Session-Decomposed Trend ("Tug of War") on XRPUSDT.BINANCE USD-M: Take Direction ONLY From Return Accrued in the US Institutional Window (13:00-21:00 UTC), DISCARD Retail-Hours Return — Single-Leg, Always-In Long-Short, Hourly Bars, No Gate, No Supplementary Feed

A SINGLE-INSTRUMENT, SINGLE-LEG, always-in long-short directional strategy on XRPUSDT.BINANCE USD-M perpetual, driven by 1-HOUR bars (catalog verified: one contiguous file 2020-01-06 -> 2026-09-17, ~58,400 hourly bars / 6.7 years). The novelty is the SIGNAL ESTIMATOR, not the instrument, the venue, the timeframe or a filter. Every trend strategy this factory has run measures the trend as the CLOSE-TO-CLOSE trailing return, which sums information from all 24 hours indiscriminately. This hypothesis DECOMPOSES the trailing return by clock session and keeps only one component. Mechanism in one sentence (instrument and timeframe stripped, for the duplicate check): 'go long/short on the sign of the trailing return accrued exclusively inside the institutional trading window, discarding the return accrued in retail-dominated hours.' That sentence does not appear in the abandoned corpus — the corpus contains trailing-return-sign TSMOM, dual-timeframe confluence, volume-confirmed momentum, Donchian breakout, range-decile anchoring, pullback-in-trend, and various supplementary-feed gates. This is a different ESTIMATE of the same latent quantity (drift), built on the Lou-Polk-Skouras 'A Tug of War' result that the intraday-vs-overnight decomposition of the SAME cumulative return contains two components with opposite predictive signs — a published, out-of-sample-in-equities mechanism that has never been transferred to a 24/7 crypto clock, where the natural analogue of 'institutional session' is the US window and the analogue of 'retail/noise session' is the Asia window. SESSION DEFINITIONS ARE FIXED A PRIORI, NOT FITTED (declared selection choices, per lesson 122): US window = 13:00-21:00 UTC = 09:00-17:00 New York, the overlap of US equity hours, CME crypto futures hours and US derivatives-desk staffing. It is NOT swept and the optimizer must not tune it; the whole claim is that this economically-defined window carries the persistent drift. The remaining 16 hours per day are deliberately thrown away. WHY XRP, DECLARED EXPLICITLY (lesson 136: satisfy breadth by changing the mechanism, then express it on the most liquid instrument that carries it): the mechanism requires (a) a genuine two-population order flow with a measurable Asia-retail leg and a US-institutional leg, and (b) multi-year contiguous HOURLY history. XRP is a top-5 perpetual by turnover, is the major with the most documented Asia-retail participation skew, and has 6.7 years of hourly data already in the catalog. Venue: Binance USD-M is over its 40% corpus quota and used anyway because the mechanism needs contiguous multi-year hourly bars plus shortability — Hyperliquid serves only ~7 months at 1h and BINANCE_SPOT cannot short, which would amputate half of a signal whose whole point is that the sign is informative in both directions. The diversity contribution is the MECHANISM and the direction bucket, not the ticker. WHAT IS DELIBERATELY ABSENT (lesson 130 — filters subtract): NO regime gate, NO volatility gate, NO funding/OI/taker-flow confirmation, NO second timeframe, NO supplementary feed. Always in the market, long or short. The only non-signal machinery is a Chandelier trailing stop, which is risk control and not a signal. PRE-REGISTERED FALSIFICATION: if the US-session component carries no information beyond the full-day return, this degenerates into ordinary TSMOM and should NOT outperform it. The hypothesis predicts a directional hit rate at least 2 percentage points ABOVE a same-lookback full-return TSMOM on the same instrument and window. If the two signals produce near-identical trade ledgers, the premise is falsified and the run should be abandoned as premise_flawed rather than iterated.