TokSeq documentation/Current program

Current program and what is being built

What the platform is scaling right now, which forward windows are open, and which research questions are queued with dates attached.

This page describes work in progress rather than results. It is written in the same style as the rest: with the sample sizes, the dates and the pre-registered verdicts that each item is waiting on. Items here are not claims. They are commitments to measure something.

Instrument coverage is being widened

The research history and the live engine were built on three primary assets. That was a deliberate constraint, not a limitation of the design: three correlated instruments keep the effective sample honest while the machinery is being validated, and expanding coverage before the method is trustworthy only multiplies the multiplicity problem.

The method is now trustworthy enough to widen, and the widening was tested before it was performed. A pre-registered transfer probe over twenty additional instruments asked whether the volatility and regime models carry across, with the pass threshold declared in advance. Twelve of twenty cleared it, against a requirement of ten, so coverage is being extended across the full width rather than to a hand-picked subset.

The probe also recorded, before it ran, the caveat it then confirmed: at a one-day horizon the volatility benchmark adds nothing over the trivial statement that volatility reverts to its mean, on any instrument. At the one-hour horizon it adds 0.03 to 0.05 on all twenty-three instruments tested. The consequence is built into the design rather than glossed over. Across the wide instrument set the platform ranks the probability of one-hour expansion and the regime state; the volatility premium itself is computed only where option markets exist.

A second market is being added to the volatility program, with its own volatility index and roughly a dozen underlyings carrying liquid option series. It is unrelated to the first market, which is the point: an effect that reproduces on an independent market with different participants, different hours and different microstructure is a different class of evidence from an effect measured twice on the same one. The premium there measured +9.2 volatility points over 913 trading days, positive on 88 per cent of days and positive in every calendar year of the sample.

Storage was sized for the expansion before it started rather than discovered mid-way: current growth is about 228 megabytes a day, and the wider instrument screen plus the second market's underlyings add roughly ten gigabytes a year against 86 gigabytes free.

Forward windows currently open

WindowWhat it decidesStatus
Volatility premium desk, 30 daysFive pre-registered criteria including a paired comparison against a naive twin, a tail constraint and a coverage bandOpened 7 September 2026, verdict due early October
Long-volatility cardsWhether buying expansion against cheap implied volatility survives costs, gated and pre-registered on the same patternAdded to the demo desk in September, running alongside their twins
Paper desk pool, 152 agentsDistribution of forward performance including the noise tier, which is what any leaderboard has to beatAccumulating to the end of October
Anomaly gate for the volatility deskImplementation of the two signals that passed their measurement gate, with a kill criterion over a month of forward operationSpecification complete, implementation next

None of these windows will be extended, and none of their thresholds will move. A window that fails is a result, and the pre-registration says so in advance so that the failure cannot be re-described later as a learning experience.

Research queued, with the dates it is waiting on

The platform keeps a coverage registry of what has been collected against what has actually been tested, and the honest reading of that registry is uncomfortable: of forty-five collected streams, eighteen have taken part in experiments and twenty-seven never have. That is a wiring defect rather than a collection defect, and it is tracked as one. Roughly 480 experiment specifications are waiting on a crowding feature block and 240 on an option-surface block that do not yet exist.

Queued, each with a pre-registered verdict date rather than an intention:

Deliberately not on the roadmap

An honest roadmap needs a section for what was closed, so that a future reader does not mistake silence for an oversight:

What the next generation of the platform looks like

Three lines of work, in the order they are being executed:

  1. Monetizable volatility first – the premium desk and the long-volatility cards through their acceptance windows, on the wide instrument set and on the second market.
  2. The risk layer second – the anomaly gate promoted from a measurement to a live one-way gate, with its own kill criterion, because a short-volatility book without a tail gate is a bet rather than a strategy.
  3. The surfaces last – an instrument screen ranking expansion probability and regime across the widened coverage, and a workspace that switches between a short-horizon layout and a volatility layout instead of pretending one layout serves both.

The ordering is deliberate. Interfaces are built after the thing they display has been measured, not before.