LLM earnings-call/news-tone PEAD overlay

The question

Do dated corporate-event shocks (IPO lock-up expiries, post-IPO drift) produce a tradeable, cost- and survivorship-honest edge — or do apparent effects dissolve under proper method?

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

[UNBLOCK-RESOLVED / ARCHIVED 2026-06-30 (operator-directed 'do the 1 unblock'): the transcript-PRIMARY HISTORICAL backfill (hash f444d917) is ABANDONED — FMP transcripts are permanently dead (v3/v4 403 + /stable 402) and Rule #8 makes the locked file immutable, so it can't be reworked in-place. The thesis moved to the live-forward Path A shadow (Alpha Vantage), now ACTIVE: operator TODO complete — ALPHAVANTAGE_API_KEY set + TRANSCRIPT_TONE_FORWARD=on + cron + route all verified live 2026-06-30. Path A accrues the hindsight-free tone→SUE→fwd-14d-drift corpus the pre-reg named as its clean validator; a future ΔIC-join verdict would be its own pre-reg. pead.ts sentimentDelta STAYS null (promotion needs a STRATEGY_GRADE verdict + operator decision). No open data-acquisition decision remains. HISTORY ↓] LOCKED 2026-06-22 (.1% evaluation — the #1 forward-AI gap: ZERO ML/NLP in the trade path). First LLM/NLP signal evaluated for the trade path; finally tests the dormant pead.ts sentimentDelta hook. Confronts the LLM-specific look-ahead head-on (a 2026-trained model scoring a 2021 call) — entity redaction + outcome-forbidden frozen prompt + shuffled-label negative control + the backfill verdict CAPPED at INFO_GRADE; STRATEGY_GRADE requires a clean LIVE-FORWARD shadow track. The live engine NEVER calls the LLM + sentimentDelta STAYS null until a verdict + explicit operator promotion. ⚠️ DATA-BLOCKED on transcripts: --validate-data found FMP transcripts unavailable on the current tier (v3/v4 → 403 legacy, /stable transcript → 402). RESOLUTION (2026-06-22): FMP `/stable/news/stock` IS live (HTTP 200, confirmed) → the NEWS data path works, but this pre-reg is transcript-PRIMARY + IMMUTABLE (Rule #8) so it stays blocked until transcripts are acquired (FMP tier upgrade / alt provider). The viable near-term path is a SEPARATE news-only-tone pre-reg (news is a distinct construct, Rule #10 — not a silent swap of this locked file). Operator decision: acquire transcripts (run this as written) OR register a news-only sibling. **NEWS-ONLY SIBLING NOW REGISTERED (`news-tone-pead`, 2026-06-22, operator 'Yes to both').** **PATH A LIVE-FORWARD SHADOW BUILT 2026-06-25 (operator-directed): FMP transcripts confirmed DEAD (v3/v4 403 legacy — won't return on upgrade; /stable 402 tier-gated). Alpha Vantage EARNINGS_CALL_TRANSCRIPT verified free (demo IBM 2024Q1 → 52,355 chars). Built the forward shadow the pre-reg names as the CLEAN (hindsight-free) validator: lib/research/alphavantage-transcript.ts + transcript-tone-forward.ts (pure, +7 tests) + -assemble.ts + scripts/transcript-tone-forward.ts + cron app/api/cron/transcript-tone-forward (env TRANSCRIPT_TONE_FORWARD=off default). Charter-safe (lib/research, never imports engine/portfolio; sentimentDelta stays null). DORMANT pending OPERATOR TODO: claim a free AV key → set ALPHAVANTAGE_API_KEY → set TRANSCRIPT_TONE_FORWARD=on + add cron. The locked HISTORICAL backfill (transcript-PRIMARY, this pre-reg) stays gated/blocked — Path A is the forward-capture infra, not the backfill. Memo project_transcript_tone_data_unblock_2026_06_25.md.** Harness scripts/backfill-transcript-tone-pead.ts gated. DO-NOT-RUN before 2026-06-27.

Superseded by a later version or failed a robustness check. Kept for the record.