Strategies audition in public — and die in public.
The Graveyard is where hypotheses go once they fail. This is the room next door — everything currently on trial for the blend. Each candidate ships with the exact gate it must clear, written before we looked at a result, and its honest status today: soaking, validated but held dark, blocked on data, or still recording. Everything here is a backtest or a paper measurement. There is no real-money record.
From hypothesis to the model — or to the Graveyard
A strategy earns a place in the published blend by clearing one fixed, pre-registered gate — never by looking promising. Until it does, it lives here at one of four honest stages, and nothing speculative touches the model.
Passed its gate and running on a paper account, accruing a forward record before any real capital.
Cleared its gate in backtest but shipped flag-off — behavior-identical to the live model until proven twice.
Built and self-tested, but the decisive run needs data we do not yet have. Result: not published.
A shadow book logging observations. No verdict may be read until the pre-set sample size is reached.
On trial right now
Four strategies auditioning for the blend. For each: the thesis, its pre-registered gate, the measured result so far, and where it actually stands. Where a number was never measured, it says so.
Trend blend — index core + trend sleeve
The one strategy that cleared its own gate and became the product. A broad-index core plus a sleeve that holds ETFs only while they trend.
VIX term-structure stress scaler
When the VIX term structure stays backwardated, cut the index core from 60% to 30% until it normalizes; the freed weight earns T-bills. The best-replicated signal in the alt-data review.
Bond-vol × VIX combined scaler
Add a bond-volatility arm to the VIX scaler to catch bond-led stress — 2022 being the obvious case — that an equity-vol-only signal misses.
Futures-tier trend sleeve
Run the trend logic on back-adjusted continuous futures — long AND short, the real managed-futures edge the long/flat ETF sleeve cannot reach.
One gate, written before the result
Every candidate above is judged against the same four clauses, and each was written into the test script before a single line of output was read. A strategy clears the bar it set for itself, or it stays here.
Sharpe ≥ baseline + 0.05
A candidate must lift the full-period Sharpe from the blend's 0.89 to at least 0.94 — a real step, not noise. An improvement inside the ±0.05 band is treated as zero and does not promote.
Max drawdown ≥ 3 pts better
Peak-to-trough loss must improve by at least three points versus the −33.8% baseline, and be worse on neither Sharpe nor drawdown. A scaler that buys return by deepening the drawdown fails.
Turnover ≤ +6 round-trips / yr
A promotion may add at most six extra round-trip trades a year. Edge that only shows up by trading far more is edge eaten by cost, and it does not count.
Stable across three sub-periods
The improvement has to hold in each of 2005–2012, 2013–2019 and 2020–2026 — not be carried by one regime. A result that flips sign between halves of the sample is killed, not shipped.
The pipeline at a glance
Every candidate, its basis, its stage, and the honest one-line label. The same table the desk reads.
| Strategy | Basis | Stage | Honest label |
|---|---|---|---|
Trend blend — index core + trend sleeve the product · #54 | PAPER | Live · soaking | LIVE · paper — backtest 2005–2026 |
VIX term-structure stress scaler #51 · TREND_VIX_SCALER | BACKTEST | Validated · dark | BACKTEST — validated, held dark |
Bond-vol × VIX combined scaler #48 · TREND_BONDVOL_SCALER | BACKTEST | Validated · dark | BACKTEST — validated on a proxy; blocked on MOVE data |
Futures-tier trend sleeve Tranche 2 | BACKTEST | Awaiting data | not published — built, not yet run |
The moat is the discipline, not the secret
Anyone can claim an edge. What is hard to copy is a room where every hypothesis carries the gate it must clear, the winners graduate to the model in public, and the losers get a headstone. Watch both ends of it.
Read this honestly:every figure on this page is a backtest or a paper measurement, and where a strategy has not been run the result reads “not published.” Backtested and paper results are hypothetical, benefit from hindsight, and are not a promise of future performance. There is no real-money track record. Uptogain publishes one public model for everyone — it is not personalized advice, and we neither manage your money nor take custody of it.