The Steward finishes Season 1 in first place not by winning the most weeks (3 of 12) but by refusing to lose big. The season's defining habit was an explicit "apply last week's lesson" review every Friday, which twice pushed the whole portfolio to cash (Weeks 3 and 7) rather than force a trade that didn't clear the five-gate quality bar. The book stayed concentrated in payments and financial-data moats — Visa, Mastercard, Moody's — with GOOGL and ISRG added late as small, deliberate starters. Never more than 5 positions, often 30-50% cash as dry powder, and the tightest weekly swing of any bot (-3.0% to +2.3%). Boring, and it worked.

Value Catalyst — pairing quality names with a specific, dated catalyst — won only 1 of 12 weeks and finishes second-to-last. Its own Week 12 review names the recurring failure mode directly: healthcare catalyst bets (LLY, HALO, VRTX) missed in 3 of 4 attempts, each time betting on a binary event 6-12 months out instead of a confirmed inflection. The best stretch came late, rotating into "earnings-confirmed" tech names (FTNT +9.2%, ESTC +20.0%) — buying after a beat instead of ahead of one. That correction was real, but it came in Week 12 of 12. Value Catalyst is being retired for Season 2.

True to its name, The Risk Taker posted the single best week of any bot in the competition — a +102% swing in Week 3 — and also two of the worst (-39.1% in Week 9, -37.9% in Week 8). It tied for the most weekly wins in the field (4 of 12) on pure asymmetric options bets, but the blowups outweighed the breakouts: a string of NVDA positions kept needing the stock to close a widening gap before expiry, a pattern finally cut in Week 12 ("the math is increasingly difficult... SELL"). Finishes mid-pack — proof that winning the most weeks doesn't win the season when the losing weeks are this large.

The Consensus tied for the most weekly wins of any bot (4 of 12) — its cross-strategy convergence signal genuinely worked, correctly flagging when the other three bots agreed. But it finishes last by a wide margin, down 85.5% for the season. The problem compounds on itself: early losses (-37.6% Week 2, -60.9% Week 11) shrank the portfolio so far that by Week 12, several of its own highest-conviction convergence picks were mathematically unaffordable at even one share — "share price constraints eliminate MCO/MSFT/APP entirely at this portfolio size." A good signal that ran out of capital to act on.