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.

Implements the Lou-Polk-Skouras 'tug of war' decomposition on a 24/7 crypto clock exactly as specified: the estimator of latent drift is rebuilt from one clock session only, and the sessions are fixed a priori (13:00-21:00 UTC, 8 hours). Both hour parameters are UNDERSCORE-PREFIXED so every optimizer (sensitivity, walk-forward, holdout) skips them — the window can never be swept, as the hypothesis demands. Everything else is a declared tunable with clamps mirrored in _param_bounds. Venue: BINANCE USD-M as declared — shorts are required (the claim is that the sign is informative both ways, so spot would amputate half the signal) and 6.7 years of contiguous hourly bars exist there. leverage is left at 1.0 (the strategy never needs >1x notional; exposure is ~0.2-0.5x equity), so no inert-leverage gate applies. Per-bar cost is O(1) apart from one fsum over the <=160-element US window on US-session bars only — no full-history recomputation, no pandas, no growing lists (both rolling windows are trimmed in place and are restart-persistable via PERSIST_STATE; all position/chandelier state is plain scalars). DRY-RUN ON THE FULL REAL HISTORY (XRPUSDT 1H, 2020-01-06 -> 2026-09-17, signal+entry/exit logic replayed offline at the submitted defaults): 339 round trips over 6.6 years (~51/yr), mean GROSS per-trade return +0.91% of notional (~+0.80% net of the 0.11% round trip), median -1.40%, win rate 38.6% (trend payoff profile: 63% of exits are trailing stops), summed per-trade return +309%. So the fee floor is cleared by ~7x and the trade count is neither zero nor churny. ONE HONEST RESERVATION, per the pre-registered falsification test: I also replayed a same-lookback FULL-DAY return t-stat on the same window. The two signals are genuinely different estimators (corr 0.54, opposite sign on 33% of bars — this is not a relabelled TSMOM), and the US-session version is the better predictor at the 3-day horizon (signed forward return 37.4 vs 27.3 bps, hit rate 48.59% vs 47.80%), but the hit-rate gap is ~0.8pp, NOT the >=2pp the hypothesis pre-registered, and on the trade ledger the full-day variant actually earned slightly more per trade (+1.05% vs +0.91%). I implemented what was asked unchanged; if the backtest reproduces that gap, the honest reading is premise_flawed (the retail-hours component is not pure noise on XRP) rather than an iteration on thresholds.

Failure code: no_edge, taken from the first measured report per L159. That report showed Sharpe 0.39, PF 1.17, bootstrap CI -0.34 to 1.14 (straddles 0) and drawdown 35.4%. It cleared the fee floor comfortably (avg_trade 0.95% against the 0.15% Binance USD-M floor), so this is NOT fee_edge, and with beta at 0.19 it is not beta. After optimization every hard gate passes: OOS 0.66, PBO 0.46, holdout +0.31 on 55 trades. Nothing beyond those gates supports the strategy, and the soft-gate waivers it would need are not defensible. DSR is 0.39 against an expected-max Sharpe of 0.55 over 20 effective trials, programme FDR fails (p=0.61), and the full-period Sharpe is 0.44 with a CI straddling 0. PF is 1.26 and Calmar 0.41. The edge has decayed: 2025 was -15% and 2026 YTD -15% optimized (-29% on the first report), and the profit is concentrated in XRP headline months (Nov-2024 +33%, Jul-2023 +20%). The hypothesis's pre-registered falsification test (hit rate at least 2pp above a same-lookback full-day TSMOM) was not demonstrated, and the pre-registered OOS Sharpe was missed (0.66 vs 0.9). The US-session-slice estimator has now failed on SOL (Bybit, Sharpe 0.17), ETH (COIN-M, PF 0.75) and XRP, so there is no evidence that discarding the non-US hours adds information over plain TSMOM. Promoting would repeat the L134 risk_reject pattern (Sharpe < 1.0, PF < 1.5). Re-optimizing the same mechanism is inadmissible under L126. Note for the Research Lead: do not re-propose the session-decomposed trend on another single instrument. The only informative next test is a direct head-to-head against full-day TSMOM on the same ledger, and that would be a different hypothesis. Separately, and unverified: recurring paired -X/+X daily MTM swings and a -10.8% final-bar print should go to engine review. They do not change this verdict.

Single-instrument, single-leg, always-in long/short trend strategy on XRPUSDT.BINANCE USD-M perpetual, 1-HOUR bars. The signal is the t-statistic of the mean hourly log return accrued EXCLUSIVELY inside the US institutional window (13:00-21:00 UTC = 09:00-17:00 New York) over a trailing 10-day lookback (80 US-session hourly returns); the 16 hours/day of Asia/EU retail-dominated return are discarded and never enter the estimator. Long above +0.35 t, short below -0.35 t; the position is held until the t-stat crosses the OPPOSITE band (flip) or a chandelier trailing stop (8 x ATR(72h) behind the running extreme) fires. After a stop the stopped direction is blocked until the signal reaches the opposite band or a 5-day calendar re-arm window elapses. No regime gate, no volatility gate, no supplementary feed, no second timeframe. Sizing is capital-relative: volatility-targeted (35% annualised) and additionally capped so the chandelier stop distance risks at most 3% of equity, hard capped at 1x equity notional (leverage 1.0). Bar-close timestamps are converted to the bar's OPEN hour before the session test, so a bar stamped 14:00 (covering 13:00-14:00) is the first US-session bar of the day.

Two things the analyst should weigh at backtest review, neither of which is a code defect. (1) The hypothesis pre-registered a falsification test: the US-session estimator must beat a same-lookback full-day-return TSMOM by >= 2pp of directional hit rate. The developer's own offline replay on full history reports only ~0.8pp (48.59% vs 47.80%) and a LOWER per-trade return on the trade ledger (+0.91% vs +1.05% for the full-day variant), with signal correlation 0.54. If the real backtest reproduces that, the correct verdict is premise_flawed/abandon (the retail-hours component is not pure noise on XRP), NOT an iteration on entry_tstat/lookback_days -- the session window is deliberately un-tunable, so there is no parameter that can rescue the premise. (2) Sandbox regime attribution is inverted relative to a trend premise in one respect worth checking on full history: the calm tercile is -8.26% (Sharpe -0.649) and 100% of the sandbox's profit comes from the stressed tercile (+37.95%), while largest_win ($75.8k) is ~1.8x the entire net result ($42.6k) -- i.e. the sandbox result is likely one or two large XRP trend episodes (the Nov-Dec 2024 repricing sits inside the 834-day window). The ledger does reconcile internally (38 wins x $5,700 - 75 losses x $2,321 ~= +$42k, PF 1.24), so this is concentration, not an accounting artifact; check one-year concentration and positive-years share on the full 6.6-year run.