What earns a place

Only a small number of strategies ever reach the program, and we read that as a sign the bar is doing its job. In a market this competitive, a process built to separate real edges from mirages should advance very few candidates. A steady stream of promotions would tell us the bar had slipped, or that the evaluation had started to flatter the work.

So the discipline lives in what we choose to run. A strategy earns its place by surviving every stage of validation, and it keeps that place only for as long as it keeps earning it. A candidate that stops working loses its spot, whatever we thought of it going in.

The pull, always, is to advance a promising idea on one more adjustment and one more reason the last test was unfair. That pull is the path a weak strategy takes into a live account, and holding the line against it is most of the work.

We would rather run a short book we believe than a long one we only hope for.