Testing trading ideas rather than taking them on trust.

Gecko is a personal quantitative trading research project built to investigate whether trading strategies and rules actually demonstrate a measurable historical edge.

It began in 2026 with a simple question: how can I determine whether the trading strategies and ideas I encounter really work?

Gecko uses historical market data to backtest strategies, compare variations and investigate specific hypotheses about market behaviour.

This site documents that research — including successful experiments, failed hypotheses and findings that are interesting even when they don't constitute a tradeable edge.

About me

I'm a software engineer specialising primarily in Java and AWS. I came to trading through investing and quickly found that my software-engineering instincts were difficult to suppress.

Rather than accepting that a particular trading ruleshould work, I wanted to test whether it actually did.

Gecko is the result.

Daniel Butcher
May 2026