EXTRACTOR

A real fruit-fly brain, the MaleCNS connectome, deciding BUY / HOLD / SELL on U.S. stocks. It's measured against brains with scrambled wiring, to see whether the fly's real wiring adds anything.

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How Extractor decides, every trading day

1 · MarketAAPL's daily bar at the close
2 · Features1-, 5- and 20-day return, plus volume against its 20-day average
3 · Eyeseach feature drives an ON group and an OFF group of visual projection neurons
4 · Brain40 spiking steps through the real wiring; GABA and glutamate neurons inhibit
5 · Motortwo groups of descending neurons, one voting BUY and one voting SELL
6 · DecisionBUY or SELL only when one side clearly wins, otherwise HOLD
7 · Riskposition, daily-loss and trade caps; kill switch; no margin
8 · Fillsimulated at the next open, with slippage and fees

After a profitable day, the next day starts with a pulse into the dopamine (PAM) neurons. Nothing learns: the wiring never changes. Which neurons stand for which feature, and which motor neurons mean "buy", is a random seeded assignment, because biology says nothing about stocks.

The brain in 3D

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Neuron positions are the real soma locations from MaleCNS. In the "thinking" videos, each group glows with the firing recorded that day by the locked model; the larger dots are individually sampled neurons with their exact spike counts. Those videos appear once the AAPL lock exists.

The fly

An adult male Drosophila melanogaster. Its whole central nervous system (brain, optic lobes and ventral nerve cord) was sliced into millions of thin sections, imaged by electron microscope and reconstructed neuron by neuron.

dataset
MaleCNS v1.0: Janelia (HHMI) with Google Research; published in Cell, Sept 3, 2026
license
CC-BY 4.0, public download
loaded here
211,577 annotated bodies (164,506 with a cell type) and 26,028,386 connections
signs
from predicted neurotransmitters: GABA and glutamate inhibit, the rest excite
model
leaky integrate-and-fire neurons: a simplification, not a living fly

The experiment's rules

train
2016–2021: the only period allowed to shape any parameter
test
2022–2025, run once with locked parameters. Any change to code, thresholds or data voids the lock.
controls
3 random-wiring brains, 3 shuffled-weight brains, 200 coin flips, buy & hold, momentum, mean reversion
edge means
beating every control brain, 95% of coin flips, momentum and buy & hold
seeds
Extractor is re-run with 3 other neuron assignments, to check the result isn't just luck of the draw
same rules
every arm gets the same data, fills, fees, slippage and risk limits

What this is not

  • Not live trading. No orders go to any broker.
  • Not intraday: one decision per day, on daily bars.
  • Not proof of anything yet: no locked test has finished.
  • Not a brain that "understands" markets: its inputs are four numbers it never learned to read.
  • Not connected to Robinhood, which has no official stock-trading API.

The brain

211,577
neurons (MaleCNS v1.0)
26.0M
connections
9,201
visual projection neurons receive price and volume
1,314
descending neurons vote BUY or SELL
316
dopamine (PAM) neurons get a pulse after a profitable day
1.1 s
to simulate one trading day

Runs

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Results: Extractor vs. control brains

No locked test has finished yet. Results appear here once one does.

Extracting: Extractor's trades, day by day

Extractor's AAPL trades appear here once calibration locks its parameters, around 08:15 UTC: every BUY, SELL and HOLD from 2016–2021, with the neurons behind each one. The 2022–2025 trades appear after the official test report, and the 2026-to-date trades after the lock.

Queue


    
Price data

    
Processes