Five boxes

One-liner: The five boxes are the skeleton of the hypothesis template: mechanism, expected regime, contract, falsification, landing. If you can’t fill all five, the sentence isn’t ready to be measured.

The five boxes in detail

1. Mechanism: why does this sentence make money? Trend continuation, reversal, calendar effect, or cross-symbol lead-lag?
2. Expected regime: which window should earn, which should lose? A trend strategy losing in chop is normal, but the falsification box must say “chop-window drawdown must not be deeper than trend-window”.
3. Contract: entry / direction / exit written down hard. When trading is allowed, how you exit when wrong, what you risk on this trade.
4. Falsification: written in advance — which KPI in which window voids this sentence. E.g. “any window with negative CAGR” or “recent-window Sharpe below 0”.
5. Landing: which court, which feature store, which symbols, which timeframe.

A filled example

See the MA golden-cross example in A strategy is a contract.

Fine print

• Fill the template
• docs/hypothesis_template.md