SANITY-FAIL report showed megacaps/ETFs already at empirical 2016-01-04 floor
(2649 bars) after deepen; check wrongly required ~2013. Pass when megacaps leave
the old 2021 two-tier floor and match SPY; XLC listing exception retained.
Terminal follow-up for Task 1: detect/refetch shallow two-tier symbols and sector
ETFs at 5000d, regenerate manifest, run ONE liquid-1500 harness with era split, grade
mom_12_1_sector_resid mechanically. Bundled as run_tier1_macbook.sh --sector-resid-deep.
Extract app/ssl_bootstrap.py (shared with FastAPI main), wire it into research
scripts, and teach run_tier1_macbook.sh to locate combined-ca-bundle.pem, certifi,
optional USE_CORP_PROXY, plus --ssl-check diagnostics.
Tier-1 alpha research (local only, no production deploy):
Sector residual momentum: two-factor SPY+sector residual and sector demean signals, IC harness + A/B. Sector resid clears pre-registered bars narrowly (PROMOTE for human wire design only). Sector demean fails t vs market resid.
Earnings: earnings_events backfill (FMP bulk paid; FMP/AV per-symbol), 2a gap diagnostic report-only, 2b SUE IC (PARK; incomplete 48/506 coverage).
History-depth: pre-registered doc + runner for MacBook deep rebuild/harness.
Do not ship production residual or filters from this branch.
Log the 21:14 orphan as a snapshot-build race, rewrite the context table to
authoritative ICs only, and soften the vol-tilt warning. Add extender completion
manifest + breadth refuse guard; strip intermediate/orphaned reports; park the
thread (no book sim, no deploy).
Add lagged/tier/prod-subset/mom-conditional checks on research.sqlite.
Log: unconditional sign is a winner/bleeder tug-of-war; mom-conditional
fip stays negative and reliable; warn on high-vol tilt if universe broadens.
Add research-only snapshot extender, PIT dollar-volume mask for signal IC,
rank-only harness path, fingerprint+breadth runner, and docs. Fingerprint
reproduced IC -0.045 / t -2.91 on prod.sqlite. No production gate/schedule changes.
Document Phase A (max-hold/vol/corr closed; next-open as decision baseline).
Add stale_close and next_open gap-cap fill modes plus a small matrix to test
whether near-close scheduling recovers overnight momentum drift.
Ship shared Sharpe SE/PSR diagnostics, next-open fill and equity-curve vol targeting in the portfolio simulator, re-derived fip_id, and a checkpointed offline matrix runner for Mac-side validation sweeps.
Finnhub profile2 reports marketCapitalization in millions; storing it
as dollars made mega-caps like SPCX show as micro (e.g. 1.8M). Normalize
on ingest, add unit tests, and include a one-shot SQL backfill script.
Investigated whether our support/resistance detection follows best practice
and whether we actually use it that way. Three findings, all backed by runs
against the prod snapshot and written up in docs/research/sr-levels-and-exits.md:
- The S/R target must NOT become an exit. Honoring it as a take-profit on top
of the 3x ATR trail drops Sharpe 2.04 -> 1.47 and halves CAGR. Win rate rises
(37.5% -> 40.0%), which is the tell: it truncates the right tail where
momentum's edge lives.
- The clear-air fallback (synthesize a 3xATR target where no resistance exists,
so 52-week-high breakouts stop being vetoed) looked strictly better in-sample
(Sharpe 2.04 -> 2.07, CAGR 50.4% -> 62.3%, DD 21.4% -> 20.1%) but FAILED a
real out-of-sample holdout: on entries after 2024-07-01 it is worse on Sharpe
(2.78 -> 2.45) and Calmar, better only on raw CAGR. Not shipped.
- The detector itself is weak vs best practice (POC/VAH/VAL computed then
discarded, HVN = any above-mean bin, 1.48x volume double-counting, "touch"
counts pass-throughs, no round numbers), but its only causal path to P&L is
the entry gate. Fix it for the displayed levels, not for returns.
Method note: nested lookback windows are NOT out-of-sample. The in-sample result
was clean, large, and consistent across five windows, and still did not survive
a proper entry-date split.
All research paths are off by default and the default report is unchanged:
BACKTEST_RESEARCH_EXITS=1 take-profit exit rows
BACKTEST_ATR_TARGET_FALLBACK=k synthetic k*ATR target when S/R offers none
BACKTEST_FALLBACK_CLEAR_AIR_ONLY=1 restrict that to genuinely clear air
BACKTEST_HOLDOUT_SPLIT=YYYY-MM-DD train/test split by entry date
Also fixes two reproducibility holes found while reconciling our local baseline
against the live report:
- create_backtest_snapshot.py now copies paper_% settings. The production
monitor row replays the runtime exit policy via get_exit_policy(); without
those keys a snapshot silently falls back to code defaults, so a live-tuned
exit would never be reflected.
- Migration 020 drops activation_min_expected_value and
activation_min_target_probability. Both are orphans of the June EV-gate
redesign, read by no code path, but prod carries min_target_probability = 50.0
which implies a probability floor that is not enforced (the real floor is the
20% constant in qualification.py).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
dennisthiessen
Dennis Thiessen