XVII · Live research
Station XVII of The Quant Map: strategies are mortal. Monitor, adapt, retire, with pre-written kill criteria. Reading order plus the free map PDF.
strategies are mortal, monitor, adapt, retire
The live rule is an experiment that does not end. Watch the paycheck (the gap can close because policy changed), the crowding (positioning stretched means a narrow exit), and the weather. Two exits are both legitimate. Adapt: go back to the mechanism, the observable, and the feature with what the break taught you. Retire: archive the rule with a post-mortem so the next version of you does not pay the tuition twice. A crowded edge grinding lower as the trade gets popular does not heal by waiting. A barriered edge inside a historical-looking drawdown is often noise. The difference is the diagnosis, and it has to be written before you are in the drawdown.
Live is a test that never ends. The two legitimate exits, adapt or retire, are both decided by a diagnosis you wrote before the drawdown.
The Quant Map PDF works this spine through example research: five full descents from observation to live rule, and a library of 835 strategy entries, each with a named payer and a named failure mode. Get the free PDF on the Start Here page.
Reading order
Top to bottom. Stop at the first article you cannot apply to a live trade; that is the one to read slowly.
| Article | Why it is on this row |
|---|---|
| How to Detect When a Trading System Is Dying | Decay is usually a grind. You need a measure that fires before the equity curve feels wrong. |
| When to Switch Off a Trading System | The kill criterion is a number you set on a calm day: drawdown, hit rate over a counted window, or a structural breach. |
| Why Systems Work Until They Don't | The rule was conditional on a regime. The post-mortem names which condition ended. |
| Why OOS Failure Is Often a Stationarity Failure | The held-out window failed because the distribution moved. |
| When a Drawdown Means the System Is Broken | Inside the historical band, sit. Outside it, the kill you pre-committed gets to fire. |
| Alpha Decay Is Just Competition (and Papers Lie) | Half-lives differ by how easy the edge is to copy. Crowding is a breach. Waiting it out is a hope. |
On the map: ← XVI · Implementation · The grand map