AlphaAssay8 July 2026 — The lottery-ticket detector
The gauntlet gained a concentration stage that asks a brutally simple question: if we
remove the single best one percent of your bars, does the book still make money? A strategy that only
works because of a handful of jackpot bars is not a repeatable process — it is a lottery ticket luck
hands out once, and the verdict now says so
(edge_concentration_extreme). Its forensic cousin checks the same
instinct against market regimes: an edge that only exists in the most violent bars lives exactly where
slippage explodes. Both run inside every check, at the same price.
8 July 2026 — We started auditing backtest software itself
Different backtesting engines disagree — on identical strategy, data and costs, published results diverge by up to 3.71%, so the simulator you choose is quietly part of your experiment. The new engine assay runs a complete suite of constructed candles, each one a qualitatively different fill situation — including the ones where price data genuinely cannot say which order filled first, which an honest engine must admit rather than guess. Framework authors can pull the suite and grade their engine against it; a free annotated starter set shows how the trap candles work.
8 July 2026 — Claimed track records go under the microscope
Two new tools widened what can be put on trial. assay_reproduce audits the arithmetic
of a claimed track record: send the trades, the candles and the headline numbers, and the engine
rebuilds the equity book independently — flagging any fill that was never physically available at its
bar's prices. assay_survivors answers the question every parameter sweep dodges: of all
the versions you tried, which does the evidence actually leave standing, at a controlled family-wise
error rate — disclosed in your input order, never ranked. The falsify battery also gained a synthetic
placebo that swaps not when you trade, but the world you trade in: markets built with
zero exploitable signal. And pre-registration learned to seal success criteria alongside the strategy —
moving the goalposts after seeing the data now has a name.
8 July 2026 — Honest sweeps, a free lint, and receipts
assay_batch made the honest path the cheap path: submit up to 25 variants of one idea
in a single call, and every variant is counted against the family budget — because showing only your
best try is exactly the trick that fools people. assay_preflight checks a payload's shape
for free before any money moves. The gauntlet gained an anchored walk-forward stage, and every paid
x402 answer now carries a signed receipt bound to its payment: a lost response is re-delivered without
paying twice, and the answer can be proven authentic later, offline.
8 July 2026 — One matrix, two questions
assay_pbo grades the selection process itself: across all combinatorial train/test
splits, how often does your in-sample winner fall below the out-of-sample median? Its companion
question — which variants survive — came one sprint later; together they interrogate a whole parameter
sweep from both ends. The trial ledger learned to recognise near-duplicate variants and count them as
what they are (roughly one idea), the gauntlet gained purged combinatorial time-partitions, and the
falsification protocol for judging any signal provider became a free machine-readable tool.
The published deflation thresholds also became a free public endpoint, so the family-budget arithmetic
can be checked without trusting us.
7 July 2026 — Every fail names its killer
The founding release of the discipline this log records. Every failed verdict began carrying its cause of death in one plain sentence; underpowered tests started being stamped as underpowered instead of quietly reading as acquittals; the placebo trial became three-dimensional (timing, sign, chronology); a beta-masquerade check began asking the cheapest question nobody else asks — is this edge just dressed-up market exposure?; the cost gate got a calibrated impact model with its uncertainty published; and undisclosed trial counts became a named finding rather than a silent benefit of the doubt.
What never changes
Verdicts are demote-only — new evidence can lower a grade, never inflate one. Every verdict is deterministic: same input, same answer, bit for bit. A fail costs the same as a pass, because you buy the trial and not the outcome. And each entry above shipped inside the same flat five-cent check — the pricing page is the live proof.