Paper first, always

A strategy that has cleared every research stage has won one thing: a longer look before any capital follows. First it trades forward in time on paper, live, in the present, at costs we hold to be realistic rather than convenient.

This stage does real work. History, however carefully you handle it, is a record whose ending you already know, and knowing the ending colors how the story gets told. Trading forward on paper takes that comfort away. The days have not happened yet, so whatever the strategy does, it does against a future nobody has seen.

We expect most candidates that reach this point to fail here, and we build the timeline so that failing is cheap. A strategy that stops working on paper has cost only the waiting. Promote the same strategy early and it costs money, and worse, it teaches the wrong lesson about how well the process works.

Costs get their own attention. Round the frictions of real trading down toward zero and almost anything looks tradeable, so we push them the other way, closer to pessimistic than generous. A strategy that cannot carry honest costs on paper will not carry them with money behind it.

Paper trading is the last check we hold before the one measurement that cannot be taken back: capital committed to an idea.