Yield-curve shape 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

DISCONFIRMED/INFO 2026-06-04: fails bars (IC -0.23, lift-CI lo 0.143<0.15); directional lift +19pp but daily-crossing over-counts episodes (44 vs ~6-9) → episode-independence violated; Rule #10 not re-run

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.