A paper fund that publishes its kills.
Ballast runs five all-weather paper books, priced every trading day by an AI operator and committed to git as they happen. The research program behind them answers to a pre-registered statistical gate, almost everything we have registered has died at it, and the whole score is public including the survivors we decided not to trade. What we can honestly claim today is disciplined risk premia and an operation you can audit. Nothing more is claimed until the gate and the forward record earn it.
The score we keep against ourselves
Every strategy idea we test is pre-registered with its thresholds before the result exists, then scored by a deflated Sharpe gate that corrects for how many things we tried. The gate is calibrated against pure noise: in its latest full null battery it shipped 0 of 100 strategies that had no edge by construction. It has killed 8 of the 9 hypotheses pre-registered and published so far, including one it first shipped and we later took back in public. The one that cleared it is held off by default, with the findings that stop it being a tradeable claim printed in the same row as the result. And it cuts the other way too: our own factor regression says the aggressive book's backtested return is mostly plain market exposure (market beta 0.51, R squared 0.62), which we print rather than bury. That is the product: an operation that will not let us lie to ourselves about our own results.
Three books, one architecture
Same all-weather engine, three risk levels. Pick the temperament that fits you. These are model portfolios you can follow, not accounts we manage, and every figure below is paper.
Ballast Aggressive Paper
Ballast Balanced Paper
Ballast Conservative Paper
Forward experiments, unproven
These books start from the aggressive all-weather book, then add strategy overlays chosen by a backtest search. They run forward in the open like the rest, but the honest re scoring of that search (see each book's honesty panel) found the overlays' edge does not clearly survive deflation and out of sample testing. Read them as an experiment, not a proven upgrade.
Ballast Systematic Aggressive Paper Forward experiment, unproven
Ballast Short Vol Watch Paper Forward experiment, unproven
New, in incubation
This book cleared our pre registered statistical gate, which is rarer here than it sounds: most of what we test we kill in public. Clearing the gate does not make it proven. Its forward record starts at inception and is nowhere near long enough to say anything, we did not backfill a day of it, the forward book is referenced to a different venue than the one the gate scored, the yield it harvests is documented as decaying, and the venue solvency risk a real position would carry is invisible to every statistic we ran. It runs forward on paper so the record can answer what the backtest cannot. Where it sits on the ladder →
Ballast Crypto Basis Carry Paper Forward experiment, unproven
Why this is different
Our gate, pointed at your backtest
The statistical machinery that kills our own ideas also runs as a standalone audit for outside strategies. Send a daily returns series plus the variants you actually tried, and it returns a certificate: the Sharpe that survives after your trial count is corrected for, walk-forward out of sample performance, the probability of backtest overfitting, and the smallest edge your sample length could even detect. The verdict applies the identical significance floor we hold our own research to.
Free to follow, more for subscribers
The NAV curves, the monthly summary, and the verification page are free. The full weekly letter, the exact current weights, rebalance issues, and alerts go to subscribers on a regular cadence. Same content for everyone, no book picked for you.
Free: NAV curves, the monthly summary, and the verification page. No spam, and nothing here is personalized advice.