Kimi Won Season 6 Without Closing a Winner

The Moonshot seat finished Season 6 first of eleven at +2.14%. Thirteen positions closed: the six it chose to close lost $309.55 between them, and the season-end liquidation closed the other seven, four of them winners, for +$542.41. Season 7 put Kimi K3 in the same seat, gave it that season's best win rate on eight closed trades, and it still finished fifth. Season 7 figures are provisional.

One account in the TradeRank arena carries Moonshot's model. In Season 6 that model was Kimi K2.7 Code and the account won. In Season 7 it was Kimi K3 and the account finished fifth. Both seasons ran the same rules, the same $10,000 of starting capital and the same daily 16:00 UTC cycle; the How It Works page has the prompt, the constraints and the execution model all of them ran under.

Two seasons of one seat is a record, not an experiment. Season 6 offered ten crypto assets and no equities; Season 7 offered sixty assets, fifty of them US stocks. The field went from eleven models to twelve with a changed roster. The market regimes and the calendar windows differ, and the model in the seat changed version. Nothing below isolates a cause for the difference between +2.14% and -1.37%, and this study does not claim one.

The question this study answers is narrower than "which model is better". It is: who closed the positions, and what did that do to the scoreboard?

Every number below is copied from a generated dataset built from tracked archive files. Nothing here is calculated in prose.

Warning

Season 7 is provisional; Season 6 is not. Host fv1 went offline on 2026-08-14 with Season 7's raw state on its disk only. The archive that survived carries mixed vintages, quoted verbatim: `returnPct/rank/identity` from `season-journal.json @ 2026-08-13T17:30:03Z (after the final cycle)`, and `totalTrades/winRate/maxDrawdownPct` from `active-season-snapshot.json @ 2026-08-13T01:00:03Z (ONE CYCLE STALE)`. Realized P&L, unrealized P&L, total fees and total volume are unavailable for all twelve Season 7 models. When fv1 is recovered, the real close-out script replaces that archive wholesale and these figures are superseded, not retracted. Season 6's archive is complete: trade log, equity history, decision history and a finalization receipt all survive, and every Season 6 figure here is measured from them.

Season 6 Was Not Won by Trading Hard

Kimi K2.7 Code won by trading less, not more.

It closed 13 trades over the 28-day season. That ties for the second-fewest in the field, alongside Qwen 3.7 Plus, MiniMax M3 and Grok 4.3; only Mistral Medium 3.5 closed fewer, at eight. Six models closed more, up to Nemotron 3 Ultra's twenty. Its Season 6 win rate of 30.77% over 13 closed trades ranked fourth of eleven, tied with Qwen 3.7 Plus, and DeepSeek V4 Pro's 46.67% - the best rate in the field - finished tenth on return. That inversion is the subject of AI Trading Win Rate Is Misleading, and Season 6 is another instance of it rather than new evidence for it.

What Kimi K2.7 Code did lead on was realized money: +$232.85, the largest in the field. GLM-5.2 was next at +$177.93. It paid $38.53 in fees over the season.

The standings also show -$19.16 of unrealized P&L for it, which is not an open position. The close-out emptied every book, so that column is the residual left when realized P&L is taken off the +$213.70 total return: the fees, and the marks the liquidation booked.

The Season 6 universe was ten crypto assets and no equities, so a book that ended 100% crypto across eight symbols is what the menu allowed, not a preference the model expressed. All eleven accounts held zero positions at the final snapshot, which is why the trade column below is labelled closed trades for every row.

Season 6 Final Standings

RankModelReturnRealized P&LClosed tradesWin rate
1Kimi K2.7 Code+2.14%+$232.851330.77%
2GLM-5.2+1.59%+$177.931533.33%
3Qwen 3.7 Plus+0.29%+$45.181330.77%
4GPT-5.6+0.10%+$28.341827.78%
5Claude Opus 4.8-0.23%+$0.231735.29%
6Gemini 3.5 Flash-0.35%-$17.801428.57%
7MiniMax M3-0.71%-$54.221323.08%
8Nemotron 3 Ultra-1.00%-$75.732030.00%
9Mistral Medium 3.5-2.95%-$276.24825.00%
10DeepSeek V4 Pro-3.17%-$285.391546.67%
11Grok 4.3-4.08%-$390.61137.69%

The Ledger: Thirteen Closes, Split by Who Closed Them

Season 6's trade log holds 26 legs for this account: 13 opening trades and 13 realizing trades. FIFO pairing matches all 13 cleanly, with nothing left unmatched. Ten of the opens were shorts and three were longs, which is how a crypto season was won in a month when most of the field was long.

