🚀 Getting started

You can be testing your first idea in about 10 minutes. Everything starts in simulation — no real money until you decide.

1
Create your free account

14 days of full access, no card required.

Create free account
2
Connect market data with a free Alpaca account about 5 minutes

Periodic Gains runs on your own market-data connection, so your quotes are real and live.

  1. Sign up free at alpaca.markets.
  2. In Alpaca, switch to your Paper Trading account, find API Keys on the home page and click Generate New Keys.
  3. Copy both keys (the Key and the Secret) into 🔌 Broker Setup in your Periodic Gains dashboard.
Open Alpaca ↗
💡 Alpaca's free plan covers big, liquid stocks well. Their paid data plan adds small-cap pre-market gappers — upgrade any time. You can also skip this for now: the Lab still works on delayed public data.
3
⚗️ Check your idea with the Litmus Test about a minute · every plan

Before you build a strategy, find out whether the idea ever had an edge. Open ⚗️ Litmus Test in your dashboard and describe it in plain English — for example “buy when the 5-minute RSI crosses above 70, sell when RSI reaches 85 or it drops 2%”.

  • It turns your words into rules you can click and change, then tests them on years of daily bars (swing ideas) or 5-minute bars (day trades).
  • Every result is compared with the same trade on ordinary days, checked on newer data it never saw, and explained in plain English — with one-click next experiments.
  • If it holds up, make it a Lab strategy in one click (shares or options) and watch whether it trades like the test said.
💡 Intern gets 2 tests a day, Researcher 10, Mad Scientist 30 — plus test packs (1 for $1, 5 for $4, 10 for $7) when you want more. If you make your idea a strategy here, skip step 4 and go straight to step 5.
4
Pick a strategy

Start from an unproven template — 🚀 Best Surge of Day, 📉 Best Dive of Day, 🔔 Opening Bell Breakout or 💼 Small Account Day Trade — or describe your own idea in plain English to the 🤖 AI Builder, or paste a ThinkScript or Pine script.

🤖 The AI Builder uses your own Claude (Anthropic) API key.
  1. Sign in or sign up at console.anthropic.com (the Claude Console).
  2. Add a few dollars of credit under Billing — it's pay-as-you-go, typically a few cents per strategy.
  3. Open API Keys, click Create Key and copy it (it starts with sk-ant-).
  4. Paste it into the 🤖 AI Builder page in your dashboard (or Account → Anthropic API Key) and save.
Templates and pasted scripts work without a key; a key gives the best script translations.
Get a Claude API key ↗
5
Let it run in the Lab

Turn it on and it trades all day in live simulation against real market data. Check back after a few sessions to see what it did — and why.

6
Improve it
  • 📜 Trade History — the leaderboard shows which strategies are actually making money.
  • 🧫 Incubator 1 free run · more with each plan — test variations on months of history.
  • 💬 Community — ask in #strategy-help, and watch the daily 🔒 picks in #best-surge-dive.
7
Optional: send in your broker's alerts

Forward your broker's alert emails or texts, or point TradingView alerts at your webhook, and Periodic Gains trades them in simulation.

Start free — no card required

Need help? Email periodicgains@gmail.com.