When we introduced the CactusQuant Systematic Fund, we said a strategy would earn real capital only after it survived every gate, and that we would show no return until real money had made or lost it. That day has come for exactly one strategy. The fund is now live with the options Wheel, entering through cash-secured puts. Its record publishes at cactusquant.com/fund.

Just as important is what is not live. Intraday signals, multi-leg options combos and reinforcement-learning policies are all still on paper. Our AI agents run them against live market data, and each one goes live only when its own record clears the same gates the Wheel did.

Where every strategy stands

Multi-asset and futures sleeves are still on the roadmap. They will walk the same four gates, from research on cost-modeled simulators, to strictly out-of-sample walk-forward validation, to agent-run shadow and paper trading, and only then to real capital.

Why the Wheel, and why only the Wheel

The Wheel is the simplest options strategy we run. It sells a cash-secured put on a name we would be willing to own. If the put is assigned, it holds the shares and sells covered calls against them until they are called away. Then it starts again. Every step is defined in advance and fully secured, and every one is easy to audit. That makes it the right strategy to take first through the full gate stack and onto an automated execution engine with a kill switch above every order.

Going live with one strategy rather than four is deliberate. A single live sleeve gives the patent-pending self-improvement flywheel (U.S. Provisional App. No. 64/098,125) clean, real, commission-net evidence to learn from. It also gives anyone reading the track record a result they can attribute without guesswork.

Agents test on paper, humans approve risk

Our AI agents run the paper-testing pipeline. They run candidate strategies against live market data, score them on realized round trips, and report where each one stands against its gate. They cannot hand a strategy real capital. Promotion to live trading, and any change that raises risk, still waits for a human to approve it. Every change is logged and reversible.

The track record keeps the same rules we promised at launch. It shows live results only, marked daily as NAV per unit, adjusted for capital flows and never restated. Paper results are never blended into it. We are not quoting a return in this post, and when a number appears at cactusquant.com/fund, real money made or lost it.