BALLAST.

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equity_dedup_collapse 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.

Equity-cluster de-duplication, expression A (collapse). The aggressive book's QQQ/SPY/MTUM sleeves run 0.77 to 0.93 realized correlation, so three of its nine sleeves are close to one bet. This expression collapses them to one broad equity-beta sleeve (SPY) plus one genuinely-distinct factor tilt (MTUM), dropping QQQ as the redundant member of the 0.928-correlated QQQ/SPY pair, and lets the risk-parity engine redistribute the freed budget to the book's actual diversifiers. Tests whether raising the number of independent bets, with no new instrument and no new data, clears the full deflation / walk-forward / PBO / incremental-DSR gate.

The pre-registered gate

Deflated incremental edge-0.051 FAIL (threshold +0.000)
Walk-forward out-of-sample uplift+0.000 FAIL (threshold +0.000)
Probability of backtest overfitting (PBO)0.46 PASS (threshold 0.50)

No-lookahead probe: PASSED (divergence date 2024-03-27)

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 +0.986 vs +1.038 (uplift -0.051)
Walk-forward out-of-sample Sharpe, candidate vs baseline +1.000 vs +1.000
PBO combinations evaluated924
Correlation to the plain baseline book +0.968 (n=3851)

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 2024-03-27)
panel_pinnedPASS panel_manifest_hash=f75ad5dbd3528e36
harness_calibratedFAIL no calibration report supplied for this profile
adversarial_red_teamFAIL no red-team artifact for this candidate: the 'How it dies' fan (report 1.2.8) auto-runs on SHIP-OFF and is required for VERIFIED (`ballast.verification.redteam`)

Check the source

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

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