Flow followed by open-interest growth as persistent positioning

Before asking whether options flow followed by open-interest growth identifies persistent positioning, a precondition had to hold: can the open-interest input be shown to be point-in-time valid? Does a session's snapshot reflect what was actually knowable during that session?

A failed precondition, not a scientific null. The hypothesis was retired before any run was spent, because its key input could not be established as point-in-time valid; nothing about the underlying flow-to-positioning question is settled in either direction.

An instrumentation investigation rather than an experiment. Offline checks on the archive established two facts: archived open-interest records are byte-stable across re-pulls (no restatement), and the field updates daily (it is live, not frozen). The blocking question is the snapshot's vintage (as-of-open is point-in-time valid; as-of-close is lookahead if used intraday), and retrospective archives cannot distinguish the two, because both produce identical histories after the fact. Only a live paired probe during a session can.

That an honest ledger needs an instrument-failure disposition. Re-pull stability and daily updates were confirmed, but the vintage identity is unrecoverable from archives alone, and an earlier live probe was indeterminate. Using the snapshot intraday without pinning its vintage would be silent lookahead, so the experiment was retired unrun, no statistical test was spent, and every positioning-derived result in the lab carried a standing vintage label. The sequel: a later Product-authorized prospective paired probe established the snapshot as open-settled and static intraday with no archive restatement, lifting the label and reopening the positioning family. This failure record stays public because it is why that probe existed.

The open-interest snapshot behind positioning quantities was established as point-in-time valid by a prospective paired probe: open-settled, unchanged intraday and post-close, with no archive restatement. Results published before that verdict were produced under the then-unresolved vintage caveat. A weekly sentinel re-gates all positioning research automatically if the measured semantics ever change.

This record documents an instrumentation limit that measurement has since resolved. It makes no claim, positive or negative, about the market question it originally blocked; that question reopened with the family.