https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog Practical writing on AI-driven QA, automation, agentic systems, and the AI bull/bear case for public software companies. en-us Tue, 12 May 2026 10:03:04 GMT 1440 https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/why-my-five-percent-take-profit-is-the-most-expensive-rule-i-run https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/why-my-five-percent-take-profit-is-the-most-expensive-rule-i-run Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT OpenClaw Tutorials The five percent take-profit on my stock engine quietly cost me about four hundred dollars of expectation over sixty sessions. I audited it this week and decided to keep it. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/three-lines-i-cut-from-my-agents-prompt https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/three-lines-i-cut-from-my-agents-prompt Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT AI & Automation The system prompt I write for my agent grew to four hundred lines in a year. Last week I cut three of them. Here is what they were and what changed. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/the-threshold-i-almost-lowered https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/the-threshold-i-almost-lowered Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Career & Best Practices The bias-score gate on my options engine has been refusing trades on most sessions for two months. I sat with the question of lowering it this Sunday, and decided not to. Here is the math. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/the-sharpe-number-i-stopped-quoting https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/the-sharpe-number-i-stopped-quoting Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT OpenClaw Tutorials Sharpe on 60 paper sessions swung from 0.4 to 2.8 depending on the 30-day window. That is not a measurement. That is a coin flip with a Greek letter on it. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/the-day-my-three-positions-were-really-one https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/the-day-my-three-positions-were-really-one Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT OpenClaw Tutorials I thought four to five open options positions meant a diversified book. I checked the pairwise correlations across 90 sessions. Five-position days were really two-position days. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/saturday-mornings-i-read-the-logs-before-the-news https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/saturday-mornings-i-read-the-logs-before-the-news Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Career & Best Practices Every Saturday, before any news app, I read my trading engine's scheduler log line by line. Here is what it caught me this week, and why the order matters. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/the-days-my-engine-sat-out-an-audit https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/the-days-my-engine-sat-out-an-audit Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT OpenClaw Tutorials The bias-score gate kept my options engine out of the market on 47 of the last 60 sessions. I went back to compute what those skipped trades would have paid. The number was honest, but the breakdown changed how I think about the gate. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/three-tests-i-write-before-letting-an-agent-touch-a-function https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/three-tests-i-write-before-letting-an-agent-touch-a-function Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT AI & Automation After a year of letting an agent write most of my code, the audit step shifted from reading every line to writing three tests up front. Here are the three, and the bug each catches. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/what-slippage-actually-costs-audit-of-200-options-fills https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/what-slippage-actually-costs-audit-of-200-options-fills Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT OpenClaw Tutorials I exported every fill from 200 options trades and totaled the slippage. The number was bigger than I expected, and the cause was not where I was looking. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/what-i-stopped-doing-after-a-year-of-coding-with-agents https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/what-i-stopped-doing-after-a-year-of-coding-with-agents Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT AI & Automation After a year of writing most of my code with an agent in the loop, I have a list of habits I had to stop. Five of them, with the bug or wasted hour behind each. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/the-five-rules-i-do-not-break-on-sundays https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/the-five-rules-i-do-not-break-on-sundays Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT AI & Automation Running an automated stack solo means Sundays are the most dangerous day of the week. Here are the five rules I have written for myself, and why I learned each one the hard way. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/three-things-about-market-regimes-i-only-learned-in-live https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/three-things-about-market-regimes-i-only-learned-in-live Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT OpenClaw Tutorials OpenClaw's regime classifier looked clean in code review. Six months of live paper-trading taught me three things no backtest ever surfaced. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/four-silent-failures-in-my-own-stack-a-friday-postmortem https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/four-silent-failures-in-my-own-stack-a-friday-postmortem Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Career & Best Practices Four things in my content automation stack failed this week without paging me. Here is what the logs actually said, and what I rebuilt after I caught each one. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/three-backtest-failure-modes-that-cost-me-real-money https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/three-backtest-failure-modes-that-cost-me-real-money Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT OpenClaw Tutorials Every backtest I've built looked fine on a Sharpe chart. The ones that broke in paper had the same three leaks. Here are the checks I run now before I trust any curve. https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-snowflake-snow https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-snowflake-snow Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Company Teardown SNOW is down 69% from its 2021 peak. ARR is $5.1bn growing 30% Y/Y with 125% NRR. The bear: AI agents prefer cheap, lightning-fast queries Snowflake makes expensive. The bull: 10,000+ enterprises already centralized here — the battle for data is over. https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-freshworks-frsh https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-freshworks-frsh Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Company Teardown Down 84% from its 2021 IPO peak, Freshworks just posted its first full-year GAAP profit and $917M ARR. Freddy AI is at $25M ARR with 8,000 paying customers. But AI-native ITSM and CX startups are compressing the exact market Freshworks built its SMB moat in. