The engine behind everything

The Research Engine

How Satis finds trading edges — and kills the rest. A closed loop with an honest gate: search every idea, correct for the search, prove it live, and feed reality back in. Most ideas die here. That's the point.

HONEST RESEARCH LOOP it tells you no 1 Hypothesise a thesis — plain English or factors 2 Search every combination, 10y survivorship-free data 3 Honest gate walk-forward · OOS · Monte-Carlo cost · trials-correction 4 Paper-first live forward-tested in public — never one-click to real money 5 Post-mortem live vs backtest — flag divergence 6 Compound feed learnings into the next hypothesis ✓

The loop that compounds

Every serious quant shop runs a version of steps 1–5. The differentiator is step 3 and step 6.

Step 3 — the honest gate. A search that keeps whatever "survives" is a false-edge factory. Ours corrects for how many things were tried, so it can't fool itself.

Step 6 — Compound (the one most never build). Each run compares the live record to the backtest that justified it. When reality diverges from the research, that becomes the next thing to investigate. The loop learns from the market, not just from itself.

The gate, in numbers

The most recent full search over the survivorship-bias-free universe — and why the survivors are read with humility, not hype.

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What survived

The strategies that cleared the honest gate. Read them in context: with dozens of tries, a couple pass by luck — the trustworthy ones also hold out-of-sample and rest on established factors.

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Proving it live

Validated edges don't go straight to real money — they run forward as public paper records first. This is step 4 → 5 of the loop, live right now.

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The graveyard

The ideas that failed the gate — including the ones every retail bot ships. Publishing these is the whole point: knowing what doesn't work, before risking money on it.

Naive "buy the dip"
No durable edge (Sharpe 0.42), dies out-of-sample. The default retail strategy — and a loser.
1-month mean-reversion
Worked in the first half, collapsed in the second (OOS Sharpe −1.3). A regime artifact.
Stock-picking momentum (alone)
Only ties a cheap index fund risk-adjusted. You can rent it as an ETF for 0.15%.
Crypto active-trading
Gap-through stops + fees erase the edge. Crypto is trend-capture, not day-trading.
The old "+128%" headline
A per-instrument envelope, not a tradeable portfolio. Retired on the spot when re-tested honestly.
Value / quality / size (alone)
Classic factor premia have decayed since ~2016 — flat-to-negative on their own here.
The point of all this. The engine's edge isn't a magic strategy — it's the discipline. Search widely, correct for the search, prove it forward in public, and let live reality tell you what to research next. In a field of confident promises that don't survive contact with reality, a research process whose defining trait is that it refuses to fool itself is the rarest thing there is.
Test your own idea → See the live forward test Backtest detail
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