Crypto Squeeze family — 4h / 1h / 30m
Phantom fills
Claimed
Sharpe 8–16, Calmar 90–160, five straight positive years.
The bug
The entry trigger admitted closes below the band while the stop sat just above it, so the backtest booked instant "wins" at stop prices the market never traded through. On 79% of 4h trades. Tighter stops produced bigger phantom profits, which looked like an "optimal stop" discovery.
Honest
Caught with real money: a live bot traded it on Binance → 8 trades, 12.5% win rate, 7/8 instant stop-outs. Honest-fill Sharpe −4 to −8. Entire family killed.
US Equity Momentum family — Fund / PC / Broad
Survivorship
Claimed
Calmar 1.88, CAGR 30%, 30 of 30 positive years.
The bug
The universe held today's 322 S&P survivors back to 1997, so the engine was quietly buying future index winners before their inclusion dates. The edge was pre-inclusion buying, not stock selection.
Honest
Point-in-time membership → Calmar 0.40; modern-era (2018+) CAGR 7.7%, Sharpe 0.55. SPY-like, with worse drawdown. Whole family retired.
BTC + Alt Overlay — v1 through v19
Lookahead + hidden DD
Claimed
+7,177% CAGR, 7.3% max drawdown, walk-forward 9.98.
The bug
Regime inputs used each month's end value to trade from its start; crash months got retroactively classified as profitable shorts. Plus seven liquidation events at 6.9× leverage, entirely hidden by monthly-close sampling.
Honest
Intra-month daily mark-to-market: −86% per year, worst single day −193%. All 19 versions void.
XAU+Forex v7 · Trend v1 · S3 Hedge
Same-bar lookahead
Claimed
Calmar 5.25 (XAU), 13.9 (oil E&P), 100% positive years.
The bug
The monthly signal was computed at the month's close and booked against that same month's return — no lag. With a fast EMA equal to the current price, it was literally "did this month go up?" applied to that month. The celebrated "EMA(1/3) is universal" result was the bug's signature.
Honest
With a one-period lag → Calmar 0.06, CAGR 0.7%. There was nothing to trade.
Fund v45 · PC v21 · US Broad v3 — risk overlay
Same-day lookahead
Claimed
Calmar 1.88, Sharpe 1.77 (Fund); Calmar 3.27 (PC).
The bug
The daily risk block set today's exposure from today's closes, then booked today's close-to-close return on those weights, so a VIX spike cut exposure retroactively on the very day it would have cost money. Not implementable live.
Honest
With t-1 risk signals → Calmar 0.77 (Fund) and 0.66 (PC). Both fail the hard limits.
HL Cross-Sectional Momentum v3
Annualization error
Claimed
Sharpe 13.06 — a Medallion-class number.
The bug
Per-trade returns from a 48-hour hold were annualized at the hourly rate, √(365×24). A pure units artifact — plus a lookahead coin-filter and a 2bp cost fantasy.
Honest
True Sharpe 1.89. Re-validated honestly it survives at a real ~1.5 — a genuine but ordinary edge, not a miracle.
India Gold v5
Hidden drawdown
Claimed
Calmar 4.89, max drawdown −4.3%.
The bug
Month-end equity sampling hid the intra-month drawdown at 3× leverage — the peak and the crash both happened inside a single month and the monthly series never saw them.
Honest
Daily mark-to-market true max drawdown −51% (the underlying fell 19% in two days at 3×). Fails all four hard limits.
Intraday / Day-Trade family · Liquidation-as-stop
Volume leak · cost fantasy
Claimed
High intraday Sharpe; "leverage as a free stop-loss."
The bug
Full-day volume used at the open as an entry filter (data not yet known). And at 100× leverage, fees alone are 10% of margin per round-trip — negative expectancy no position-sizing can fix.
Honest
Edge gone once volume is lagged; negative EV across all 54 configs over 968K honest trades. Retracted.
Claimed
59% win rate, average loss −0.010%, reward/risk 220×, walk-forward 6.8.
The bug
The average loss is the stop distance. The backtest assumed a 0.010% stop always filled at the stop price. It cannot: a stop that tight is inside the spread. Live paper on 2026-06-05 stopped out all five positions intraday. Same signature as the phantom-fill family — the profit was in the fill assumption, not the signal.
Honest
Expectancy is unknown and the 220× reward/risk is an artifact. Never traded with real money. Retired permanently 2026-07-10: daemon stopped, launch agent removed, code archived. A KeepAlive flag had silently restarted it after an earlier halt — it ran one more paper session before we caught it.