what I learned from running a public PnL
Three years of a public trade log, now a live PnL dashboard on feaws. The good months were teaching moments. The bad months were better. Five lessons that do not show up in any trading book.
I have published my trades for three years now — first as a manual public log, and since early 2026 as a live PnL on the feaws dashboard. Every trade is logged, every position size is visible, every drawdown is public. There is nowhere to hide.
The strategy itself I have written about elsewhere. The technical mechanics are not the interesting part. The interesting part is what running it in public has taught me about my own behaviour, the behaviour of the audience, and the structural differences between private and public trading.
Five lessons, in rough order of how much they surprised me.
1. the audience does not move with you
The most common worry from operators considering a public PnL is “if I publish my trades, people will copy me, the strategy will get crowded, the edge will disappear.”
Three years in, the audience-copying effect is much smaller than I expected. Most of the readers do not trade. Of the ones who do trade, most do not have the infrastructure to act on the signal at the relevant speed. Of the ones who can act, most do not size meaningfully enough to move the market. The compound result is that publishing the trades has not noticeably degraded the strategy’s edge.
What I underestimated was how much the audience’s interest differs from their action. People read the trades because they are interesting. They do not trade them because trading is hard and they have other things to do.
The “edge gets arbed away” prediction assumes the audience is a coordinated hostile counterparty. It is not. It is mostly curious bystanders.
2. losses look different in public
A losing month in a private account is a personal disappointment that you process privately. The same losing month in a public account is a disappointment that you process while a thousand people are watching.
The first time I had a losing month in public, I had calibrated for the disappointment but not for the visibility. The visibility felt worse than the disappointment. I caught myself wanting to caveat the loss, explain the strategy was working as expected, frame the loss as a learning moment. None of which I would have done in private.
The temptation to spin the loss is the temptation that destroys public traders. The discipline is to publish the loss the same way you publish the wins — with the timestamp, the size, the reason — and let the readers form their own opinion.
Three years in, the disappointment-vs-visibility ratio has flipped. The losses still feel bad but they feel bad in a private way. The visibility part has become normal. The audience does not respond to losses the way I expected; they ask better questions, they spot patterns, they sometimes notice things I missed. The public layer turned out to be net-positive even on bad months.
3. the discipline benefit is real
The pre-commitment effect is real and meaningful. Every public trade requires entry price, stop, target, hypothesis, and size at the moment of entry. The act of typing these fields filters out the trades I would have entered without them.
In the years before the public log, my trade journal (private) had entry and exit prices for maybe 60% of trades, hypotheses for maybe 30%, and emotional states for maybe 5%. The other fields, I told myself I would fill in later. Later never came.
Since the log went public, every closed trade has every field filled in, at the time of entry, with no later editing. The completeness of the data has produced post-trade analysis that is meaningfully better than anything I produced in the six years of private trading that came before it.
The discipline is downstream of the audience. The audience is the enforcement. I would not have produced this data set on my own discipline alone.
4. drawdowns are negotiations with the audience
A long drawdown — say, six weeks of underperformance — produces an interesting dynamic in public. The audience watches. They do not necessarily react. But the awareness that they are watching changes the trader’s behaviour in subtle ways.
The first temptation is to “fix” the drawdown by adding a new rule. The new rule is reactive, not strategic. The change in behaviour is driven by the audience’s gaze, not by the data. Most of the bad decisions in trading come from this exact dynamic — the trader changes the strategy because something feels uncomfortable, not because the data says the strategy is broken.
The second temptation is to over-explain the drawdown in the daily updates. Each update becomes a longer justification. The reader can sense the defensiveness even if it is not stated.
The third temptation is to stop publishing during the drawdown. To “take a break” until the strategy recovers. This is the temptation that ends most public trading projects.
The honest response is to publish the drawdown the same way you publish the wins. Short. Factual. No editorialising. The audience reads the numbers; they form their own conclusions; the trader does not have to translate.
Across three years of the public log, I have had two stretches of meaningful drawdown (the longest was nine weeks). The temptations were strong each time. The pattern is the same each time. The right answer is the same each time.
5. the public log is a different trading career
The trading I do now is structurally different from the trading I did before the public log existed. The strategies are simpler. The entries are slower. The position sizes are smaller. The holding periods are longer.
This is not because the public log forced these changes directly. It is because the public log made the cost of bad trades much higher than the cost of good trades — psychologically, reputationally, behaviorally. The trader I have become under the public log is more risk-averse than the trader I was in private.
Some of this is good. The new trader makes fewer impulsive mistakes. The new trader sizes more conservatively. The new trader’s worst week is much less bad than the worst week of the private trader.
Some of it is also a cost. The new trader misses some of the best trades because they would require the kind of high-conviction sizing that the public layer makes harder. The new trader is more averse to ambiguous setups that the private trader would have taken.
On net, the new trader is a better trader. The trade-off is real but worth it. I have made less money on the best months and more money on the average months. The variance has compressed. The compounding has improved.
the close
Three years of a public log are enough to know that the trade-off works. The losses I have absorbed publicly have not destroyed my credibility. The wins I have published publicly have not made me a celebrity. The audience has been roughly stable in size and roughly stable in quality. The strategy still works.
The deeper change is in me. The public log made me a more disciplined, more deliberate, more honest trader than I was before. None of this shows up in the dashboard. All of it is the actual return on running the experiment.
If you are considering a public PnL, run it for a year and reassess. The first three months will feel like exposure. Months four through six will feel like adaptation. Month seven onward will feel like the new normal. By month twelve you will have the data to know whether to continue.
I am three years past that point. I am continuing.