2026-07-29 to 2026-08-28 · 13 sessions · six instruments
None of the four opening shapes earned a playbook
Classify the first minutes of the session into one of four shapes, then run the shape’s playbook. Fifty-eight forward instances later, no shape clears a bar — and the best one is the shape nobody proposed.
In simple words
What happened
The two shapes that were actually proposed for promotion are among the weaker cells (29% and 25%). The best cell is the quiet inside-range shape at 50% with a much shallower typical drawdown — and nobody had proposed it, which is the strongest hint that the four-way split was reasoning ahead of the evidence.
Who would pay?
Openings are not all alike. A washout that never recovers, a push through yesterday’s high that holds, a quiet inside range — each is a different market, and each was given its own play.
How it was tested
Each session’s opening was classified once, the shape’s named contract was recorded, and the outcome graded on real prices — best excursion, worst excursion, and whether it reached the playbook’s own definition of a hit. Repeats within a name, day and side were collapsed to one instance.
What would prove it wrong?
Every shape has a lower bound at or below 25%, and three of the four have a typical worst excursion near -99%: the named contract usually goes to nothing before or instead of paying.
Leader-collapsed evidence
What each setup actually did
58 independent shape-to-playbook instances, all resolved on real contract prices
| Opening shape | Instances | Hit rate | Lower bound | Median peak | Median worst | Decision |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FLATQuiet inside range (not a promotion candidate) | 12 | +86.8% | -47.5% | 50% | Lower bound 25% | REFUSED |
| DOWNINLower inside range | 10 | +35.9% | -88.3% | 30% | Lower bound 11% | REFUSED |
| PUMPPush through the prior high that holds | 24 | +46.2% | -98.2% | 29% | Promotion candidate | REFUSED |
| FLUSHWashout below the prior low, no recovery | 12 | +22.2% | -99.2% | 25% | Promotion candidate | REFUSED |
What we keep
Learnings
- 01
Write down which cell you expect to win before you look. Here the two promotion candidates finished near the bottom and an unproposed cell finished top, which is only visible because the candidates were named in advance.
- 02
Report the worst excursion next to the best one. A shape with a +46% typical peak and a -98% typical trough is not a playbook, it is a description of a contract that mostly dies.
- 03
Reaching the required sample size is not the same as passing. The bar of 25 forward instances was cleared at 58; the answer is still no.
- 04
The strongest-looking cell here is the quiet one, on twelve instances. That is a hypothesis for a future test, not a finding.