Options-skew crash gate

The question

Do cross-asset stress patterns — volatility-of-volatility, credit spreads, the yield curve, commodities, funding plumbing, and crypto — lead broad equity drawdowns? A family of independent early-warning hypotheses.

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

NOISE (ran 2026-06-05, 59 episodes/32 OOS): IC NEGATIVE −0.07/−0.13, TPR 7-12%, FPR-bound — complacent tail-bid does NOT lead crashes. Run-once, no iterate (Rule #10). NOT a predictive-regime input.

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.