The dashboard goes public

As of today, you can watch along. The playitsmart live dashboard is open, no password, for everyone. You see the positions, the signals, the market regime and the results, in near real time. The amounts too. Also on the days when it goes badly.

This piece explains what you are looking at, how to read it, and why I decided to open everything up.

What playitsmart is

playitsmart is a fully automated trading system that decides daily about US and European stocks. And by fully, I mean fully. The system buys, sells and trades entirely on its own. Every morning it runs, assesses the market, picks which stocks it wants to buy or sell, and places the orders at the broker itself. I am not in the loop. I do not click buy, I do not click sell, I do not approve a single trade.

What I do: I set the rules, I watch, and I can switch the whole system on or off. But which stock gets bought today, at what price, and when a position is sold again, the system decides that without me. I wake up in the morning and it has already traded.

It runs with my own money, not client money. The first phase is modest, built up in stages. The goal is not primarily return. The goal is to learn how far you can get with a production system built largely with AI, that then stands entirely on its own. Return is a bonus, not a promise.

Why I am opening it up

I could have kept the dashboard behind a password until everything shines. I deliberately did not. Three reasons.

The first: learning goes better in the open. Knowing that others are watching forces me to be sharp. No hidden corners, no numbers I can quietly adjust.

The second: most trading stories only show the wins. The screenshots of the good days, never the bad ones. I want the opposite. You see the drawdowns just as much as the gains. You see when a fix goes wrong. That is more honest, and it is more interesting too, because that is where the real story is.

The third: it is simply fun. Building something and letting others watch while it happens gives energy. If you have questions or remarks, I would love to hear them.

And yes, that means my actual capital and my losses are visible too. I am choosing that deliberately. Transparency with an exception built in is not transparency.

How to read the dashboard

There are four pages. Here is what each one tells you.

Live

This is the overview. At the top is the net liquidation value, which is simply what the whole portfolio is worth if you sold everything right now, cash included. Below that, the unrealized profit or loss, which is the paper gain on the positions still open. Paper, because as long as you have not sold, it is not locked in.

The chart shows performance since the start, against two benchmarks: the S&P 500 and the AEX. So you see not just whether the system rises, but whether it does better or worse than simply buying the index. That is the honest comparison.

At the bottom you find the five largest positions and today's actions, the orders the system placed that day.

Market

This page tells you how the market looks according to the system. The central concept here is the VIX phase, which determines how many new positions the system may open per day. In a calm market it may open more, in turbulence fewer. It is a brake that automatically tightens when things get tense.

Below that you see five independent market signals that together set the regime, and the market regime itself, which indicates how cautiously or aggressively the system is positioned.

Signals

Here you see which stocks the system finds attractive, ranked. Important to understand: a BUY signal is not the same as a purchase. It means the system would want to buy the stock. Whether it actually gets bought depends on a series of checks: is there enough cash, is the sector not already full, has the position limit been reached. So many signals do not lead to a trade. On the dashboard you can now also see why a slot is not filled.

Positions

The full list of what the system currently holds, with two views. The performance view shows the profit or loss per position. The risk view shows where the stops sit and how close a position is to its exit. That second one may be the most interesting, because it shows how the system limits losses.

The terms, briefly

A few terms you will come across often.

A stop loss is a predetermined point at which the system sells a losing position, to prevent a small loss from becoming a large one. A trailing stop is a stop that moves up as the price rises, so profit is secured without selling the position too early.

Drawdown is how much the portfolio has fallen from its highest point. Not the same as loss since start. You can be above your starting value and still have a drawdown, namely the fall from an earlier peak.

The market regime is the system's assessment of how risky the market is right now, and how cautiously it positions itself as a result. The VIX is a widely used measure of expected volatility, often called the fear gauge. The higher it is, the more turbulent the market.

A composite score is the combined grade the system gives each stock, built from several factors. Stocks with a high score become eligible to be bought, provided they also pass all the checks.

What "live" actually means

Being honest about the status is part of transparency. Right now the system runs on a paper account, which is a practice account with real market behavior but no real money. So everything you see is real in terms of market data and real decisions, but the euros have not yet left my account.

The step to real money is planned. From that moment, nothing on the dashboard changes in what you see, except that the amounts will then be my actual capital. I will mark it clearly when that transition happens, so you always know whether you are looking at practice money or real money.

Finally

This dashboard is not a promise of return and certainly not investment advice. It is an experiment I am running in the open, with my own money, because I am curious how far this can go. You are welcome to watch, to think along, and to tell me when I am doing something stupid.

Watch along. On the good days and the bad.