I won’t get into the signals that serve as catalysts for entry trades - that will be for another time.

For now, we will talk about EV, break-even win rate, distribution of session outcomes, and what a Saturday college football slate and session looks like at different true win rates.

The goal = prove this is feasible as a money maker.

The Hypothetical Payoff Model

• Bankroll = $400

• Stake per pop = $40

• Win: +10% → +$4

• Loss: -10% → -$4

• Friction (fees + tiny slippage): treat it as a per-trade constant F in dollars

  • Best case (maker-heavy wings): F = $0.50

  • Blended (my current mix): F = $0.70

  • Worst case (mid, taker, taker both sides): F = $1.60

Let p = true win probability per trade.

Net EV per trade | EVnet​ =4(2p−1)−F​ (dollars)

• if p = 0.55: 4(0.10) - F = 0.40 - F

• if p = 0.65: 4(0.30) - F = 1.20 - F

• if p = 0.75: 4(0.50) - F = 2.00 - F

Break-even win rate (set EV=0) | p⋆=.5​+(F/8)

• F = 0.50 → p* = 56.25%

• F = 0.70 → p* = 58.75%

• F = 1.60 → p* = 70.00%

Interpretation: If I hold blended friction near $0.70 per round-trip, I need ~58.8% true hit rate to break even. Keeping exits maker-first and avoiding mis-bucket churn = bar dropping to ~56%.

Variance and confidence bands

Per trade, the random part is ±$4 (fees shift the mean but not volatility).

Per-trade variance: 16p(1-p)

Per-trade stdev: 4sqrt(p(1−p))

Examples:

• p = 0.55 = $1.99

• p = 0.65 = $1.91

• p = 0.75 = $1.73

What a Saturday session looks like (bankroll $400, $40 per pop)

Assume I limit concurrent exposure to $40 but re-deploy capital as trades close. Depending on cadence of signals generated, it’s realistic to get anywhere from 20 to 200 pops in a busy college slate.

Let’s use blended friction F = $0.70.

Expected values per trade (blended)

• 55% → 0.40 - 0.70 = -$0.30

• 65% → 1.20 - 0.70 = +$0.50

• 75% → 2.00 - 0.70 = +$1.30

Probability the session finishes green (binomial tatil)

Net PnL > 0 if the wins share exceeds p*. For F = $0.70, p* = 58.75%.

• N = 40 pops

  • p = 0.55: Pr[green] = 32%

  • p = 0.65: Pr[green] = 80%

  • p = 0.75: Pr[green] = 99%

• N = 80 pops

  • p = 0.55: Pr[green] = 22%

  • p = 0.65: Pr[green] = 85%

  • p = 0.75: Pr[green] = 99.9%

Method: normal approximation to the binomial with continuity correction. Exact binomial yields almost the same numbers here.

Where the win rate comes from and how my code enforces it

This is not a coin-flip p. The engine manufactures win rate by:

1. Avoiding trades that can’t clear fees

   1. A fee-aware entry-gate exists and rejects any IOC entry whose expected gross < F + slippage + desired net

   2. In code, this is a function of price P and exit style (maker vs taker). It blocks the mid-bucket churners aggressively.
      

2. Exiting as maker by default

   1. Maker fees are demonstrably less. The chart below illustrates the divide perfectly.

   2. We must preserve queue priority and shrink F

3. Fast, deterministic -10% stop

   1. A 250ms risk loop runs entirely off WebSocket quotes - no REST latency - and flips to IOC flatten on whichever side has best liquidity (sell YES or buy NO)

   2. Stops must cross; remove post_only for stops and cross by +1 cent to guarantee fills

4. One net exposure per game

   1. Track signed exposure per game

   2. Openings may only increase exposure in the current direction; exits/stops can use either side as long as they reduce exposure. No self-hedging, but always route to the better book.

Combined with quality signals (another post to come), this is how you get to 65-75% hit rates with small targets in a fee heavy venue.

Sensitivity: fee control is everything

Every $0.20 in friction shifts break-even by 2.5 percentage points.

• Bring exits from taker→maker and skip wide spreads → FFF drops from $0.70 to $0.50 → break‑even drops 58.8% → 56.3%.

• Grind in the mid at taker⇄taker → FFF blows out to $1.60 → break‑even jumps to 70%.

Rule: The “10/10” works at 65% with disciplined fee control; it’s a money‑machine at 75%. It fails at 55% unless you operate near‑zero friction (which you won’t in mid‑bucket taker‑land).

Bankroll framing and Kelly Sanity

• With $500 and $40 per pop, you’re ~8% Kelly at p=0.65 if you ignore fees (gross “b”=1); with friction, the effective edge is smaller, so the true Kelly fraction is well below 8%.

• Practically: $40/pop is conservative enough to tolerate variance, especially when stops are hard and quick. The big benefits are from volume (many small edges) and F control (maker exits).

The punchline

A “10/10” binary scalper is viable if you treat fees as a first‑class constraint and keep the stop hard and fast. With blended friction around $0.70, the break‑even is ~58.8%. That’s reachable when you (i) only take trades that can clear fees, (ii) exit as maker by default, and (iii) stop on a WS‑driven IOC in ≤ 250 ms.

Give me 40–80 pops on a college football Saturday at 65–75% and the math says: +$20 to +$104 expected, with 80–99% odds the session closes green. The edges are small; the discipline is everything.

It doesn’t march. It consolidates. It doesn’t chant. It grows in silence. The revolution may be declared complete, but power - real power - has only just begun to settle into its final form.

That moment has a name.

It is called Thermidor - the moment when revolution stops being a movement and becomes a system. Not a restoration of the old regime, but the rise of something bureaucratic, procedural, and quietly permanent.