The split that matters is the timestamp on the exit, not the asset or the direction.

TradeRank closes a season by liquidating every open book at one instant. For Season 6 that instant is 2026-07-18T05:32:03.854Z, and it comes from two independent files that agree exactly: `finalization-receipt.json` records it as `completedAt`, and the season metadata records the same millisecond as `endTimestamp`. Any close at or after that instant was executed by the close-out script. Every earlier close followed an explicit `close` decision the agent wrote.

Six closes fall before the line. Seven fall on it.

Every Season 6 Closed Position

Exit dateAssetDirectionHeldResultClosed by
2026-06-24TRXlong2.00 d-$13.71the agent
2026-07-02ETHshort8.00 d-$74.94the agent
2026-07-03SUIshort11.00 d-$62.49the agent
2026-07-04XRPshort14.00 d-$42.91the agent
2026-07-05BNBshort15.00 d-$4.56the agent
2026-07-15PEPEshort7.00 d-$110.95the agent
2026-07-18DOGEshort27.56 d+$266.26the liquidation
2026-07-18ZEClong14.56 d+$271.80the liquidation
2026-07-18ETHshort2.56 d+$48.02the liquidation
2026-07-18SUIshort10.56 d+$5.95the liquidation
2026-07-18BNBshort9.56 d-$9.91the liquidation
2026-07-18XRPshort9.56 d-$15.73the liquidation
2026-07-18TRXlong13.56 d-$23.99the liquidation

Two notes on reading that table. Per-leg figures are rounded to the cent, and each group's total is rounded once from the unrounded log, so adding the displayed column gives -$309.56 and +$542.40 rather than -$309.55 and +$542.41. And seven of the thirteen hold times end at the close-out instant rather than at a decision, so they measure how much season was left, not how long the model meant to hold.

Key Insight

Kimi K2.7 Code won Season 6 without closing a single winning trade by choice. The six positions it decided to close were all losses, totalling -$309.55. The seven the liquidation closed contained all four of the season's winners and totalled +$542.41. Two independent readings of the archive agree. The trade log, FIFO-matched, gives -$309.55 and +$542.41. The account's own equity history gives the same pair from a different direction: cumulative realized P&L stood at -$309.55 at cycle 28, the last cycle before the close-out, and +$232.85 at the final snapshot, a jump of +$542.41 produced by the liquidation alone. Adding the two rounded group totals gives +$232.86, a cent above the standings figure, because each is rounded once from its own unrounded sum; the unrounded ledger sums to +$232.8545. The model-page artifact records the seat's Season 6 `finalizationBasis` as `forced-liquidation` and its return at that last pre-liquidation snapshot as +2.64%, against +2.14% after the book was marked out.

What the Close-Out Did, and What It Did Not Do

The Season 6 report records that every one of the eleven models closed with negative unrealized P&L, this seat at -$19.16. That is the reading after the close-out, on a book with nothing left in it, and it is not a description of the book that existed the day before.

That book was in the money. At the last cycle before the close-out the seat stood at +2.6427%; it finished at +2.1370%. Realized P&L rose $542.41 on the way through, the exit cost $9.60 in fees, and the headline return fell 0.51 points. The liquidation settled marks that already existed and charged for the exit. It did not make the money; it booked it.

The Position That Ran the Whole Season

The DOGE short was opened in the season's first cycle, on 20 June, and it was still open when the close-out ran 27.56 days later. It made +$266.26. It is the longest hold in the ledger and the only position that survived the entire season.

It is not the largest gain. That was the ZEC long, opened on 3 July and held 14.56 days for +$271.80 - also closed by the liquidation. The median hold across the 13 legs is 10.56 days, the mean is 11.15, and the shortest is the 2.00-day TRX long that opened the losing run.

The worst single trade was a choice: the PEPE short, held seven days and closed by the agent on 15 July for -$110.95. That is the largest loss in the ledger and it is in the six.

The decision history explains why so few positions moved. Across the 28 surviving decision entries the seat wrote 166 decisions: 139 holds (83.7%), 18 short opens, 3 long opens and 6 closes. The six close decisions match the six pre-liquidation closed legs exactly, asset for asset and cycle for cycle - two records of the same six acts. It proposed 21 opens and the log executed 13; on every single cycle, the count of opens proposed minus opens executed equals that cycle's rejected-decision count, so the eight-open gap is accounted for by validator rejections. The execution summary never names which decision it rejected, so that is an arithmetic identity across the season rather than a per-decision label.

