Articles
Research write-ups
Long-form answers to the questions people actually search for — written strictly from this project's published, out-of-sample research. Educational only, never investment advice.
Why AI can't beat the market
We built the AI trading system everyone dreams about — then used it to prove, exhaustively and with full disclosure, that it doesn't beat a plain index. Here is the whole story.
June 2026 · 8 min read
Lump sum or dollar-cost averaging?
On a century of data, investing earlier won about two years in three. The honest answer is still 'it depends' — but on exactly one thing, and it isn't the market.
June 2026 · 7 min read
Can you actually avoid crashes?
The most seductive idea in investing is keeping the upside while skipping the crashes. We tested the standard tool for it. The honest answer: you can buy shallower crashes — but the price is your return, not someone else's.
June 2026 · 7 min read
Momentum is real. You still can't eat it
The strongest anomaly in academic finance survived our tests too — right up until we charged it what trading actually costs. What's left is the clearest lesson this project produced.
June 2026 · 6 min read
Can you trade the oldest anomaly?
After a big earnings beat, the stock keeps drifting up for weeks. Finance has known this since 1968. We retested it — and found that being famous for half a century is exactly what kills it.
June 2026 · 6 min read
Why your backtest looks like a winner
The most dangerous flaw in a backtest isn't a bug in the code. It's the companies that aren't in the data — because they died. We paid to put them back in, and several strategies died with them.
June 2026 · 6 min read
What leverage actually does to a long-term holder
Double the exposure does not mean double the outcome. The daily-reset math quietly works against you in choppy markets and catastrophically against you in crashes — and in our multi-regime tests, leverage only won in the regimes you'd have to predict in advance.
June 2026 · 6 min read
Educational research write-ups. Not investment advice.