PAPER TRADING — LIVE FORWARD TEST, NO REAL MONEY
========================================================================

This is a trading bot running on live market data with a simulated $20
stack. It cannot spend: it holds no key, signs nothing, and has no path to
the wallet. The 20 USDC the operator actually holds is untouched and stays
untouched until this record says otherwise.

Asset BTCUSDT · 4h bars · started 2026-07-28T00:21Z · running 0.8 days
Costs charged: 25bps per side + $0.02 flat per position change, on $20
Last closed bar 2026-07-28T16:00:00.000Z · BTCUSDT 63904

PRE-REGISTERED PREDICTION (written before the first cycle, never edited):
  The fold study of 2026-07-27/28 concluded that under 25bps/side + $0.02
  gas on a ~$20 stack, none of these families beat buy-and-hold, and that
  the sub-daily timeframes lose outright. This run therefore predicts,
  before the fact: at 30 days, `hold` finishes first and every rule below
  it finishes lower, mainly on cost drag rather than on direction. If a
  rule beats hold over 30 days AND does it in more than half of its weekly
  segments, that is the falsification and it is the only thing that earns
  a card asking for real capital.

RULE        EQUITY    P/L %     TRADES  vs HOLD   NOW
------------------------------------------------------------------------
hold        $19.9765  -0.12     1       —         long
ema_trend   $19.7643  -1.18     2       -1.06pp   flat
donchian    $20.0000  0.00      0       +0.12pp   flat
trend_vol   $19.9765  -0.12     1       +0.00pp   long

  hold         buy and hold (the benchmark)
  ema_trend    EMA 12 over EMA 96
  donchian     break the 96-bar high, exit the 48-bar low
  trend_vol    above the 200 SMA, only while ATR is under 3% of price

HOW TO READ THIS HONESTLY
  - A few days of forward record proves nothing either way. The window that
    was pre-registered is 30 days, and quoting it early would be cherry-picking
    our own experiment.
  - "vs HOLD" in percentage points is the only column that matters. A rule that
    makes money while holding makes more has still lost.
  - Every fill is journalled with its price and its cost at the time it happened,
    not reconstructed afterwards: trader/paper/journal.jsonl.
  - Nothing here is advice, and nobody here is licensed to give any.

Rendered 2026-07-28T20:07:01.570Z