A snapshot whose schema predated a migration made every _fetch_columns call
raise, both dispatch paths caught the per-ticker exception and continued, and
the run wrote a report with zero candidates that was indistinguishable from an
honest run that found no setups. Nothing said the run had lost its universe.
run_backtest now builds a completeness ledger and emits it as
report["data_quality"]: expected / loaded / evaluated counts, per-symbol
failures with stage and reason, bar-less symbols named, and benchmark
availability. Every universe symbol lands in exactly one terminal bucket and
the arithmetic is checked, so a counter that stops being maintained reports
itself as a failure rather than under-counting quietly.
Benchmark availability is a separate axis: without SPY, residual 12-1 momentum
silently degrades to raw 12-1, and the report now says so instead of leaving it
in a log line.
Three statuses, because severity differs. "failed" (nothing evaluated, empty
universe, unbalanced ledger, missing benchmark) replaces the performance tiles
with the callout rather than warning above them — a banner over ordinary-looking
numbers is exactly how the zero-candidate run would still have read as a quiet
week. "degraded" keeps the tiles with a note. A report with no data_quality
block reads as unknown, not clean; defaulting old reports to complete would
reproduce the bug being fixed.
The same gate applies to the two other consumers of backtest numbers:
productionBaseRates returns null for a failed run, and EvaluationPanel will not
report drift against a broken baseline.
"complete" means the processing and coverage checks passed. It does not mean
the prices are correct — a complete run over silently wrong bars is still
complete, and the card says so.
Also threads an explicit terminal-events option through the replay, validated
before dispatch so a stale events file aborts the run instead of quietly
degrading it. Verified against a healthy snapshot (degraded, 505/506) and one
with tickers.cik dropped (failed, 0/506, 506 fetch failures).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01HAH7vVtn7qbcn1EVheecHQ
dennisthiessenandClaude Opus 5