BALLAST.

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activist_13d on aggressive KILL

Did not survive the pre-registered gate. This is a first-class result, not an error: the honest thing to do with a hypothesis that fails is publish the kill.

The Schedule 13D activist-stake trade (buy the session after an activist's 13D becomes public, hold a fixed ~40-session horizon, long-only, capacity- limited fixed-fraction tranches) wrapped as a synthetic instrument (ACT13D) and added to the plain aggressive universe. Tests whether this filing-driven, small/mid-cap flow effect survives the full deflation / walk-forward / PBO / detection-floor gate at micro-cap-realistic transaction costs, net of the harness's own calibration and no-lookahead verification. Point-in-time by construction via each 13D's EDGAR acceptance timestamp.

The pre-registered gate

Deflated incremental edge+0.024 PASS (threshold +0.000)
Walk-forward out-of-sample uplift-0.009 FAIL (threshold +0.000)
Probability of backtest overfitting (PBO)0.67 FAIL (threshold 0.50)

No-lookahead probe: PASSED (divergence date 2022-02-07)

The underlying comparison

In-sample figures are the best-of-menu figure on one price history and are upward-biased by selection. Where they disagree with the deflated or walk-forward out-of-sample figures above, those win.

In-sample Sharpe, candidate vs baseline +0.952 vs +0.927 (uplift +0.024)
Walk-forward out-of-sample Sharpe, candidate vs baseline +0.407 vs +0.417
PBO combinations evaluated924
Correlation to the plain baseline book +0.998 (n=1509)

Trust ladder

Current rung: UNVERIFIED. A hypothesis reaches a stakeholder surface as a claim only once it clears VERIFIED; see the verification page for what each rung means.

validatedFAIL research loop verdict: KILL
lookahead_probePASS probe passed (divergence 2022-02-07)
panel_pinnedPASS panel_manifest_hash=d4e26af794cfe7ce
harness_calibratedFAIL calibration battery did not pass (null false-ship rate 0.0%, MDE None)

Check the source

Every number above is read straight from these committed files, nothing recomputed for this page:

data/research/activist_13d-aggressive.json   # the ORIGINAL pre-registered verdict, machine readable (never rewritten)
data/research/activist_13d-aggressive.md   # the same original verdict, written out
data/research/activist_13d-aggressive.verification.json   # trust ladder rung for the original verdict