Verdicts and advice¶
Verdicts¶
| Verdict | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Supported | beat the benchmark by the required margin, within the risk ceiling, on enough trades to be worth reading |
| NotSupported | ran cleanly and did not clear the bar |
| Inconclusive | the run cannot answer the question either way — the expected outcome, and not a failure |
The criteria: at least 30 trades, an excess return over the benchmark
above 0, a drawdown under 30%. A finding also carries
read_this_first, one sentence saying what the verdict means for that
run.
Advice¶
Each item: a finding in words, its evidence, an action, and a
severity — blocking (the numbers are not a result yet), warning (read
them with this in mind), info. Examples the platform produces:
- Too few round trips to tell skill from luck — widen the window or loosen the entry; do not read the return until it does.
- The run ended holding a position — treat the tail of the curve as provisional.
- The point estimate says nothing about its own error — lengthen the window; do not compare this Sharpe against another until it is.
- The selection did not survive deflation — the best of this many tries is what luck produces.
- The dividend gap is most of the margin — the split-adjusted series cannot see distributions the benchmark paid.
- Supported only under the stated costs — do not promote this; widen the edge or trade less often until the rule survives fills that cost twice what was assumed.
A session's verdict¶
The same vocabulary, applied while a rule trades, by comparing the session's ledger with the finding's out-of-sample expectation:
| Verdict | Reason named when it applies |
|---|---|
| Holding | |
| Diverging | expectancy (live expectancy per trade outside the out-of-sample interval, after enough trades), drawdown (beyond the out-of-sample max by a factor, before the account's halt), frequency (firing far less or more often than in the window), regime (entries in a regime the finding was not Supported in), execution (slippage above the cost model assumed) |
| Inconclusive | too few live trades yet |
A verdict never touches the gate. It feeds the warning tier and the promotion gate: a live executor refuses a finding whose paper session was Diverging.
Cost tiers¶
Every experiment states one cost model, the realistic one: what a fill is expected to cost at the venue it was studied for. Two more are derived from it. Conservative is half again the commission, twice the slippage and never under five basis points, twice the flat and per-unit fees, twice an option's spread; a study that would be Supported is asked whether it survives this, and refused if not. Optimistic is half the commission and nothing else, a floor for asking how much of a result is costs; nothing is ever judged under it.
Staleness¶
stale_reason on a finding: data, ruleset, or both. The finding stays;
it no longer describes the present. data means a bar inside the span the
run read has changed. A series that has only grown is not stale.