Yes — some form of periodic “relearn” is a legit way to fight drift, but a full wipe is usually the most dangerous version of that idea.maybe a re-learn-wipe data periodically would address the lag as it builds up drab data causation or win rate?
What I'm worried about is real: as data accumulates, the SLM can get “dragged” by older regimes and the model’s edge can decay because the market changes (volatility regimes, liquidity, macro, microstructure, etc.). The fix is not bigger history, it’s better recency handling.
What works better than a full wipe:
1) Rolling training window (most common, most robust)
Train only on the most recent N trades or last X days (ex: last 500–2,000 closed trades or last 90–180 trading days).- Keeps the model aligned to current market behavior
- Prevents “drab data” dominance
- Still has enough sample size to generalize
2) Exponential decay weighting (best if you want “memory” but not “drag”)
Keep all data, but give newer outcomes more weight.- Avoids catastrophic forgetting
- Naturally adapts to drift
- Smooths regime transitions
3) Regime-aware training (high win-rate upside)
Tag trades by simple regime features (ex: VIX band, ATR percentile, trendiness, session type), then either:- train separate models per regime, or
- include regime features so the model learns different behavior per regime
When a wipe makes sense (rare)
A wipe is useful only when:- you changed core logic so old labels are no longer comparable (strategy definition changed)
- you had a bug contaminating labels/features (bad P/L, wrong exit price, missing fills)
- the feature schema changed so older data is incompatible
Practical “safe” policy I’m using for Nexus II
- Never wipe ledger/trades.
- Maintain an SLM dataset built from ledger.
- Retrain on:
- Rolling window: last 180 trading days OR last 2000 trades (whichever is smaller but above a minimum)
- Decay: half-life around 60–90 trading days
- Trigger retrainwhen:
- rolling 20-trade win rate drops below threshold, OR
- drift detected (feature distributions shift), OR
- every week/month on schedule
- Always run a shadow evaluationbefore promoting new weights:
- compare “current model” vs “candidate model” on last X trades
- promote only if it beats by a margin and doesn’t increase drawdown / loss tail