the naked-emperor box
Receipts first, no hype. Eight are wired and published; two are named and pending — and they say so. The honesty contract is the whole moat: we publish our own misses, we test folklore instead of selling it, and we never claim an edge we can't show.
| # | Truth | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Survivorship bias — the record is a highlight reel. You only ever see the strategies that survived; the losers were deleted or never existed. | in box |
| 2 | Forecasters are barely better than a coin flip. The ones who look right were lucky or cherry-picked. | in box |
| 3 | The crowd is wrong at the extremes. Euphoria marks tops, terror marks bottoms. | in box |
| 4 | Most "edge" is overfitting. Perfect backtests are usually curve-fit, with look-ahead leaking in. | in box |
| 5 | Complexity is sold as sophistication. Fancier indicators add fragility, not edge. | in box |
| 6 | Market timing is a losing game. Time in the market beats timing it. | in box |
| 7 | Fees and churn quietly eat the alpha. The biggest drag isn't a bad strategy — it's paying too much to trade it. | in box |
| 8 | Leverage and liquidity kill more traders than being wrong. Size kills; direction doesn't. | in box |
| 9 | Institutions herd — "smart money" isn't immune. Career risk makes professionals crowd the same names. | to wire |
| 10 | "This time is different" — every bubble's last words. The four most expensive words in finance. | to wire |
Until a future source is live, anything unwired is labelled as such. The same rule the whole box runs on: receipts first, no fake signals.