Research brief 020

A backtest spends information every time we change the question.

The Axiomatic Trader connects model complexity, research search and position sizing through explicit assumptions.

Public research brief

The final backtest rarely shows how many alternatives were tried before it became the final backtest.

Jiayu Li’s The Axiomatic Trader treats that search history as part of the statistical problem. It develops a framework linking assumptions about persistent market structure with how much modeling and strategy selection a dataset can support.

This is methodological research. It does not discover an alpha for us, and its mathematical guarantees are conditional on assumptions about the world.

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