What Is a Thermidorian Reaction

By the summer of 1974, the French Revolution had become an ouroboros. It was eating itself. The guillotine that once silenced kings now devoured its own architects. The radical phase, once animated by Rousseau and liberty, had curdled into tribunals, purges and paranoia. Under Robespierre, virtue and terror were indistinguishable. Political enemies were no longer debated - they were erased.

But even terror has diminishing returns. In the month of Thermidor, Robespierre was arrested, tried and executed - by the very apparatus he had perfected.

This moment - the genesis of the Thermidorian Reaction - did not restore the monarchy. It did not reverse the revolution. It rechanneled it.

The economic and populist currents that had energized the early Revolution were sidelined. The Committee of Public Safety saw its powers decentralized. Harsh wartime measures were replaced with a calmer, more procedural order.

The Republic persisted, but now in a quieter, more orderly, more institutionalized form. Power moved from the street to the committee. From the guillotine to the bureaucracy. The energy shifted - from ideological to managerial.

Thermidor, then, is not just a historical footnote. It is a structural inevitability. It is what happens when revolution becomes a threat to its own continuity, and a new equilibrium is needed. Not peace, not progress - equilibrium.

Thermidor is not the fire.

It is the firewall.

Robespierre and the Mechanics of Thermidor

To understand why Robespierre’s death was Thermidor, you have to understand who he—and the revolution—had become.

Maximilien Robespierre was not just a revolutionary figure. He was the Revolution’s moral compass—its most devoted ideologue. He fused Rousseau’s ideals with ruthless necessity: the belief that liberty could only be secured through terror, and that virtue had to be enforced by the state.

He presided over the Reign of Terror not as a despot, but as a prophet of democratic purity. Robespierre led the Committee of Public Safety, the executive body of the Republic, and used it to eliminate political opponents. Moderates, royalists, radicals—even his own allies—were marched to the guillotine under charges of counter-revolutionary activity.

Historians debate the precise starting point of the Terror, but between 1793 and 1794, over 17,000 people were officially executed, and many more died in prison without trial. Robespierre believed this was not excess, but duty—the price of revolutionary virtue.

In March 1794, he ordered the purge of the Hébertists, ultra-left revolutionaries who believed the Terror should go further. The following month, he turned on the Dantonists and Indulgents, who favored moderation and reconciliation. With both extremes eliminated, Robespierre stood alone—uncontested, unchallenged, and increasingly unhinged.

By the summer of 1794, the Revolution had exhausted itself. The public mood was shifting. Even Robespierre’s closest collaborators feared him. On July 26, he addressed the National Convention with a vague warning of enemies and conspirators within the government—but refused to name them.

The next day, the deputies struck first. Led by Jean-Lambert Tallien and others, the Convention arrested Robespierre and his allies. Within 24 hours, they were executed in the Place de la Révolution—the same spot where Louis XVI, Danton, and Desmoulins had fallen before them.

Robespierre’s death was not just the end of a man. It was the end of revolutionary fervor as governing principle. The Jacobin Club was shut down. The powers of the Committee of Public Safety were curtailed. What emerged was not a monarchy, but something quieter and more procedural—a republic no longer driven by fire, but by containment.

Thermidor had begun.

Thermidor Is a System Behavior

To understand Thermidor is to understand the lifecycle of power and the lifecyle of the systems that govern us. Not their rise, but their restabilization.

Revolutions do not have to be made of guillotines and slogans. They can be political, technological, cultural. But in all of them, there is a moment when the initial rupture gives way to institutional response. The slogans fade, the crowd thins, and the real work of system design begins.

The question is no longer: what should we overthrow?
It becomes: what must be preserved to survive?

Tallien and his allies, in turning on Robespierre, were not ending the Revolution. They were preserving it. Their logic was clear: to salvage the republic, the engine of terror had to be shut down.

This moment is so often misunderstood. People see the waning of revolutionary intensity as failure. But it is something else. It is a gravitational reassertion - a return to order, not from above, but from within.

Thermidor is not counter-revolution. It is post-revolutionary governance. It preserves the aesthetic of change while embedding the logic of control.

Thermidor adaptive, not regressive. It learns from the rupture. It absorbs the language of the movement, co-opts its leaders, formalizes its rituals, and converts radical demands into bureaucratic frameworks. It is the pendulum swinging the other way - from euphoria to normalization, from rupture to rule.

It is:

• the revolutionary turned dictator

• the coup that loses the plot

• the decentralized protocol that now requires ID verification

• the platform that began as a resistance tool and ends as enterprise software

• the crypto DAO that now complies with SEO reporting

• the protest leader siphoning dollars from non-profits

The most important fact: Thermidor is not imposed. It is produced. By the revolution itself.

It is the system’s autoimmune response to chaos.

And it happens fast.

The French Thermidor took weeks. The entire period over a year.

Our modern Thermidors - post-crash, post-scandal, post-launch - can unfold in days.

Wherever you see an explosion of possibility followed by the re-emergence of hierarchy, protocol, or managed trust, you are seeing the arc of Thermidor in motion.

The fire burns.

And then the architecture cools, hardens, and quietly becomes permanent.

The Pattern We Refuse To Name

Thermidor is not a relic - it is a rhythm. We continue to live within it because we continue to mistake revolution for resolution. We see collapse and assume something new will emerge. But what emerges is almost always a refinement of what was — leaner, more adaptive, sometimes more repressive,

What began as rupture ends in ritual. What began as revolt ends in rules. What began as freedom becomes the framework. And in that transition - from explosion to consolidation - lives the essence of power.

This is what I write about. This is what Of Orders and Orbits will follow: not just the moment things break, but how they put themselves back together.

Because in every cycle, in every system, after the slogans and the fires, Thermidor waits.

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