Nine shorts fired in three days and every one of them stopped out. In the same week, the biggest winner in the book's life reached the public record. Both are the rule. Here is what we did with the losing half: tested the obvious fix, and rejected it.
A false break, then a bounce. On Tuesday bitcoin sat within a few percent of its 55-bar low without closing through it. Six of the 27 markets we track did close through theirs, mostly by a hair, and the rule shorted them. Bitcoin then turned up: +5.3% on the week, 27 of 27 markets higher over seven days, 19 of 27 above where they stood a month ago. Every short was underwater within a day.
Volatility has compressed again: 19 of 27 markets are in their low-volatility regime on the measure our staged filter uses. Two markets sit within one ATR of their upper channel, none near their lower one. If the next signals come, they lean long.
Bitcoin dominated the flow again: 200 items this week, 53 labelled positive against 13 negative, on a week the price rose. The next-busiest coin had 37. The public record now shows nine open positions, all of them longs opened after the shorts were cut. As always, the count is published and the names are not.
Nine shorts, nine stops. Eight of them were held less than three days; the rule cut each one at its initial stop as soon as the break failed. That is what a wrong short is supposed to cost, and it is what these cost: −8.75R in total, about one R each.
Two closes from the previous week reached the public record after their 48 hours: a long held 24 days that exited by its trailing stop at +16.25R, the biggest single trade since the book went live, and a −1.05R stop. Counting those, the eleven closes since Issue 02 net +6.45R: one winner, ten losers. Four signals were skipped this week because one minimum lot would have risked more than the sleeve allows; we count those instead of hiding them.
The record stands at +17.42R after 86 closed trades (63 days live). Against the probability envelope fixed on 19 July 2026, before the first trade closed, that is inside the band, between the 50th and 75th percentiles, as it was last week. The full chart is on the Record page.
When nine shorts fail in three days, the fix looks obvious: bitcoin never confirmed the break, so only short when bitcoin has broken its own 55-bar low too. On Thursday we did what the method requires. We wrote the rule down exactly, registered it with locked pass bars and a prediction, had the script reviewed for look-ahead, and ran it across every trade since 2021.
It failed all four bars. Total return fell by 119R. Drawdown got worse, not better. The 2022 bear year, which shorts exist to insure, went from a gain to zero. And the mechanism was the opposite of the intuition: the shorts the gate removed were roughly break-even, while the shorts it let in came later, after bitcoin had confirmed, and lost a third of an R each. Waiting for bitcoin to confirm makes you late, not right.
The three rules that are staged for the October review kept their own ledgers busy: the concurrency cap would have refused two of this week's shorts, the volatility filter three, and the early-exit rule would have closed one position sooner. All three verdicts are due 1 October. The full list of what has been tried is in Tested & Rejected, now seventeen entries long.
Not investment advice. Past performance does not predict future results. We publish outcomes, not recommendations. Closed trades appear after a 48-hour delay; figures are R-multiples on the same basis as the public record.