Macro-nowcast regime/timing

The question

Do forward-macro nowcasts — the rate-of-change of growth nowcasts, recession probability, and inflation expectations — time the broad market's risk-on/off regime, orthogonally to the cross-asset stress family?

How it was tested

The hypothesis, its exact trigger, the outcome it predicts, and the pass/fail bar were written down and cryptographically hash-locked before any data was tested, then held through a mandatory cooling-off period. The backfill ran exactly once against those frozen parameters — no re-tuning, no curve-fitting — using adversarial statistics (stationary-bootstrap confidence intervals, multiple-testing correction, purged cross-validation with an embargo, and walk-forward out-of-sample splits). The specific trigger thresholds are proprietary and omitted here.

The outcome

RAN 2026-06-14 → NOISE. CLEAN GDPNow ALFRED-vintage window only (FRED vintage record begins 2016-05-17 → composite usable ~2017-08; the final-revision series was NOT used to pad pre-2016 — would inject the lookahead the pre-reg flags LOAD-BEARING). 9 risk-off onsets. Primary SPX 3mo: continuous IC −0.062 [lo −0.256] STRADDLES 0 (→NOISE trigger), and the impulse does NOT beat the LEVELS composite (deltaLo −0.078) — the pre-reg's defining hypothesis (delta>level) FAILS. Binary onset did show lift (0.229) + Holm-Sidak + 4/5 purged, but the continuous-IC + levels-subsumption fails are decisive. Honest-prior outcome (universally-watched → subsumed; short vintage window caps power). data/backfill/macro_nowcast_regime_2026-06-14.json. MACRO_NOWCAST_MODE stays off. Rule #10: no iterate.

The backfill ran and the hypothesis failed its pre-registered bar. It is recorded and retired — not re-tested without a fresh, separately-registered hypothesis.