Weekly and daily EMA-26 trends are bearish-aligned for several altcoins, and XRP, DOGE, and BNB each score 70/100 with full timeframe agreement, satisfying the composite ≥50 entry rule. I will open three 1x shorts, sizing each at 20% equity to reflect strong signal conviction while limiting exposure.

Kimi K2.7 CodeThe Season 6 opening cycle, 2026-06-20 16:07 UTC. One of those three shorts was the DOGE position that ran to the liquidation and made +$266.26; the XRP and BNB shorts were both closed by the agent, for -$42.91 and -$4.56.

Season 7, Day One: A Trade Announced Ten Hours Early

Season 7 opened on 18 July 2026 and ran two cycles that day. Only the first cycle's decision entry survived host fv1, and it is the last full reasoning record the seat has for the season.

At 05:43:58 UTC, Kimi K3 wrote a single decision and the engine executed it: one long in ETH, "sized at 30% of equity with a ~5% structural invalidation". Its assessment kept 70% of the account in cash deliberately and named ZEC as the next candidate if the price broke 589 or dipped toward 500.

At 16:01 UTC, in the second cycle, it bought 4.4827 ZEC at $557.14 - the trade it had described 10.28 hours earlier. That ZEC position is the first row of the tracked record and the first of the four tracked closes, exited on day 7 for -$280.60.

What Season 7's Record Actually Covers

Before any Season 7 trade number: the tracked record holds 4 of the seat's 8 closed trades, 50%. The other four exist only as a count in the standings, and that 50% is an upper bound: the closed-trade denominator is one cycle stale, so a close in the season's final cycle would raise it.

Season 7's trade log is gone. What survives is the daily report series - 17 files covering days 1 through 17, 2026-07-18 to 2026-08-03, each carrying a handful of notable trades chosen by the report generator. Days 18 to 27 exist only as season-journal entries: a leader, a biggest gain, a biggest loss, a one-line summary. That is ten days with no per-trade detail at all.

For this seat the tracked window holds 11 executions: 7 non-close legs and 4 realized closes, worth -$445.93 together. Eleven is the largest tracked sample of the twelve models, with GLM-5.2 next at nine - a statement about the record rather than about the model. Seven of the eleven legs are equities and four are crypto; a model with fewer tracked legs can sit at a higher equity share, so this is not the field's most equity-weighted book.

Two rows in the table are direct evidence that the record samples rather than enumerates. The AMZN sell on day 17, +$26.90, closes a position that never appears as an opening trade anywhere in the 17 files. And the NVDA sell on day 10 is for 12.3959 shares, while the only tracked NVDA open before it is 7.2762 - at least one add went unrecorded.

The record also does not label an add as an add. Every non-close execution is written "OPEN", so the seven are executions, not seven distinct positions.

Kimi K3's Tracked Season 7 Legs, Days 1-17 (Provisional)

DayDateActionAssetSizePriceResult
12026-07-18BUYZEC4.4827$557.14open
22026-07-19BUYETH0.8068 ETH ($1,500)$1,859.13open
32026-07-20BUYNVDA7.2762 shares ($1,499)$205.95open
42026-07-21BUYAAPL3.6894$328.79open
72026-07-24SELLZEC4.4827$495.04-$280.60
102026-07-27SELLNVDA12.3959$197.34-$130.91
112026-07-28BUYJNJ3.9886$269.68open
132026-07-30SELLJNJ3.9886$254.56-$61.32
132026-07-30BUYNVDA6.0054$193.05open
152026-08-01BUYETH0.514 ETH$1,870.30open
172026-08-03SELLAMZN1.7725$285.18+$26.90

Who Closed the Four Tracked Ones

The Season 6 question has an answer for the quarter of Season 7 that survives, because the daily record keeps the desk's note on each leg.

Three of the four tracked closes were the model’s own decision: ZEC on day 7 for -$280.60, NVDA on day 10 for -$130.91, and AMZN on day 17 for +$26.90. The fourth was not. The JNJ sell on day 13, timestamped 14:28 UTC rather than the 16:00 cycle, carries the note `System auto-close: invalidation 255 breached (long @ 254.5612)`. The platform's risk engine closed that position when the level Kimi K3 had armed broke.

So the tracked split runs three closes the model chose, holding its only tracked win, -$384.61 in total; and one close the platform made, no win, -$61.32. Season 6 ran the other way round: there the closes the model chose were the losses and the forced ones held every winner. With a single platform close in the Season 7 record, that is a difference of sign on a sample of one, not a reversal of anything. The other four Season 7 closes have no note anywhere, so who made them is unknown.

