Calibration Log: Every Rule Change We've Made, Dated
How our desk grades and delivers signals changes when the numbers make us. Every change since July 2026, what forced it, and what it means for your alerts.
Rules change around here when the numbers make us. This is every change we've made to how our desk grades and delivers signals, when we made it, what forced our hand, and what it means for the alerts you get. When we bench a strategy it keeps running in the dark so it can earn its way back. And we never touch the history.
How this works
Three habits, so that benching a strategy is a decision you can check on, not a loser that quietly went missing.
A benched strategy keeps firing and getting graded where nobody can see it. It comes back on numbers it earns in the dark, not on a hunch.
Before we bench something, we write down what it takes to come back. Usually that's 20 closed signals that add up to a profit. So we can't move the goalposts later.
Whatever we sent you stays in the book exactly as it was graded. The 28 sweeps we delivered are still in there at −8.45R. So is every other loser.
September 2026
Liquidity Sweep goes on the bench. All of it.
Every sweep signal now goes internal, and no score, reward or session rule can rescue one. Nothing reaches you until we've rebuilt it.
- In August we let forex sweeps back in on a short leash and wrote down the test they'd have to pass. They failed it: 0 for 3, −3.00R, every one a full stop. The last one (GBP/JPY, M15) opened and got stopped the morning we pulled the plug.
- All-time, the sweeps we sent you: 4 wins out of 28, −8.45R. Last 90 days: 2 of 18, −6.38R.
- We were tempted by a fix: all six winners ever came between 11:15 and 15:30 UTC. But fitting a three-hour window to six trades is exactly the kind of storytelling this page exists to stop.
20 closed sweeps in the dark that add up to a profit, or a change to the entry itself.
No sweep alerts for now. The 28 you got stay in the book, graded as they were.
If the stop sits inside the spread, it isn't a trade
Some signals had a stop closer than twice the instrument's usual spread. You can't actually execute that, and the R on it is make-believe. Those now go internal. We bumped the engine version to v3 so anyone can see where the line is.
- 60 days back, that class was 6 signals, 4 of them sent to you. All 6 lost, full stop. So this rule takes away nothing you'd have wanted.
- We also tried a stricter version at five times the spread and threw it out: it would have cut about 29% of your alerts, including 15 winners.
Nothing good disappears. A kind of alert that could only lose is gone.
August 2026
EMA 200 Reclaim on the new markets earns its way out of the dark
When we added metals, oil and indices in July, we ran their M15 reclaim signals in the dark to see if they actually worked. They did. They now go out like everything else.
- Aug 14 to 26, in the dark: 17 closed, 47% winners, +21.95R. About +1.29R a signal.
- We replayed our normal filters over those 17. The over-extension rule alone would have caught the six losers (−6R), and the reward floor two more. Hiding all of them was overkill.
- What gets through: 6 premium (+12.68R) and 3 watchlist (+13.52R). US500 on H4 stays out. It went 0 for 7.
More reclaim alerts on non-forex M15, same rules as everything else.
Weekend Gap Fill couldn't fire. Fixed.
We launched Gap Fill on Aug 17 and it was silent every Sunday after. Not a quiet market and not a rule blocking it. A bug: the detector threw away the Sunday reopen bar as "not finished yet" before it could see the gap. Fixed on the 25th. The first live signal fired Sunday Aug 30 at 21:15 UTC, NZD/USD short on M15.
Sunday-evening gap alerts actually arrive now. Judge the strategy on a small live count until it grows.
M15 breakouts: the New York rule goes, the reward floor drops to 2R
Three things. We dropped July's rule that only let M15 breakouts fire during New York hours. We lowered the reward floor for M15 breakouts from 3R to 2R, while everything else keeps 3R. And M15 breakouts that open outside 9 to 18 ET get labelled watchlist, not premium, until live results earn the upgrade. Went live Aug 26.
- We replayed two windows, Jun 8 to Aug 21 and March through May, charging the spread and assuming the worst on exits. The New York rule's logic didn't hold in either: signals outside those hours made money both times (+16.1R over 12 recently, +8.5R over 23 in spring), and the 9 to 12 ET overlap was actually the worst slot.
- The 3R floor was blocking M15 longs that planned under 3R (+11.0R over 19, profit factor 2.14) while waving through the 3 to 4R ones, which went 0 for 7. A 2R floor beat both 3R and no floor at all.
when 20 live off-hours signals add up to a profit.
More M15 breakout alerts. Some say watchlist instead of premium for now.
Pivot Extreme Fade: premium has to be earned
When we launched pivot fades we labelled every one premium. That stopped. Premium now takes all five: forex, the H4 chart, the first touch of that level this period, a stretch of 1 to 1.5× ATR, and not USD/CAD. Everything else still goes out, labelled watchlist.
