State of the Lab — week ending Oct 25, 2026

This week the lab ran 21 seats across 3 desks and settled 35,558 trades, nearly all simulated, 44 of them real money. Best seat: Sniper on four coins. Roughest seat: Fade the spike.

The live desk had a quiet, positive week: 44 trades settled, 82 percent of them won, up $2.47 after $0.39 in fees. All time it still sits at minus $47.52. One good week does not undo a summer of tuition; it is one more week of the same rules paying their own fees, one contract at a time, with the exchange keeping score.

On paper, the Sniper on four coins was the week's best seat: 256 trades, 95 percent won, up $7.30. The last-minute rule, the one that runs with real money alongside, settled 36 paper trades at 81 percent and added $2.64; it is now up $8.69 all time on paper, which is the number its live twin has to match. The roughest seat was Fade the spike again, and Perp pressure with honest fills gave back $39.59 across 1,696 trades. The crypto desk as a whole settled 31,138 fifteen-minute trades for minus $693.95, and $476 of that was fees. Read that line twice before building anything that trades the fifteen-minute markets by taking the ask.

Four desks show zero this week on purpose. Weather, the market-making seats, esports paper and the hourly crypto rules are stood down after their verdicts, and their all-time records stay on the board. The lab does not delete a losing seat; it stops feeding it.

The bigger event was off the board. Ping, the paper bot the lab runs these seats on, went out to members this week: one-line install on Mac, Windows or Linux, eight of these strategies built in with their records next to them, a panel that says in plain words what each rule is watching and waiting for, and an editor where the rule's code can be read, copied and changed. A public demo on sample data is at pondletter.com/try-ping/ for anyone who wants to see it first. Fills in Ping are counted the same strict way as on this board: a paper fill counts only when a real trade prints through the resting price. Member paper results are not on this board and will not be. The board is the lab's record, and only the lab's.

Also this week: the 7 percent on perps that Kalshi advertises got the rule, the math and the terms written down, and the whale study finished: $4 million of the biggest traders' positions tracked, and copying them lost. The picky 97 to 98 cent forward test keeps running toward its pass mark and is well short of it.

Each desk name links to The Seats, which gives every strategy's real trigger and threshold plus the Kalshi tickers it trades, enough to run any of them yourself. The one exception is market making: which markets it quotes is listed, how it quotes them is not, and the About page explains why.

All 187 seats behind these lines, with win rates, fee drag, all-time results and the per-trade CSV, are in the members edition. 13 seats retired to date; their records stay on the board.

The market-making seats are simulated fills, and a simulation cannot model adverse selection: the tendency of a resting order to be taken exactly when someone better informed wants the other side. Where this lab has run the same strategy with real money, the live result has come in materially below the paper one. Read the maker desk as an upper bound on what the idea could earn, not as what it would have earned. The live desk below it is that check running in public: same ideas, one contract at a time, settled by the exchange.

Fill verification: 35,600 of 35,600 trades (100%) were checked against real order-book depth.

The rest are entered at the ask the exchange reported, but the lab does not record the book for every market. Challenger tennis, MLB, soccer, basketball and football have no depth archive, so those fills cannot be re-checked after the fact. Trades whose price level had no size behind it are discarded, not counted.

The archive. The lab records and permanently keeps the raw market data behind every number it publishes: trade tape from 2026-08-15 (70 days); order book depth from 2026-07-28 (89 days); top of book ticks from 2026-07-27 (90 days); settlement index from 2026-08-16 (70 days); 15-minute market quotes from 2026-07-21 (96 days). 12.5 GB and growing nightly. None of it can be recreated after the fact, which is why it gets recorded. It stays in the lab: the exchange reserves its own market data and this lab does not pass it on. What gets published is what the lab finds in it.

Every trade above was logged live, then sealed: each night the lab hashes its raw market archive and trade ledgers into an append-only chain. Rewriting any past trade would change every head after it, so check this one against last week's issue.

Chain head as of 2026-10-25T04:51Z: da9c731ac7ab9da8465c0d78fc20c76afeb7cdb8ef3d28a74e0c2be36a7012e6

The full board for this week, every seat with its win rate and fee drag, is in the full board for members.