About

Casey Smith

I’m a semiconductor engineer based in Idaho, with a background spanning device physics, process integration, product engineering, and product quality. My day job is solving data-heavy problems where the answer has to hold up under scrutiny — root-causing failures, building test plans, and making calls backed by evidence rather than intuition.

How the trading fits in

That same discipline carried over into the markets. In 2021 I started trading a rolling butterfly strategy on SPX and RUT, and treated it less like a hobby and more like an engineering problem: define the process, measure the results, and iterate from there. Since then it’s grown into a small portfolio of systematic strategies — each one backtested across years of data before it ever touches a live account, and each one logged, monitored, and debugged the same way I’d treat any other production system.

That means real bugs get found and fixed in the open — a stale price feed, a filter using the wrong threshold, a range calculation pulling the wrong day’s data. The strategies on this site aren’t theoretical; they’re running live, and the engineering behind them is held to the same standard I’d expect from any other system I’d put my name on.

Why this site exists

Sawtooth Alpha documents that work in the open — the strategies, the methodology at a high level, and the actual results, good and bad. I’m not a financial advisor, I don’t manage money on behalf of others, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell, or follow along. It’s a track record, not a pitch.