Campaign regime-invariant-orthogonality · judging the 120 harvested liquidity / crowding / fragility candidates · append-only spoke · ← the harvest that produced them
Does a candidate measure something real and useful about execution cost and fragility — beyond the trivial volume baseline — and does that hold across market regimes?
Axis-2 candidates are orthogonal to price by construction. The 19 grounded instruments from the realness campaign all ask "does this predict forward return?" — so pointing them at these 120 would score every one at roughly zero and reject the entire cohort. It would look like a clean, rigorous result.
The target is therefore swapped. A liquidity metric is judged on whether it predicts what it costs to trade, and above all on whether it warns before costs blow up. The warehouse already records exactly that, so this is an existing yardstick rather than one invented for the occasion.
Cheapest filters first, so the most candidates die for the least compute. Default is EXCLUDE — a candidate advances only by clearing the gate. One gate per loop firing.
| Gate | Asks | Kind |
|---|---|---|
| SEAL | do the controls themselves work? (C1–C4 self-test, before any real candidate) | self-test |
| F0 | computable at all — spot-legal · no order-book requirement · a Python path exists | deterministic |
| F1 | non-degenerate and dense enough | inferential |
| F2 | not a duplicate — vs the shipped set and within the cohort | inferential |
| F3 | beats the raw-volume baseline ← expected to do most of the killing | inferential |
| F4 | real and useful against the cost targets, multiplicity-corrected, power-backed | inferential |
| F5 | holds across market regimes — the ship bar | inferential |
PREREG.md before any candidate was measured.readonly=2; compute confined to 5 cores / 5 GB / no swap. Cap-kills are recorded as evidence — the cap is never raised.Mostly negative, and that is the anticipated shape rather than a failure. Around 19 candidates park immediately for want of order-book data that does not exist anywhere in this system; a share are rejected on tooling; many will prove to be the same few ideas wearing different hats; and most survivors are expected to fail the volume baseline. The comparable axis-1 campaign ended 16 admitted against 45 killed.
Each firing appends one row here and emits one self-contained page index_iter_<N>_<slug>.html in this folder. Rows and pages are never edited or deleted — corrections add a new sibling row citing the parent. Mirrors the markdown SSoT axis-2-cascade-free/evaluation/LEDGER.md.
| Iter | Date | Gate | Decided | Running | Page | Note |
|---|
Markdown SSoT lives in the audit folder findings/evolution/audits/2026-07-22-regime-invariant-orthogonality-campaign/axis-2-cascade-free/evaluation/. Cohort frozen at catalog commit e6eaa6be. Substrate BTCUSDT × {100, 250, 500, 750} dbps, 3s cost-realism labels, 2018-01 → 2026-07.
Compute runs on bigblack inside one dated, fully deletable campaign folder — /home/nasimubd/lab/2026-07-24-axis2-cascade-free-evaluation/ — holding the environment, a git worktree of the campaign branch, the harnesses and all artifacts. Nothing this campaign creates lives outside it. Results count only once committed to the campaign PR; a run sitting only in the lab is an unbacked result.