Why We Don’t Just “Buy at 5c, Sell at 30c”

It’s tempting to think energy trading is simple: always charge at 5c, always sell at 30c. Many new users ask for this because it matched what happened this week. But the market never sits still.

Prices move every five minutes. Some weeks 5c never shows up. Other weeks, 30c is just the beginning of a spike to $15. If you hard-code rules from one week, you’ll miss the next opportunity—or worse, buy high and sell low.

This is the classic trap of overfitting: learning too fast from too little data. At Powston we train softly at the start, gathering more history before adjusting. That way, when the real volatility arrives, the system isn’t locked into last week’s patterns.

The goal isn’t to win a single week. The goal is to capture value across seasons, price shocks, and weather events. That’s why we’ve been refining this, five-minutes at a time, for years.

More on overfitting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting