LEARN/THE METRICS

The metrics

Fourteen statistics. What each one measures, why it matters to a strategy, and where its band came from.

Where every band came from

Ten consecutive 252-day windows of 40 US large caps, 2015 to 2025, measured with this module's own estimators. Nine windows set each band. The tenth, the window that straddles the COVID crash, is reported separately as that band's crisis window.

So the panel is a claim about a typical year. Crisis behaviour is measured under pinned scenarios instead.

The fourteen

annualised_vol_pct How violent the market is
15.00 28.3103 36.00

It sets the scale of every gain and every loss. Too high and every Sharpe ratio you measure is depressed and every stop is hit too often. Too low and risk looks free.

REAL WINDOWS 18.3 / 25.9 / 30.7
excess_kurtosis How fat the tails are
1.60 10.0043 41.00

How often a day lands far from typical. Zero is a normal distribution, and real markets are strongly positive, because crashes and melt-ups happen far more often than a bell curve allows. This one decides whether tail risk means anything in your results.

REAL WINDOWS 5.6 / 11.1 / 36.7
return_acf1 Does yesterday predict today
-0.08 0.0114 0.06

Near zero in a real market. A positive value is free money for a momentum rule, so this is the row that decides whether a trend result here is a finding or an artifact.

REAL WINDOWS band -0.08 to 0.06
abs_return_acf1 Does a wild day follow a wild day
0.02 0.0769 0.22

Volatility clustering at one day. Present in every real market, and the reason a calm week is a poor forecast of the next one.

REAL WINDOWS band 0.02 to 0.22
abs_return_acf5 The same, one week apart
0.01 0.0305 0.12

Clustering at lag five. Whether a volatile spell persists long enough for a weekly risk model to see it.

REAL WINDOWS band 0.02 to 0.09
abs_return_acf20 The same, one month apart
-0.04 0.0096 0.08

Clustering at lag twenty. This is where the decay-shape gap lives: the model holds the level here but reaches it with the wrong curve.

REAL WINDOWS band -0.04 to 0.08
cross_sectional_corr How much names move together
0.08 0.2616 0.56

The average pairwise correlation. It decides whether a diversified book is actually diversified, and it is the row that concentration moves first.

REAL WINDOWS band 0.08 to 0.56
volume_abs_return_corr Do big moves come with volume
0.46 0.5108 0.66

Volume and absolute return move together in every real market. An execution algorithm that assumes constant depth is wrong in exactly the moments that matter.

REAL WINDOWS band 0.46 to 0.66
leverage_effect Do falls raise volatility
-0.16 -0.0258 0.00

Negative returns raise future volatility more than positive ones do. A symmetric model gets the shape of a drawdown wrong.

REAL WINDOWS band -0.16 to 0.00
volume_change_acf1 Does volume mean-revert
-0.32 -0.2794 -0.20

Negative in real markets: a heavy day is followed by a lighter one. Participation caps read against ADV depend on it.

REAL WINDOWS band -0.32 to -0.20
corr_asymmetry Do names couple more when falling
-0.25 -0.0018 0.45

Correlation rises in a selloff, which is when diversification is most wanted and least available.

REAL WINDOWS band -0.25 to 0.45
corr_asymmetry_lagged The same, one day later
-0.20 -0.0327 0.55

Whether that coupling survives into the next session rather than being a one-day artifact.

REAL WINDOWS band -0.20 to 0.55
sector_excess_corr Do industries move together
0.11 0.2081 0.23

How much more a name moves with its own industry than with the market. Undefined on a single-sector roster, because those are the same thing.

REAL WINDOWS band 0.11 to 0.23
corr_persistence_acf1 Does correlation stay high after a panic
-0.19 0.1771 0.54

Correlation does not snap back the day after a crash. The single row pt-v14 misses on held-out seeds.

REAL WINDOWS band -0.19 to 0.54

What one run actually shows you

Every banded number is a median across seeds. The spread around it is wide enough to change the answer, and tradefloor.envelope.intervals() reports it per statistic.

median The point estimate a single panel would report.
low, high The actual minimum and maximum across seeds.
p10, p90 The tenth and ninetieth percentiles.
sd Across-seed standard deviation, measured on these panels.
shipped_sd facts.SEED_SD, measured once at the baseline.
distance Band distance, and sd_out gives that distance in units of noise.
extremes_straddle The minimum or maximum crosses a band edge.
typical_straddles The p10 to p90 range crosses a band edge. This is the one to read.

Read typical_straddles, not extremes_straddle

extremes_straddle fires when one seed of thirty crossed an edge. That is close to expected, so it is information rather than a finding.

typical_straddles says the middle eighty percent crosses. Then a reader running one seed is likely, not merely able, to measure out of band on a statistic whose median sits well inside.

Measured on pt-v10 over thirty seeds, nine of the fourteen straddle by that test. That is the previous era's dispersion. pt-v14 moved the medians and the spread around them has not been re-measured.

Three bands are not raw measurements

A band is what this measurement returns on real data, with three documented exceptions. Each names itself on its own provenance row.

annualised_vol_pct EXTENDED OUTWARD

The ceiling moves from the windows' 34 to 36, so the band admits a slightly more violent year than the sample held.

abs_return_acf1 CLAMPED INWARD

The floor is held at +0.02. Zero volatility clustering appears in no retrieved source and no observed window.

leverage_effect CLAMPED INWARD

The ceiling is held at 0.00. A top above zero would certify a reversed leverage effect as real-market behaviour.

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