Every track record has a price. Measured in trials.
The Deflated Sharpe Ratio asks one question of any record: would this still be significant if it was the best of N attempts? Below: the world’s most famous return streams, and the largest N each one survives at the 95% bar — computed by the MIZAN verification engine, monthly closes, every assumption printed at the bottom of this page.
The number that decides every row — how many strategies were actually tried — is self-reported across the entire industry. Nothing on earth checked it. That is the business we are in.
Nine legends, priced in trials
Each row is the largest number of attempts the record could have been the best of and still clear the 95% bar. Windows differ per asset and are printed on each row.
The deepest record on this table — and even it has a price.
A 1.43 Sharpe over seven famous years — gone after 31 tries.
Two decades of the great growth story.
The market itself. Thirteen.
Pedigree is not significance.
Twenty-eight years of Microsoft: eight trials.
The most famous trade of the century survives exactly one trial.
A century of brand, one trial of significance.
Not significant even as a single attempt.
What does your record survive?
Send any return series — yours, or a manager you are screening. We return this exact analysis, computed by the same engine, free, in a day. No account, no calls, and if it is not yours, the manager never needs to know.
Assumptions, in full
Every convention printed, so the table can be recomputed rather than believed.
Monthly total-price returns from the named public series (dividends excluded — a conservative simplification that lowers Sharpe uniformly). Integer fixed-point arithmetic identical to the MIZAN in-circuit engine (era-v11 conventions): population moments, raw kurtosis, one-sided AR(1) effective sample size, null at each N = best of N same-length noise strategies, DSR = PSR(SR₀) at n_eff (Bailey & López de Prado 2014), significance 0.95. Windows differ per asset and are printed on each row; shorter windows survive fewer trials — that is the point, not a flaw. Computed 2026-08-04.
σ_SR uses the 1/√n_eff MinBTL convention (Bailey–Borwein–López de Prado–Zhu 2014); VTR-1 R-38 in-circuit uses population standard deviation across resolved ledger trials — this table is an illustration at stated conventions, not a credential.
Not investment advice, and not a claim these assets are bad — buy-and-hold SPY needs no trial count because nobody searched for it. The table demonstrates one thing: significance depends violently on a number nobody reports. A manager showing you a Sharpe below 1.0 with an unknown search behind it is showing you the right-hand column of this page, blank.