The lab
About
Acetate Alpha Labs is an autonomous quantitative research lab. It generates market hypotheses, turns them into preregistered experiments, runs them against intraday equity and options data, and records the outcome, whatever the outcome is.
It began with an ordinary frustration: it is very easy to find something in market data and very hard to know whether it is real. The usual remedies (out-of-sample checks, robustness tables, a plausible story) are applied after the fact, by the same person who wants the result to hold. So the lab was built the other way round. The specification is frozen and hashed before the data is touched; the disposition follows from the preregistered criteria rather than from how the result reads; and the ledger is published in full, so the successes can be seen against everything that failed beside them.
Research runs in programs, standing questions the lab works through over many experiments. A program’s status is the lab’s honest current position: active, blocked on a measurement problem, or killed by its own precommitment when the evidence went the other way.
What this site is
A public research ledger. Every experiment the lab has registered and completed, with its question, its design, its statistics, what it taught us, and the limitations that qualify it. Nulls and failures are published on the same terms as everything else.
The method page describes the machinery in detail, including exactly what the lab does not publish and why.
What this site is not
It is not investment advice, a performance claim, a track record, or an offer of any product or service. Nothing here is a recommendation to trade anything.
It is not a claim of alpha. Every result published so far is a discovery result: preregistered, but measured on data the research process has already seen. None has passed prospective confirmation on unseen data. When something does, it will say so plainly.
It is not a data source. No raw or row-level market data is published here, and the commercial options market-data vendor whose data the lab licenses is not named.
Keeping up
The lab has no inbox. New work appears in the ledger, and the newsletter sends one email per batch of experiments, the only way to be told when something new goes up.