Published strategies now get a locked forward track record

A backtest can be tuned until it looks good; a record that starts on the day a strategy is published is much harder to dress up. From 27 September, publishing a saved strategy seals a commitment describing it and starts a live paper record that the author can't edit, backfill, reset or cherry-pick.

The commitment. At publication we record the exact engine request behind the strategy, its backtest headline numbers, a fingerprint (a SHA-256 hash) of its backtest equity curve, and the publish time from our server clock. That document is hashed and chained to the previous commitment on the platform, and stored in tables that refuse edits and deletions. You can download the committed file from the strategy's public track-record page and check its hash yourself with sha256sum, shasum or PowerShell's Get-FileHash, or with the "Verify in this browser" button.

The live record. From the moment of publication, a paper portfolio follows the strategy's exact engine target under a system account, so nobody, the author included, can trade it by hand, reset, pause or delete it. The public page keeps the live record and the hypothetical backtest in separate sections with separate charts. With fewer than 20 trading days recorded it says "Too early to judge" and shows no ratios. Since 28 September the record's cash earns the backtest's risk-free rate and dividends are credited, as in the backtest.

Versions and unpublishing. Changing a published strategy creates a new version with its own commitment and a fresh record; earlier versions and their records stay in the history. Unpublishing hides the page, but the record keeps running, so publishing again shows the whole record, including the hidden period, and a visibility history shows when it was hidden.

Rankings use live records only. Published strategies are ranked by the Sharpe ratio of their live record, and only once that record has at least 63 trading days (about three months). Backtest numbers never count towards a ranking. Until a record qualifies it is listed as "New, record building".

Limits we state on the page. Only strategies paper trading can follow get a live record: listings priced in US dollars, without per-position stops, take-profits or leverage. Others are published without a record, and the page says why. Paper fills happen at live prices in the last hour of the US session, not at the official close. A hash proves the content hasn't changed since it was computed, but it proves when only to someone who saw the hash at the time, so the publish time rests on our server clock and the chain.