Most edges are statistical mirages. These aren't.
We take a trading strategy, try everything we can to kill it — fee-realistic, look-ahead-free, tested across market regimes — and publish the autopsy. The graveyard and the rare survivors alike. The refutations are the survivors.
Education & data-journalism only. Never signals. Never personalised advice.
“We try to kill every strategy. Subscribe to the ones that survive.”
Falsification, not hype.
The scientific standard applied to trading edges: assume it's noise, and try as hard as you can to prove it. Almost everything fails. That's the point.
Try to kill it
Every idea starts guilty. We backtest with real fees, no look-ahead, and enough data that a lucky run can't hide. Most edges die here — cleanly and on the record.
The harder test
The few that live face out-of-sample, held-out market regimes, and one-independent-trade-at-a-time checks that expose the mirages a single tidy curve is hiding.
Real money or an obituary
Survivors go live on real capital. Everything else gets a public post-mortem — what looked promising, why it was a mirage, and the exact test that caught it.
The statistics, in plain English.
You don't need a maths degree to tell a real edge from a lucky one — three ideas do most of the work, shown on real charts instead of formulas. We'll teach you the tools. What we build with them is the letter.
Standard deviation
How far is “far”? A move only means something once you measure it against normal noise. One standard deviation is ordinary; two is rare. It turns “that looks like a big candle” into a number you can actually test.
The parameter surface
Trust the plateau, not the peak. Sweep two settings and every backtest becomes a landscape. A real edge is a broad mountain — nudge the dials and it still works. A lone bright spike is just a setting that happened to fit the past. We only keep the plateaus.
Leave-one-regime-out
Prove it on markets it's never seen. Hold out a whole market era — a crash, a long grind — build the edge on everything else, then test it on the part it was never shown. Survive the unseen regime, or it was just memorising the past. This is the test almost nothing passes.
The graveyard is free. The survivors aren't.
The refutations are open to everyone — that's how you learn to trust the process before you pay a cent. The research that survived is what the paid letter is for.
The Refutations
- ✓Teardowns of the edges that didn't survive — with the data and the exact test that killed them.
- ✓The statistics-mirage checklist: the ten ways a backtest lies to you.
- ✓The reproducible method notes — standard deviation, parameter surfaces, out-of-sample testing — taught with real charts, not formulas.
The Survivors
- ✓A deep letter every month — plus a quarterly report that pulls the monthly ones together and opens up bigger projects.
- ✓The survivor research: the handful of edges that lived, with the equity curves and the tests they passed.
- ✓Enough of the workings to see the reasoning and judge it honest — the method, not a copy-paste signal.
- ✓Written by a named operator who trades his own research live, not an anonymous account.
- ✓Credibility and process — never a signal, never a “buy this now.”
Ten ways a backtest lies.
Every survivor has to clear all of these. Most “edges” you'll read about elsewhere fail at least one — quietly.
The in-sample glow
Gorgeous on the data it was tuned on; a coin-flip on data it's never seen.
The fee wall
A tidy gross edge that arithmetic — spread, slippage, funding — erases before you ever profit.
The regime mirage
Prints money in one bull run, quietly bleeds everywhere else. Validation has to span regimes.
The tail carry
Ninety percent of the “profit” is five lucky trades. Take them out and the edge is gone.
…and six more. The full checklist ships free to every subscriber.
A survivor teardown.
The refutations are free. The survivors — which tactics lived, and exactly how they held up under the method — are for subscribers. Here's the shape of one.
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“I put roughly twenty strategies into the guillotine. Eighteen died. I trade the survivors with my own money — and I'll show you the ones that didn't make it, not just the trophies.”
A named operator with skin in the game.
No faceless guru, no rented Lamborghini. The Refutation is written by someone who runs his own validated research live on real capital, publishes the failures alongside the wins, and would rather show you a losing backtest and the lesson than sell you a dream.
That's the whole moat: honesty you can check. The refutations prove the method. The survivors are worth paying for because the graveyard is public.
Get the refutations. Then decide.
Free teardowns and the statistics-mirage checklist — confirm your email and they're yours. Upgrade to the US$29.90/mo letter only once the process has earned it.
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