52-Week-High Momentum (campaign): a killed candidate

Verdict: KILLED Stage: deployed gauntlet
Identity: eq_52whigh

The one AlphaMax construction variant whose cheap screen cleared the bar (t 2.01 vs plain momentum's 1.73), so we honored the pre-registration and ran the FULL deployed-path walk-forward. It KILLED: net Sharpe -0.289 (WORSE than plain 12-1's own -0.049 on the same harness), DSR 0.00, and OOS correlation +0.42 to plain momentum — neither better nor genuinely different. The frozen 12-1 build stays. KILLED at the gauntlet.

Why it was worth testing

This one reached deployment before it was killed, which makes it the most expensive kind of kill and the most important to publish in full. A candidate that passed on the evidence available at the time and failed on better evidence later is not a process failure to be hidden; refusing to withdraw it would be.

The result

Measure	Value
Screen net Sharpe	-0.2890

What this does and does not say

It says this configuration, on this data, net of the costs we charge, did not clear the bar it pre-registered. It does not say the underlying economic effect does not exist, that no implementation of it works, or that someone with different data or different execution would reach the same conclusion. A null is evidence about a test, not a proof about a market.

It also does not say the trial was free. Every hypothesis tested raises the deflated-Sharpe hurdle for every sleeve already in the book, including the ones that survived. That is why the kill count is published beside the survivor count rather than behind it.