Personal Market Rulebook
The capstone — a personal rulebook synthesising the whole semester into the rules a student would actually trade or invest by
The brief
Write the rulebook you would actually hand yourself before risking real money — not a survey of everything the course covered.
The Personal Market Rulebook is where the semester’s weights concentrate, because it is the one piece of work that asks you to commit to a position on every instrument covered — stocks, short selling and leverage, futures, options and crypto — rather than describe each in the abstract. Each rule is really an answer to the same question the course has been asking since Week 1: what would keep a small account from losing capital, or being forced to stop trading, on this particular instrument. It should visibly draw on the calculations and plans you built across the whole semester, not restate the lectures.
What you submit
A single rulebook document, 1200–1800 words, covering:
- Time horizon — the holding periods you’d actually use, and why, in your own words.
- Permitted and prohibited instruments — for each of stocks, leverage/ short selling, futures, options and crypto, whether you’d use it and under what conditions, or why you’d rule it out entirely. “I would avoid this” is a valid, complete answer for any instrument.
- Leverage policy — the leverage, if any, you’d allow yourself, and the margin/margin-call reasoning from Weeks 8–9 behind that limit.
- Maximum risk — your position-sizing rule (Week 5’s method, reused, not reinvented) and an account-level cap that holds even when more than one position is open at once.
- Entry and exit logic — how you decide to get in and out, referencing the observation/assumption/entry/invalidation/exit structure from Week 5 onward.
- Review or journalling process — how and when you’d check whether the rulebook itself still holds up.
- Testing an idea before real capital — how you’d try a new idea against simulated data or a small trial before committing real money to it.
No real trading history or performance claims — this is a statement of rules, not a track record, and it should stand on its own without you there to explain it.
Before you submit
Check that at least one rule visibly traces back to a specific calculation or plan you produced earlier in the semester — a rulebook that could have been written in Week 1 hasn’t drawn on the course.
The spec
The brief poses the problem and leaves room for a response. The spec is the fixed part: what a marker checks. Some lines can be checked mechanically; the rest call for judgement.
- states, in the student's own words, which instruments and holding periods they would use and why
- includes explicit risk rules covering position sizing, invalidation and when to stop trading altogether
- addresses at least one instrument from each of leverage, futures, options and crypto, even if the rule is "avoid it"
- stands on its own without the student there to explain it
How it is marked
Judged as a whole against whether the rulebook is a coherent, personal synthesis of the semester rather than a survey of it — particular attention to whether the risk rules are specific enough to act on and whether the instruments the student chooses to use (or rule out) are justified by what weeks 1–11 covered.