- The week of Aug 17 went 1 for 14, −11R, all of them labelled premium. Lifetime, the live fades win 30.4% of the time. A fixed-2R strategy needs 33.3% just to break even.
- The 20-month backtest (187 trades, profit factor 1.33) makes about 93% of its money inside that 1 to 1.5× ATR pocket: +33.0R over 66, 52% winners, positive in 6 of 9 pairs and in both years.
- USD/CAD is the chronic one: −14.1R over 22, 18% winners. And across 299 trades on every market we track, the edge only exists in forex. It flips negative on metals (−9.5R over 40) and energy (−3.2R over 23).
Fewer premium labels, same alerts. Expect two or three premium fades a month.
Mean Reversion gets graded on the reward it plans, not its score
The score gate is gone. It was backwards: signals scoring 70 to 77 made +0.91R on average, 78 to 84 lost −0.66R, and 85 and up went 0 for 3. Now the label follows the planned reward. Premium at 2R or better, watchlist at 1.4R or better, internal below that. This replaces the flat 3R floor, which a pivot-targeted reversion trade almost never reaches by design.
- 90-day replay: the premium group made +2.9R over 17 (35% winners). The 1.4 to 2R group we now demote lost −2.9R over 11.
- I picked a 2R premium bar over 3R (+6.9R over 14) to get the flow back after a week with zero premium alerts.
Mean-reversion alerts flow again, graded on what they actually plan to make.
M15 breakout shorts go on the bench
M15 breakout shorts now go internal. Shorts on H1 and H4 still go out.
- All-time they're −90.6R over 226 trades, winning 18% of the time, and they lost in every month we checked: April −23.8R over 57 (during our best breakout month ever), May −43.8R over 116, June −12.3R over 31, July −8.8R over 20.
- H1 shorts made +4.5R and H4 shorts +8.7R at 54% winners, positive nearly every month.
20 closed M15 shorts in the dark that add up to a profit.
No M15 breakout short alerts until they earn it back.
Asian Range Breakout goes on probation
Signals that would have been premium are capped at watchlist. Monday signals go internal. The score floor went up to 80, longs need six more points than shorts, and we halved how far past the range a signal is allowed to chase, from 0.30 to 0.15 of the range.
- June +44.0R over 64. July −13.0R over 46. August −20.4R over 24, with one winner. Every pair lost both months, and the tuned version went 0 for 9 in August. That's the market changing, not a knob we can turn.
- Mondays: −18.4R over 25 all-time. Scores 75 to 79 lost −9.9R over 47 while 80 to 84 made +28.0R over 49. Longs lost −15.0R over 90; shorts made +25.6R over 44. Chasing 15 to 25% past the range cost −22.2R over 31.
a rolling 45-day check on the tuned version, written down in advance.
Fewer ARB alerts, and none labelled premium until it earns the label back.
Weekend Gap Fill launches
A new strategy. At the first M15 close after the Sunday reopen, when price has gapped 10 pips or more from Friday's close, we fade it back toward Friday. Stop one gap beyond the open, 48 hours to work. Premium from day one.
- A year across 9 pairs, charging three times the normal spread because Sunday nights are ugly: profit factor 1.50, +0.171R a trade, all 9 pairs positive. Per weekend, profit factor 1.84. Every stop-size and cost combination we tried came out positive.
One or two Sunday-evening alerts a week, when a gap qualifies.
The dead zone: forex signals opening between midnight and 3am UTC go dark
Any forex signal whose bar opens between 00:00 and 02:59 UTC, which is 8 to 11pm New York, after the close and before Tokyo wakes up, now goes internal, whatever the strategy.
- A 120-day study by hour of day: that's the only three-hour band that lost in both halves of the window. Hours 00, 01 and 02 together came to −50.1R over 103 forex signals (leaving ARB out), and 0 for 16 in the last 90 days.
- This is not an "Asia is bad" rule. The same study showed that blocking all of Asia would have cost +27.1R from April to June.
if those hours start paying again. They keep getting graded either way. We owed ourselves a re-check on Sep 4 and haven't done it yet.
No alerts from those three hours.
Internal means internal, in every market
We found a leak. The email digest had a forex-only rule that let internal signals on other markets slip through, about 29 a month. Closed. Now an internal signal reaches nobody, anywhere. The ones that leaked before the fix still count in the record, because you got them.
Same day, two more things. We started the four-weekly rule review this page grew out of. And we let forex sweeps back in on a short leash, watchlist only, while metals and oil sweeps stayed out: 0 for 6, with fantasy reward targets of 5.6 to 14.7R, all stopped. We wrote down the test the forex ones had to pass by Sep 1. They didn't pass it. See Sep 4.
The book only has what we actually sent.
