Net Fed liquidity (tide) impulse

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 (subsumed). 10 drain onsets 2010-2026 (latest net-liq ≈ $5.90T). Primary SPX 3mo: continuous IC +0.121 [lo 0.086] (drain z carries weak signal) BUT lift CI straddles 0 (0.04 [lo −0.169]), beats NEITHER the liquidity-valuation level (deltaLo −0.006) NOR naive VIX/credit (deltaLo −0.331); purged 2/5, Holm-Sidak n.s. The FLOW adds nothing beyond the LEVEL/coincident stress — answers the operator's 'where does liquidity come from' thesis (real construct, not an orthogonal forward edge; consistent with liquidity-valuation's 6/12 cluster). data/backfill/net_fed_liquidity_2026-06-14.json. Sentiment sibling still data-blocked. 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.