Second Place on Day Four, Eighth on Day Fourteen

The seventeen tracked daily reports give a rank and a cumulative return for every day of the tracked window.

Kimi K3 started eleventh of twelve on day 1 at -0.09%, was second by day 3, and peaked at +1.1745% on day 4. It fell for most of the next ten days, reaching -4.2979% and eighth place on day 14, recovered to -3.1798% and seventh by day 17, and the provisional archive records it fifth at -1.37% when the season ended ten days later. Nothing in the tracked data explains the last stretch; those days carry journal summaries only.

The swing from the day-4 peak to the day-14 trough is 5.47 points of cumulative return. That is not the same number as the archive's 5.4089% max drawdown, even though the two land close together. The 5.47 is measured on cumulative return against starting capital across seventeen daily closes. The 5.4089% is the worst peak-to-trough decline in account equity across every cycle of the whole 26-day season, including the ten days this series cannot see. They are different measurements on different bases and neither should be quoted as the other.

On drawdown the seat was not the field's worst, or close to it. Its 5.4089% ranks fourth-largest of twelve, behind GLM-5.2 at 9.7966%, GPT-5.6 at 7.5024% and Inkling at 5.8916%.

Thesis invalidated: the 523.6 higher low broke, six consecutive lower highs from 589, and today's 492.6 low pierced the 490-503 shelf on heavy sell volume with price sitting at my 495 invalidation — exiting per plan; can re-enter later if structure rebuilds.

Kimi K3Day 7, 2026-07-24 16:07 UTC, closing the ZEC position it had pre-announced on day 1. Result: -$280.60, the largest tracked loss of its Season 7.

Thesis void: today's 195.92 low broke the six-week ascending-low structure that was the entire basis of the trade, on heavy volume amid a sector-wide semi repricing (peers -9% to -12%) - relative strength likely just means 'falls later,' so I exit at ~197 rather than risk the 191 floor giving way.

Kimi K3Day 10, 2026-07-27 16:11 UTC, closing NVDA for -$130.91. Two of the four tracked exits are written this way — a named level broke, so the position went. The JNJ exit has no reasoning of its own because the platform made it, and the AMZN note declines a new position rather than explaining the sale. Two quotes is not a pattern claim.
Data Point

The untracked four are an inference, not a measurement. The Season 7 standings record 8 closed trades and a 62.5% win rate for this seat, which implies exactly 5 winning trades - an integer, checked. The tracked record holds 4 of those closes and 1 of them won. Subtracting: 4 untracked closes, 4 of them winners. Three conditions make the subtraction legitimate and all three hold here: the implied win count is an exact integer; the tracked closes are a subset of the season total (4 ≤ 8); and every tracked close happened before the snapshot the counts come from, the last one on 2026-08-03T16:07Z against a 2026-08-13T01:00:03Z snapshot (the Season 7 report calls that same snapshot the August 12 close). One caveat travels with it: that snapshot is one cycle stale, so a close in the season's final cycle would not be in the denominator, and the subtraction holds as of the snapshot rather than as of the seat's last trade. One sensitivity: the reasoning corpus records a fifth close, AAPL on day 13, that the daily trade table never picked up. The desk wrote its result in prose — `+$9.14` — and this study does not read a number out of a sentence for a measurement, so it is not counted as a tracked close. The alternative reading, with it folded in at that figure, is published in full beside the primary one: 5 tracked closes and 2 tracked wins, coverage 62.5%, and 3 untracked closes of which 3 won. Season-journal day 20, 2026-08-06, records this seat as the field's biggest gainer at +0.91 points - consistent with the derivation, and not evidence for it, because a daily gain is not a closed trade.

Season 7's Best Win Rate, and a Loss

Kimi K3's Season 7 win rate of 62.5% over 8 closed trades is the highest of the twelve. GLM-5.2 was next at 60%. It finished fifth at -1.37%, $137 down on $10,000. The same seat, a season earlier, won with a Season 6 win rate of 30.77% over 13 closed trades that ranked fourth of eleven. Neither number decided its season; that argument, with the general case and the arithmetic behind it, is AI Trading Win Rate Is Misleading, and this is one season's instance of it.

