The Refutation

About

Falsification is the method. The surviving edge is the product.

The Refutation is a quant markets research letter with an unusual editorial policy: we publish the strategies that failed as prominently as the ones that worked. It is not a "nothing works" project. It's a survivorship filter. Roughly twenty strategy ideas go into the guillotine; most get a headstone; a handful survive honest out-of-sample testing and get real capital behind them. The refutations are what earn your trust. The rare survivors are the product.

The whole identity is methodological honesty. We show process — base rates, next-bar fills, netted fees, out-of-sample regime testing, and what killed an edge — rather than forecasts. We sell credibility and method, never signals or personalised advice. That's both our compliance posture and our selling proposition: if you can't trust the person testing the strategy, the backtest is worthless.

Who writes it

The Refutation is written by a Mathematics Head Teacher with degrees in mathematics and chemistry (BSc Mathematics, BSc Chemistry) who has spent over a decade in the markets, including more than two years living and teaching overseas, among them a stint in Beijing. He invests the way he teaches: form a hypothesis, test it, try to break it. He has put real money to work across equities, property and systematic strategies, with outsized returns in more than one and real mistakes in all three. The letter is a direct by-product of that work: the same tests, the same graveyard, written up in plain English.

This isn't a faceless account posting screenshots. The method is public and the graveyard is checkable: when a strategy is refuted, you see exactly how and why, and when one survives, you see the bar it had to clear. In this field that accountability is the product.

What you can expect
  • Honest verdicts — refuted far more often than survived.
  • Method and evidence, never buy/sell signals or price targets.
  • Clear disclosure of AI-assisted drafting, always human-reviewed before publishing.
  • No hype vocabulary — no "guaranteed," "risk-free," or "get in before."

What it isn't

This is not a signals service, a Discord "pump" room, a course promising financial freedom, or personal advice. Nothing published here accounts for your objectives, situation or needs, and none of it is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial product. If you want a recommendation, see a licensed adviser. What we offer is the ability to think about markets like a sceptic — and the receipts to back it up.

Start with the method