Frozen-Rule Breadth Test of 4H Capitulation Absorption on a Disjoint Binance SPOT Universe: buy a spot alt at the close of a <=-3-sigma, >=1.5-sigma-volume 4H bar, fixed 48h clock, 10% per leg, max 5 concurrent (15 older-generation alts chosen by 2020 quote volume, incl. later-delisted EOS/XMR/MATIC; BINANCE_SPOT 4H, long-only cash, flat ~90% per name)

Original Research Lead hypothesis: an out-of-universe, out-of-venue breadth test of a promoted mechanism, with the rules frozen. The source is the paper-stage 'Bybit Spot 4H Volume-Confirmed Capitulation Absorption Panel' (405 trades, average trade +1.78%, PF 1.80, Sharpe 1.26, max DD 15.0%). It traded 11 coins on BYBIT_SPOT: SOL, XRP, ADA, DOGE, LINK, LTC, DOT, AVAX, ATOM, FIL and NEAR. Following lessons L228 and L224, this run tests the same rule on coins it has NEVER traded, on a different cash venue. It shares no coin, and so no price series, with the source panel. It is a fresh test, not a replication on the same data. MECHANISM: a forced or panic seller (stop cascades, a margin call met by selling spot, a fund exiting) leaves an unusually large 4H drop on unusually high volume. A patient cash buyer who takes the other side is paid through a partial rebound over the next 1-2 days. Spot cannot be liquidated and pays no funding, so this is a plain liquidity-provision bet. UNIVERSE, fixed by a data rule BEFORE any return was examined (survivorship-honest, point in time). Take the BINANCE_SPOT USDT pairs that had daily bars by 2020-01-01. Exclude BTC, ETH and BNB, stablecoins and fiat or gold tokens, leveraged UP/DOWN tokens, and the 11 coins of the source study. Rank the rest by median daily quote volume over calendar 2020 and take the top 15: BCH, EOS, TRX, XTZ, VET, ETC, ZEC, XLM, NEO, DASH, XMR, ONT, MATIC, QTUM, ALGO. Three of them were later delisted from Binance spot: XMR (2024-02), MATIC (2024-09) and EOS (2025-05). They stay in the universe. The base template closes a position at its last bar, and the strategy checks is_listed() before every entry. The selection uses 2020 data only, so trading starts 2021-01-01, with late-2020 bars used only as indicator warm-up. Set parameters['point_in_time_universe']=True so the later delistings do not clamp the window. SIGNAL, the source rule unchanged. On every closed 4H bar of each coin: shock_z = ln(close/prev_close) / std of 4H log returns over the previous vol_lookback bars (the current bar is excluded). volume_z = (ln(volume) - mean of ln(volume) over the previous vol_lookback bars) / their std. An event is shock_z <= -shock_z_min AND volume_z >= volume_z_min. After an event, the coin cannot fire again for 24h (6 bars), and it never fires while a position in it is open. EXECUTION: a market BUY at the signal bar's close. On a 24/7 venue that price is the next bar's open; the registry lists this as the use_equivalent for next_bar_open_fill. The exit is a market SELL after hold_bars closed 4H bars. Exits are on a time clock only: no stop, no target, no signal exit, as in the source. SIZING / RISK CONTROL route (b), a time exit plus capped sizing. Each position is leg_weight = 10% of current equity, with at most max_concurrent = 5 open at once (50% gross, 1x cash, no leverage). When more coins fire on the same bar than there are free slots, the most negative shock_z is filled first. Under the conservative risk profile, each leg contributes about 0.10 x ~100% annualised alt volatility = ~10%, far under the 120% per-position limit. Even a -50% gap on a leg costs only 5% of equity, under the 15% per-trade limit. PRE-STUDY: catalog BINANCE_SPOT 4H bars, 2020-06 to 2026-10. z-scores use prior bars only and vol_lookback = 180 (30 days); entry is at the signal close, with one event per coin per 24h; returns are gross. There were 1,185 events on 349 distinct entry dates (lesson L238: events cluster, so the date count is the honest sample size). The mean forward return was +0.87% at 12h, +1.71% at 24h (median +1.12%) and +1.53% at 48h (median +0.89%, 56% positive). By year, the 24h mean was positive in all seven years: 2020 +0.5%, 2021 +4.6%, 2022 +0.5%, 2023 +1.1%, 2024 +2.0%, 2025 +2.0%, 2026 YTD +0.6%. The 48h mean was positive in 6 of 7 years, all except 2020 (-0.2%). The 48h mean was positive for 14 of 15 coins; the exception is ONT at -0.5%. CAVEAT: this pre-study covers the whole history, holdout included. The holdout is therefore not unseen by the Research Lead, and the rules were frozen from the SOURCE study, not from this pre-study. COST ARITHMETIC: the round trip on Binance spot is 0.20% in taker fees plus about 0.05% modelled impact, so 0.25%. The gross 48h mean is ~1.5%. Haircut by 50% for capacity skipping and fill reality, it is ~0.75% gross, ~0.5% net per trade: 2x+ the cost floor, and about 6x the cost before the haircut. PRE-REGISTERED COMPARISONS: (1) Lesson L170: report the strategy's max drawdown next to an equal-weight buy-and-hold of the same 15 coins over the same window. That basket drew down far more than 70% in 2021-2022; the strategy should stay near 20%. (2) The traded horizon is 48h, frozen from the source. The 24h horizon is reported beside it through secondary_horizons_days, because the pre-study shows the 24h capture is as large. This is reported only; the rule is not changed. CORPUS / QUOTA: BINANCE_SPOT is 10.4% of experiments against a target of at least 15%, and lesson L192 says spot-tagged long-only ideas have the highest survival rate. All 15 coins are old-generation names that have barely been used in the corpus, so this spends unused data rather than re-mining BTC. The design is event-driven and flat most of the time, which is the lesson-L224 pattern. It is not a momentum variant.