Minimum planned reward goes from 2R to 3R
A signal now has to plan at least 3R of reward for every 1R it risks, or it goes internal, on M15, H1 and H4. This roughly halved premium alerts. Two strategies have since earned their own lower floors: Mean Reversion on Aug 18 and M15 breakouts on Aug 22.
- Over 150 days, the 2 to 3R band we cut lost −13.6R over 127 signals. That supports the rule.
- But month by month it went June +6.0, July −20.4, August +4.9. July did all the work. And the win rate falls as planned reward rises (35% down to 21%), so the idea behind the rule isn't as clean as it sounded. We're saying so.
- Under 2R stays out regardless: −8.8R over 88.
by Sep 15, or once 40 signals have been cut by this rule, whichever comes first. If the 2 to 3R group would have made money, the floor drops to 2.5R.
Fewer, bigger-reward alerts. This one's on watch, not settled.
July 2026
EMA 200 Reclaim: the over-stretched ones stop going out
If the 50 and 200 EMAs are more than 2 ATR apart when the signal fires, it goes internal.
- Jul 8 to 31: signals above that line went 1 for 18, −15.45R. Below it: 30.9% winners, +11.24R. The odds of that split being luck are about 1 in 80, and it holds however you slice it: by pair, by date, by market, by direction, by timeframe.
- The score couldn't see it. It actually hands out maximum points for wide separation, and over the same window score and results had basically no relationship (r = +0.004 across 99 signals).
- Checked again at the Aug 7 review: it blocked 4 signals, all losers. Four for four. Best rule we have.
Fewer reclaim alerts, and the missing ones were the losers.
First bench: Liquidity Sweep. Plus, no M15 breakouts on metals and oil.
Liquidity Sweep (2 wins in 21, −0.59R a trade) went internal instead of getting deleted, which is the habit this whole page runs on. M15 breakouts on gold, silver and oil were blocked outright. And we limited M15 breakouts to New York and overlap hours, a rule that didn't survive contact with the data and came off on Aug 22.
- Metals and oil M15 breakouts: 0 for 8 in the July review, 0 for 9 in June. Our pip settings were built for forex and they don't translate to gold's volatility.
Three sources of losing alerts closed. One rule later reopened on evidence. Two stand.
The scores that predicted nothing
Mean Reversion's score floor came off after we found the score was backwards: higher score, worse results (correlation −0.30). We also rebuilt how it scores "stretch", so an extreme stretch, which usually means a trend day, scores zero instead of top marks. Asian Range Breakout's score floor went up from 62 and 58 to 75.
- ARB under 75: −10.9R over 26. At 75 and up: +37.9R over 55.
- Mean Reversion with the score gate gone: +6.81R in the study window.
Score never gated Mean Reversion again. ARB's floor later went to 80, on Aug 17.
Breakout score floor set at 75
Breakout signals scoring under 75 stopped going out. We set the floor at 70 in the morning and raised it to 75 the same day.
- 45 days of data on the current engine: the 70 to 74 band was the worst breakout group per trade, and 75 and up the only one that made money.
- It cost about 55% of breakout volume. We noted at the time: if alerts get too thin, revisit with fresh numbers before lowering it.
About half as many breakout alerts, from the half that paid.
What we're watching
Open questions with dates on them. When one gets answered, it becomes an entry above.
If the 2 to 3R signals we've been cutting since Aug 3 would have made money by the time 40 of them have piled up, the floor drops to 2.5R.
On 50 clean days, watchlist averaged +0.74R and premium −0.03R. That's upside down. Premium has to beat watchlist or the labels get fixed.
−30.6R over 73 trades at 12% winners, with no rule on it yet. We're looking before we write one.
Lift the midnight-to-3am bench if those hours are paying again. They keep getting graded in the dark either way.
Sweeps and M15 breakout shorts return at 20 closed signals in the dark that add up to a profit. Asian Range Breakout on its 45-day rolling check.
Metals and energy fades go out as watchlist only. If they start firing for real, whether to keep sending them gets decided, and logged, here.
Words we use above
- R
One unit of the risk you took at entry. +2R means the trade made twice what it risked. −1R is a full stop.
- Premium · watchlist · internal
Premium is our best-evidenced setup. Watchlist still goes out, at lower conviction. Internal gets graded but never sent to anyone.
- The book
Every signal we actually sent to subscribers, graded as it closed. Internal signals are left out of every public number. It's all here.
- In the dark
A benched strategy keeps firing and getting graded where nobody can see it, against a bar we wrote down on the day we benched it. The opposite of fitting a rule to the past and calling it proof.
Every number on this page comes from the signals we actually sent, graded at close. Internal signals are left out of every published figure. The full statistics update continuously; this log updates the day a rule changes.
Want the changes as they happen, plus every signal graded, every week? The Dossier is free.
We got receipts.
Every signal our desk fires, graded in R — winners and losers, no cherry-picking. One email, every Friday.
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