UrverkOverfitting Audit

Overfitting audit certificate

SURVIVES_DEFLATION

Survives deflation

Your strategy cleared every gate. Its edge survived selection luck deflation and its own estimation error at our 95% confidence floor. Read this as a statistical finding, not a promise. It means we could not rule your edge out as noise at this sample size, not that it will make money going forward. A live track record, not a backtest, is the only thing that proves forward edge.

What each gate says about your strategy

Does your edge survive selection luck and its own estimation error?Pass

Your reading: 0.9981 (gate: 0.95)

Your advantage over the baseline is large enough that, after accounting for how many variants were tried and the noise in a Sharpe measured over this many observations, we are at least 95% confident the true edge is positive.

How often would this strategy look best purely by an accident of where the data is split?Not evaluated

Not computed. This needs the other strategy variants you tried, supplied as trial_returns. With only the one series there is nothing to rank.

Did the advantage hold up out of sample?Not evaluated

Not computed. This needs a baseline series to compare against out of sample.

The detection floor on your sample

At 1500 observations, the smallest edge this gate could certify at all is about +0.67 of incremental Sharpe. Your observed uplift of +1.187 is above that floor, so it is inside what this sample size can resolve.

The floor is set by how many observations you supplied, not by your strategy. More history lowers it. A short sample cannot prove a small edge no matter how clean the numbers look.

The numbers behind the verdict

Observations	1500 (periods per year: 252)
Candidate Sharpe	1.187
Baseline Sharpe	0.000 (zero skill null, no baseline supplied)
Uplift over baseline	+1.187
Selection luck haircut (E max of 1 trials)	+0.000
Deflated uplift	+1.187
Incremental DSR (confidence the edge beats baseline plus luck)	0.998
Probability true Sharpe is above 0	0.998
Sharpe standard error	±0.409

These are the raw statistics the gate ran on your data. The verdict above is a mechanical function of them at pre-registered thresholds, not a judgment call.

The honest fine print

This certificate checks whether an in-sample Sharpe survives selection-luck deflation and its own estimation error, and it does NOT prove a strategy will make money going forward. A candidate that clears every gate here has only cleared the bar of 'not statistically distinguishable from noise'; a live track record, not a backtest, is the only thing that proves forward edge.
Detection floor at n_obs=1500: this gate cannot reliably tell a real edge from noise below an incremental Sharpe of ~+0.67 (the smallest uplift whose incremental DSR reaches 95%). A candidate that clears the gate below is a genuine statistical finding at this sample size; more history lowers this floor.
No baseline_returns supplied: uplift/DSR are computed against a zero-skill null (Sharpe 0), not a market benchmark, and walk-forward out-of-sample uplift could not be computed.
No trial_returns supplied: PBO (probability of backtest overfitting) could not be computed. PBO needs the OTHER strategy variants actually tried, not just the one you're submitting.

This certificate is statistical analysis of the return series supplied by the customer. It is not investment advice and not a recommendation to buy or sell anything.

Inputs are self-attested. Deflation cannot correct for variants a customer does not disclose, and a certificate can only be as honest as its inputs.

A passing verdict is a statistical non-rejection at a 95% confidence floor, not a promise of future profit. The gate behind this certificate is the same one Ballast, a paper-traded systematic fund, holds its own strategies to, and it has killed most of them.

Urverk. Methodology and the fund's public kill-log stand behind every verdict.