2026 So Far: +28.63R, and the Worst Month of the Year in Full

Ten months and 294 trades into 2026, SkyAnalyst is up 28.63R, and a month ago we were up 38.35R. Through Oct 31, 2026, the system has banked +28.63R YTD since the Jan 12 inception. A simulated $100,000 account risking 2% per trade sits at $157,278.64 on static sizing, from 162 winners against 132 losers, a 55.1% win rate. October is inside those numbers. It lost 9.71R, the worst month of the year, and it took the record to just below where it stood at the end of August. The shape of the year is simple to state, and it is less comfortable than it was at the last refresh. From January through July the desk built +31.43R across 176 trades. In the three months since it has traded 118 times, won 58, lost 60, and given back about 2.8R. August lost 2.67R, September made 9.59R, and October lost 9.71R. All of the year's profit was made in the first seven months. This article does not try to make October smaller than it was. It sets out how the record was built, what the last three months have and have not shown, and which of our own explanations survived being tested. To judge a stretch like this one on your own instruments, see SkyAnalyst run your markets.

Act I: Finding out whether the process works

The first quarter was about whether the system could produce an edge before it was asked to produce a large one. January was a soft launch, three trades from January 12, all winners, +3.02R. February was the first month with a real sample, +6.64R, and the first month where several instrument traders worked the same tape and reasoned about it differently. March was the busiest month of the quarter and finished close to flat.

A flat month was a useful thing to see at that stage. It showed that risk held constant when the tape was not paying. Toward the end of March we consolidated execution onto one primary engine, the one whose analysis had held the most consistent discipline across the quarter's regime changes.

Act II: The accumulation

April through July is where the year was made. The desk was not doing anything new in those four months. It was doing the same thing repeatedly, in markets that paid for it: pullback entries in trending tape, continuation reads on the indices, and a Risk Agent working to the same sizing rule regardless of how the last trade went.

May added +8.33R and June added +9.16R, and June also produced the best single trade of the year, a NAS100 short off a bounce rejection on June 5 that paid +3.26R on the TP1 baseline. It is still the best trade on the board ten months in. By July 31 the desk stood at +31.43R across 176 trades, 104 winners against 72 losers.

That number is the anchor of our published record. Every figure in this article builds forward from it, and none of it gets re-derived when the underlying data moves. It is also, as of this refresh, higher than the number at the top of this page.

Act III: Three months and no net progress

August lost 2.67R across 44 trades and took the record down more than 11R from its late-July high before a winning run pulled most of it back. The damage sat mostly in one place, a GBPUSD long book that took ten trades, won two and gave back 6.18R. On August 27 we split every instrument trader into independent long and short books. We covered it in the August monthly recap.

September looked like the answer: 37 trades, 23 winners, +9.59R, and a new high for the year. Underneath, 32 of the 37 entries were shorts carrying much the same view of the tape, and that view stopped out four shorts on September 14 and three more on September 24. We said then that a book of separate tickets can be one bet.

October is the month that makes the September number hard to read as a recovery. Thirty-seven trades again, 14 winners, -9.71R and a 37.8% win rate. The month's nine longs lost 5.31R and its 28 shorts lost 4.40R, and five of the six instruments we traded finished negative. On Oct 7 the Nasdaq, S&P and Dow books went short inside eighteen minutes, into the same bounce, and all three stopped: the September cluster again, about two weeks after we had named it. We went through the month in full in the October monthly recap.