seven loops.
seven loops run the engine. each on its own period. each feeds the next. the fast loops act; the slow loops decide what the fast loops should stop doing.
most trading systems are one loop. signal in, order out. the ones that survive longer add a feedback loop — learn from closed trades. zero runs seven, each on its own clock, each reading and writing to a shared state that every other loop can see.
trade.
every 5sthe only loop the public sees directly. everything else exists so this one does the right thing and does it fewer times.
observe.
every 5sreads the world. if this goes quiet the rest of the system works with a lag and every downstream loop degrades silently.
remember.
every 60swrites everything it saw, whether it acted on it or not. the rejections matter as much as the trades — a system that only remembers wins fools itself.
calibrate.
every 1htightens or loosens gates against what actually happened. safety-bounded so it cannot amplify its own feedback — a runaway loop here is how small bugs become ruin.
evolve.
every 4hthe research loop. hunts for what could be better, not for what is broken. most candidates die here before they reach a diff.
propose.
every 24hthe loop that turns receipts into proposed changes. nothing gets to live capital just because it was proposed; review and veto come first.
reflect.
every 7dthe slowest loop. the one that asks 'what did we actually learn this week?' and writes it down so next week starts somewhere new.
how the loops talk to each other
loops do not call each other. they read and write to a shared state. this is deliberate. a direct call from trade to calibratewould let a fast loop starve a slow one and pretend everything was fine. a shared state makes the staleness visible — if observehasn’t written in 10 seconds, trade knows it is trading on a ghost and refuses to act.
this is the difference between a bot and a learning system. a bot runs a pipeline. zero runs seven loops in parallel, each one checking the others’ work. when the world changes shape, the fast loops notice, the slow loops confirm, and the proposal loop gets to work.