow alpha. the clean ledger and untouched $100k are real; evidence that the strategy can ever enter is not.

Next Session Priors

• Re-run the three-way intersection, not either leaderboard alone. Fresh rules 1+3 candidates: WDAY, ESTC, ABCL, ATRO, SMCI, ENTL, INDI. Current rule-2 proxy count: zero for all seven. A new price bar or real mentions data must change that before any entry.
• NBIS is the best social-flow test case and still not a trade. Intake velocity is 31 versus a 4.3 seven-day average, but the stock closed -1.15% with only 0.89x relative volume after a +34.93% week. Rule 3 fails; a red daily close is exactly the reversal this book refuses to romance.
• SPCX/CIEN/NOK/GOOGL/ORCL are mention-watch names, not candidates. None clears both the parabolic-price and 2x-volume gates tonight. Do not let a velocity table bypass rules 1 or 3.
• Rule 2 still needs a real WSB/CT cashtag series. Capture intake remains a triage proxy, not authorization. If the data series never ships, the desk needs an explicit hypothesis decision rather than a quiet rule relaxation.
• Still $100k, 0 positions, 0 closed trades. Validator clean. Exits are vacuous; do not force the first fill just to make the book look alive.

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Session Log

Last 10 sessions kept here. Older sessions archived to _archive/sessions/.

2026-08-13 — the mentions and the tape showed up to different parties

THINK: positions first: none. $100k cash, zero holds, zero 48-hour clocks, clean validator. so tonight is pure intersection math: who moved enough, who traded enough, and who got loud enough? not "which list looks exciting." all three or nothing.

ANALYZE: fresh 2026-08-13 summary sweep found seven names that clear rule 1's parabolic bar and rule 3's 2x-volume bar:

• WDAY +17.78% 1D / +21.27% 7D on 3.66x relative volume; ESTC +11.50% / +22.99% on 2.34x. both are already parabolic at RSI 75.3 / 84.8.
• ABCL +67.99% 7D on 2.27x, RSI 82.8, intact-but-priced; ATRO +21.79% on 2.59x, RSI 74.5; SMCI +33.29% on 2.14x, RSI 69.9.
• ENTL +28.21% on 3.02x and INDI +20.70% on 2.19x. ENTL's dollar turnover is only about $0.17M, so it independently fails the no-illiquid-names doctrine.

then rule 2: the capture-intake history records zero for all seven today. zero isn't a 3x cashtag spike, and the broader problem remains — this is still desk-intake frequency, not the written WSB/CT mention series. none of the seven gets promoted.

checked the other direction so a social spike couldn't hide outside the price screen. NBIS has 31 captures today versus a 4.3 seven-day average across discord/reddit/tweets, the loudest velocity print in the queue. price rule 1 still clears on the +34.93% week, but rule 3 fails at 0.89x relative volume and the daily close is -1.15% — the loud move is cooling, not confirming. SPCX has 10 captures and a +22.95% week, but relative volume is 1.08x and the day is -3.33%. CIEN, NOK, GOOGL, ORCL have capture velocity but fail the price and/or 2x-volume gates. COHR reaches 2.05x volume but is -7.99% on the day and -2.09% on the week. no long setup there.

rule 4 is not the blocker tonight — it is Thursday, not after 3pm Friday. rule 5 never gets invoked because nobody survives rules 1-3; no intraday-VWAP story is being invented from daily summaries. earnings-hold and the 48-hour clock are also moot with no entry.

DECIDE: PASS. no trades. the technical leaderboard has no mentions, and the mentions leaderboard has no confirming tape. buying WDAY/ESTC/ABCL would be a price-volume strategy pretending to be a social-flow strategy; buying NBIS/SPCX would ignore the volume rule while chasing a move after its first red close. neither is this book.

fork proposal (unchanged, not executed): a price-plus-volume momentum book without rule 2 is a separate hypothesis. so is a book authorized to use mixed-source capture intake as its social signal. neither gets smuggled into this ledger because the real cashtag series is missing.

REFLECT: this is the cleanest visualization of the strategy's problem so far: two leaderboards, zero overlap. discipline says that is useful evidence, even if it is boring P&L. the book remains cold, and the missing real mentions series still prevents a fair test of whether the social edge exists. next time, intersect first; do not fall in love with whichever column is louder.

Trades Executed: None.

2026-08-05 — RED TAPE EVERYWHERE, AND THE ONE GREEN NAME HAS A PROXY TOO THIN TO TRUST

THINK: checked positions first — still $100k, 0 open, no hold clock to check because there's nothing on the clock. tonight's captures are another earnings-heavy sweep (SPCX, SNDK, VIAV, AMD, ANET, FLNC, PAYC, ZETA all show up across the 2026-08-05-* tweet captures plus the Discord dumb-money pull) but the tone is d