How it works
Every few minutes, Archon asks two questions.
What does the account hold? What should it hold? Then it places orders for the difference and nothing else. It keeps no private record of what it thinks it owns. Hyperliquid is the record.
01The cycle
Ask, compare, trade the difference, start over.
Each cycle starts from a fresh reading of the account on Hyperliquid. That one design choice is why a restart, a crash or a deploy changes nothing about what is held.
-
1
Ask Hyperliquid
What does the account hold right now, and what is it worth?
BTCETH -
2
Ask the rule
On the last closed 4-hour candle, which markets should be held?
BTCSOL -
3
Compare
Keep what both agree on. Mark the rest to sell or to buy.
keep BTCsell ETHbuy SOL -
4
Trade the difference
Orders that fill now or cancel. Nothing is left waiting on the book.
ETH soldSOL bought
A few minutes later it asks again, from scratch.
Orders fill now or cancel
Each order is a limit up to 1% through the market price, marked immediate-or-cancel. By the time Hyperliquid answers it has filled, partly filled or died. Nothing sits on the book.
1x before every entry
Before opening a position Archon sets that market to 1x cross margin, whatever the account had before. The rules were measured unlevered and are run that way.
Only its own markets
Positions in markets the rule does not trade are left alone. A short in a market it does trade is closed, because the rules only ever hold longs.
02The rule
Decided on closed 4h candles, and nothing else.
Every listed rule reads one thing: the closing prices of 4-hour candles. The frozen rule, Breadth Trend, buys a market when its close is the highest of the last 200 candles, about 33 days. It sells when the close falls under the average of those 200 candles.
A rule only ever looks at candles that have closed, so a price spike in the middle of a candle cannot trigger anything. If the newest candle Archon has for a market is more than 10 hours old, it opens nothing in that market until fresh data arrives. Other markets carry on.
Every listed rule reads the same closed candles. The research desk is testing new families beside them, on candles from one hour to one day. Every rule and its record.
03Sizing
Equal slots. No position grows past its share.
The account is divided into equal slots. Each new position takes one slot, and keeps it until the rule exits.
- BTCheld since March
- SOLheld since May
- HYPEheld since June
- ETHturns long now: buys $1,250
- empty
- empty
- empty
- empty
- A new position gets the account divided by the slots, or the cash left if that is smaller. Total exposure never exceeds the account.
- A position is not resized while it is held. It stays until the rule exits it.
- With every slot full, a new signal waits. Ties go in market-name order, as in the tests.
- The default is one slot per market, 32 in all. Hyperliquid will not take an order under $10, so that needs at least $320 in the account; fewer slots need less.
04The 30% halt
If the account falls 30% from its peak, Archon sells everything and waits for you.
The peak is the highest the account has been worth. Archon stores it and moves it when you deposit or withdraw, so taking money out never looks like a loss and a restart never lowers it.
A halt is sticky. Archon closes every position it manages and opens nothing, even if the rules turn long again. It stays that way until you look at what happened and press re-arm. Re-arming starts a new peak from the account's value that day.
Breadth Trend on the full history, and what the halt would have done at each size. Fewer, larger positions fall further.
| Breadth Trend sized as | Worst fall | The 30% halt |
|---|---|---|
| One slot per market | −23.0% | never fired |
| 16 slots | −28.0% | never fired |
| 8 slots | −45.9% | fired 15 Jan 2025, at +53.3% for the run so far |
| 4 slots | −55.1% | fired 19 Jan 2025, at +60.6% for the run so far |
Worst falls are measured as if the halt had not fired, so you can see what it protects against. Once it fires,
the account sits in cash and waits for a person. Same replay conditions as the home page:
5 bps fees, before funding, no slippage. Source: .context/app/live.json, 28 Oct 2026.
05Restarts and outages
It keeps no memory, so a restart cannot confuse it.
If Archon stops
Your positions stay open on Hyperliquid, exactly as they were. The halt is not watched while the engine is down, which is why hosted accounts run on a server that stays up, and why self-hosters need a machine that does not sleep.
When it starts again
It reads the account fresh. A position the rule still wants is kept, not sold and bought back. A position the rule no longer wants is sold. The halt's peak is read from storage, so a restart cannot reset it.
If a market's data goes stale
That market is held as it is and opens nothing until fresh candles arrive. It does not stop the other markets, the halt, or close-all.
If an order fails
Archon writes down what Hyperliquid said, in plain words, and moves on. The next cycle sees what is actually held and tries again from there.
06Your controls
Three switches, all of them yours.
Buttons on the hosted dashboard. On a self-hosted engine, your assistant works them for you.
- Pause new trades
- Exits keep running, so nothing is left unmanaged. Nothing new opens until you resume.
- Close everything
- Sells every position Archon manages within minutes and opens nothing until you turn trading back on.
- Re-arm
- After a halt, once you have looked at why. The peak restarts from today's value.
The technical version is in the docs.
Every rule the engine follows, written out, with the messages it can show you and what each one means.