AXOQUANT

Proprietary quantitative research

We trade enforced obligations. We measure what our own tests can see.

Axoquant looks for relationships a mechanism obliges to hold — a rebalance mandate, a defended band, share-class identity, contract convergence, an index-tracking mandate. A candidate names the obligated party and the trigger that binds them, or it is not a candidate. A pattern that merely held is not a thesis.

We run two nulls, because they answer different questions. A matched control asks whether a book beats its neighbours. Only a calibrated, edge-free generator — series required to reproduce the market's volatility clustering, tails and correlation structure while containing nothing to find — asks whether it beats nothing at all. We had been reading the first answer as though it were the second; the three incidents that forced the distinction, and the doctrine reversal we published against ourselves when it landed, are AQ-11. The generator is built and its out-of-sample moment-match table is not yet in; until it is, it is an instrument rather than a null, and we say so where it is used.

And a kill is not a finding without a detection floor. State the smallest edge the search could have seen, or the verdict is a statement about the search rather than about the market. Every verdict is now required to cite the floor for its class. Two mechanism classes have been measured; the rest are outstanding, and a verdict citing one of those is a prerequisite batch rather than a kill. The floor's value is proprietary.

Most candidates do not survive. Increasingly, neither do our own verdicts.

Models author strategy code and propose hypotheses here at volume. Nothing a model says is permitted to adjudicate; the gate is arithmetic. What the machines got wrong →

FIG. 1 — THE SPECIFICITY GATE
authored 2,029 abandoned before test 1,764 gate-tested 265 refuted at the gate 246 survived 19
Of 2,029 strategies authored to date, 1,764 were abandoned before any gate test — killed at authoring, at the novelty check, or by a sweep that produced nothing worth testing. 265 accumulated enough independent windows to face the specificity gate, where each candidate is re-run against a control ensemble built to null exactly the mechanism it claims; 246 were refuted there and 19 survived, under Benjamini–Hochberg false-discovery control with consistency required across independent windows (the pre-registered false-discovery rate is not published). Two readings the bars do not give you. Each of the 265 was itself the surviving parameterisation of a several-thousand-trial optimisation, so the gate sees a population already selected for looking good. And we have since measured how often that selection manufactures a survivor out of nothing at all; that measurement, and its correct reading, are published as AQ-04 rather than summarised here. Earlier copy on this page called 2,010 strategies "refuted". That was wrong: it counted the abandoned with the tested, and abandonment is a weaker word than refutation. Corrected 2026-08 by AQ-08, which is the correction of record; this page is the home of record for the counts themselves.

The library

  1. 11 items published to date, numbered AQ-01 to AQ-11
    five working papers, a decommission, a data-quality finding, a charter, two corrections and a retraction · dated · status tracked · never renumbered, never silently edited     library →
  2. 244 papers shelved across 20 shelves
    a verdict recorded against each · most of them Background, and the page says so     reading →
  3. 3 corrections and retractions issued against our own record
    a funnel figure that called abandonment refutation; two different breadths published under one name; and a working paper retracted in whole, its corpus optimised at a fraction of production budget     corrections →

Each figure has one home of record and is cited from it, not restated. Estate figures — how many venues, how many asset classes, which bar intervals — live on coverage. Corpus figures live on reading. Cross-references across the library are hand-maintained; a link check runs before publish.

FIG. 2 — THE SHELF, BY MONTH
1 3 11 2026-06 2026-07 2026-08
Cumulative items in the library, by month of publication: 1 in 2026-06, 3 by 2026-07, 11 by 2026-08. n = 3 months. This is a record, not a trend, and at this length it cannot be anything else — which is the reason to date every step rather than assert a body of work. An AQ number is assigned at publication and never reused. A wrong item is not edited; it is corrected by a new item that cites it, and the status vocabulary is closed: current, revised, superseded, corrected, retracted. A retracted item stays on this count and in the index — withdrawal is a status, not a deletion — so the line never falls.

Published against ourselves

Recently refuted

  1. Carry as alpha A G10 carry basket cleared survivability with a stable Sharpe across every test window and was refused at the specificity gate: p = 0.62 against a beta-adjusted null. It is the carry factor, correctly named, and we publish it as one. It was also that market's planted control — a factor strategy seeded among the candidates, expected to clear survivability and die at specificity — and it died as designed, which is the only reason the pass rate around it can be read at all. AQ-01 →
  2. Cross-sectional mean reversion, US equities Negative after real per-share costs in every test window. No parameterisation rescued it, because the fee floor is not a parameter. The fee floor is the finding, and the campaign that produced it returned no book that passed both gates. AQ-01 →
  3. Our own first equity flagship It passed both gates and was void 48 hours later, killed by our own fills ledger: the instrument records showed the backtest had filled on a venue the book's label did not claim. Three further asset-class routing defects were excavated underneath it. The verdict was withdrawn and the campaign's equity results with it; the pre-flight check that caught it is now standing. The discovery chain is the strongest exhibit that campaign produced. AQ-01, revised →