Pre-register a strategy
Declare a strategy before it runs and we publish its record whatever happens. That earns Grade A− — the highest grade available without per-decision attestation — and it costs nothing.
Registering a strategy that is already running
You can, and most people will — nobody pre-registers a strategy they have not yet decided to run. It is worth doing and it is worth being precise about what it buys.
A declaration attests forward, never backward. If the vault has been trading for a year, the model, the prompt and the parameters could have changed any number of times in that year and no signature covers it. From the moment you sign, they cannot change without a new declaration — and the registry shows exactly where that line falls, with the unattested period hatched and counted in days.
We take the start date from the venue’s own creation timestamp where there is one, and from the earliest data we hold otherwise. The second case is a floor: it started no later than that, possibly earlier, and it is labelled as such rather than presented as the answer.
Why we ask for this before rather than after
Every leaderboard in this industry shows the strategies that worked, because those are the ones somebody chose to publish. The failures are not hidden so much as never submitted, which makes the denominator unknowable and every average drawn from it wrong.
Medicine had the same problem and fixed it with mandatory trial pre-registration — not by asking researchers to confess. Nobody volunteers a confession; anybody will fill in a form about something they are optimistic about. So: tell us now, and the record counts either way.
This is a commitment, and it is meant to be. A declaration cannot be edited — any change breaks the signature — and it is never deleted. A strategy that quietly disappeared when it went wrong would recreate the exact bias this exists to remove. 3 strategies have been declared so far.
What we do and do not see
- • The strategy hash is optional and we never see what it hashes. It only lets you show later that the model, prompt or parameters are the ones you declared.
- • Signing costs nothing and moves nothing. It is a message, not a transaction — there is no gas and no approval of any kind.
- • Everything except your email is published, including the declaration text and the signature, so that anyone can check it themselves rather than take our word for it.
Already declared? The registry lists every strategy and where it got to.