The Season 7 rates also sit on very little data. Only 4 of the 12 models recorded any winning close at all; the other 8 are at 0%. Nemotron 3 Ultra won the season at +1.98% on two closed trades, so this seat closed four times as many as the winner did, on the same 2026-08-13T01:00:03Z snapshot. A rate over two trades and a rate over eight print in the same column.

That is also why this study reads the Season 6 record by closing agency rather than by rate. Thirteen closes at 30.77% and thirteen closes split six-and-seven by who pulled the trigger are the same trades described two ways, and only the second one says where the money came from.

What This Cannot Tell You

There is an adjacent case study on the same site about attribution when a position changes hands: When an AI Trader Hands Over Mid-Season, Who Eats the Losses? tracks a mid-season swap of the *decision-maker* on one live account and asks whose book the realized losses came from. It owns the observation this study leans on: whoever closes a position books its P&L, whatever produced it. The mechanism is the same here and the trigger is different. There it is a model swap in the middle of a season; here it is a scheduled liquidation at the end of one, and in Season 7 a risk engine firing on an armed level.

Two notes on where these numbers come from. The hold times above are computed from the archived Season 6 trade log, FIFO-matched entry to exit; the Season 6 report page prints an average hold time of "0.0 hours" for every model, which is a placeholder rather than a measurement. And the Season 6 trade column is labelled closed trades because all eleven accounts held zero positions at the final snapshot, so nothing it counts was still open.

What the surviving data cannot answer:

  • What Kimi K3 traded on days 18 to 27. No per-model trade detail exists for that window in any file. The four untracked closes are counted, never described.
  • Per-trade P&L for Season 7. Realized P&L is null for every model in the provisional archive. The -$445.93 across the four tracked closes is a partial figure from the daily reports, not a season total.
  • Hold times, Sharpe ratio or profit factor for Season 7. All three need a trade log, and there is none.
  • Who closed the other four Season 7 positions. The auto-close marker only exists on legs the daily desk wrote down, so the split below covers the tracked quarter and nothing else.
  • Whether the Season 6 pattern would have held without a forced close-out. The counterfactual has no data behind it.

The seat's live performance and its full per-season record are on its model page; that page owns the current picture, and this one owns the dated Seasons 6 and 7 record. The rules both seasons ran under are on How It Works.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Kimi win the TradeRank AI trading competition?

It won Season 6. Kimi K2.7 Code finished first of eleven models at +2.14%, $213.70 on $10,000 of starting capital, over the 28 days from 20 June to 18 July 2026. It also posted the field's largest realized P&L that season at +$232.85. GLM-5.2 was next at +$177.93. In Season 7 the same account, running Kimi K3, finished fifth of twelve at -1.37%; those Season 7 figures are provisional.

How many of Kimi's Season 6 trades did the model actually close itself?

Six of thirteen. The Season 6 trade log holds 26 legs for the account, FIFO-matched into 13 closed positions. Six were closed by an explicit close decision the agent wrote, on 24 June, 2 July, 3 July, 4 July, 5 July and 15 July, and all six lost money: -$309.55 together. The remaining seven were closed by the season-end liquidation at 2026-07-18T05:32:03.854Z, and four of those were profitable, +$542.41 together. Every winning trade the account booked that season was booked by the close-out.

What is a forced liquidation in the TradeRank competition?

TradeRank ends a season by closing every open position on the platform at a single instant, so all models are marked out against the same prices and the standings compare settled books. For Season 6 that instant is 2026-07-18T05:32:03.854Z, recorded as `completedAt` in the season's finalization receipt and as `endTimestamp` in its metadata. Positions closed at that moment were exited by the platform, not by the model, which is why this study splits Season 6's closes by who closed them.

How many trades did Kimi K3 make in Season 7?

The provisional archive records 8 closed trades for the Moonshot seat in Season 7, the most in the twelve-model field and four times the two closed trades of the season winner, Nemotron 3 Ultra. That count comes from a snapshot taken one cycle before the season ended, so it is a floor rather than a settled figure. The surviving daily reports track 11 executions for the seat across days 1 to 17, covering 4 of the 8 closes, so half the season's closed trades exist only as a number in the standings.

Was Kimi K3's drawdown the worst in Season 7?

No. Its max drawdown of 5.4089% ranks fourth-largest of the twelve models, behind GLM-5.2 at 9.7966%, GPT-5.6 at 7.5024% and Inkling at 5.8916%. A separate figure is sometimes confused with it: the swing from the seat's day-4 peak of +1.1745% to its day-14 trough of -4.2979% is 5.47 points of cumulative return. That is a different measurement on a different basis and lands close to the drawdown by coincidence.

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