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/qa-engineer-career-growth-2026 https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/qa-engineer-career-growth-2026 Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Career & Growth The QA landscape is shifting faster than most engineers realize. Here's the honest breakdown of which skills will make you irreplaceable in 2026 and beyond. https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-okta-okta https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-okta-okta Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Company Teardown OKTA is down 71% from its 2022 peak. ARR is $2.7bn growing 13% Y/Y. Microsoft Entra is free with M365 and a 2023 breach shattered trust. But every AI agent needs an identity layer — and non-human identity management is a brand new $50bn problem. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/i-built-an-automated-options-trading-bot-heres-what-happened https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/i-built-an-automated-options-trading-bot-heres-what-happened Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT OpenClaw Tutorials I wired up a regime-based options trading bot with AI signal filtering and let it run. Here's everything I learned about what works, what blew up, and what I'd do differently. https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-unity-u https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-unity-u Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Company Teardown Unity is down 91% from its 2021 peak after a catastrophic runtime fee announcement that alienated its entire developer base. But the 3D engine powering 70% of mobile games might be the unexpected infrastructure winner of the AI-generated content era. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/i-replaced-half-my-qa-team-with-playwright-ai-agents-heres-what-happened https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/i-replaced-half-my-qa-team-with-playwright-ai-agents-heres-what-happened Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT QA Engineering After six months running AI-assisted testing with Playwright's MCP integration and self-healing tests in production, I have thoughts. Spoiler: it's not the apocalypse QA engineers feared. https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-veeva-veev https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-veeva-veev Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Company Teardown VEEV is down 43% from its 2021 peak but is one of the most defensible businesses in public software. A 22% GAAP operating margin at $3bn ARR with 120% NRR tells the whole story. The AI risk is real but underestimated — so is the moat. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/april-2026-ai-agent-llm-breakthroughs-qa-engineers https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/april-2026-ai-agent-llm-breakthroughs-qa-engineers Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT AI & Automation April 2026 has been a landmark month for agentic AI and LLM releases. Here's my breakdown of what's actually shipping, what it means for QA engineers, and why your test strategy needs to evolve right now. https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-gitlab-gtlb https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-gitlab-gtlb Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Company Teardown GTLB is down 61% from its 2021 peak. ARR is $820M growing 26% Y/Y with 120% NRR. GitHub Copilot has dominated AI coding headlines, but GitLab is building the complete DevSecOps platform — and Duo AI embedded in CI/CD and security scanning may be more valuable than autocomplete. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/i-backtested-every-sp500-stock-with-ai-and-found-the-only-pattern-that-actually-works https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/i-backtested-every-sp500-stock-with-ai-and-found-the-only-pattern-that-actually-works Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Quantitative Trading After 3 months of backtesting 500 stocks across dozens of technical and fundamental signals, I found exactly four patterns with statistically robust edges. Most popular strategies are completely random. Here's what the data actually shows. https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-confluent-cflt https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-confluent-cflt Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Company Teardown CFLT is down 71% from its 2021 peak. ARR is $1.1bn growing 22% Y/Y with 118% NRR. AWS and Redpanda are eating managed Kafka from below. But real-time event streaming is the nervous system of every AI agent deployment — and Confluent owns the standard. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/i-engineered-a-real-time-options-flow-scanner-here-is-what-the-smart-money-looks-like https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/i-engineered-a-real-time-options-flow-scanner-here-is-what-the-smart-money-looks-like Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Quantitative Trading Unusual options activity precedes major stock moves more often than most people realize. I built a scanner that monitors live options flow, filters for institutional-sized bets, and alerts me before the news breaks. Here's the full system and what I've learned. https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-elastic-estc https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-elastic-estc Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Company Teardown ESTC is down 58% from its 2021 peak. ARR is $1.6bn growing 17% Y/Y. The bear: AWS forked it, Pinecone and Weaviate eat the vector DB market. The bull: hybrid search (keyword + semantic) is what enterprise RAG actually needs — and Elasticsearch is already embedded in everything. https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/i-built-a-news-sentiment-ai-that-predicts-stock-moves-24-hours-early https://suneetmalhotra.com/blog/i-built-a-news-sentiment-ai-that-predicts-stock-moves-24-hours-early Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Quantitative Trading After years of watching market-moving news break on Twitter before it hit the wire, I built a real-time NLP pipeline that ingests financial news, scores sentiment with an LLM, and flags tickers before the crowd catches on. Here's the full architecture. https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-docusign-docu https://suneetmalhotra.com/stocks/teardown-docusign-docu Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Company Teardown DOCU is down 75% from its 2021 peak. ARR is $2.9bn growing 9% Y/Y. E-signature has become a commodity, but the contract lifecycle management market is $10bn and growing — and DocuSign's Maestro AI platform is the most credible pivot in enterprise SaaS.