State of the Lab — week ending Sep 20, 2026

This week the lab ran 2 seats across 1 desk and settled 668 trades, every one of them real money. Best seat: Live · crypto 15-min, book B. Roughest seat: Retired · liquidity-rebate quoter.

The desk earned thirty seven dollars this week and gave back thirty five of it in a single day, finishing up one dollar and sixty six cents across 668 settled trades. Both halves of that are worth reading.

The earning half was the crypto fifteen minute book that has carried this lab all month. It settled 568 trades at six and a half cents each, its best week at any size. That book spent the week climbing a ladder written down in advance: one contract, then two, then four, each rung a fixed block of orders with its pass mark fixed before the first order went in. Two contracts passed convincingly. Four failed, and failed in the manner the prediction described, with the edge per contract collapsing as the count of contracts rose. Dollars a day went three, then five and a half, then five and a half again.

So the ladder is finished and the answer is two contracts. That is a smaller answer than we wanted and it deserves stating plainly. The limit is not the idea, and it is not the money available, most of which sits idle. It is the depth of the book. These markets hold five to ten contracts at the price we want, so a larger order simply collects a worse average price. Size is spent as a lever here.

The other half was one day spent trying to collect the exchange liquidity rebate, which pays resting orders whether or not they ever trade. The arithmetic looked excellent. Three variants were tried and all three were picked off: an order resting at or near the best price in a fast fifteen minute market loses ten to fifteen cents a contract to whoever hits it, and no share of a twenty dollar pool covers that at our size. Thirty five dollars and forty six cents, closed the same day, and the fault was ours rather than the venue.

Two seats retired. The oil fifteen minute book stopped itself when the two halves of its record disagreed in sign after a hundred and fifty orders, which its own rule calls a coin rather than an edge. A week long test of the favourite idea on hourly crypto markets failed on all four of its series and was shut down on schedule.

Two paper lanes opened in their place, both asking the same question from different directions: whether the one thing that works in crypto also works where the books are deeper. Neither has a verdict yet. Both have dates.

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 159 seats behind these five lines, with win rates, fee drag, all-time results and the per-trade CSV, are in the members edition. 12 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: 668 of 668 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 (35 days); order book depth from 2026-07-28 (54 days); top of book ticks from 2026-07-27 (55 days); settlement index from 2026-08-16 (34 days); 15-minute market quotes from 2026-07-21 (61 days). 6.0 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 2026-09-20T04:40Z: 32460f3e6b129bc1445c3cb62d0b2a9ff8e655f8aa4c64b0b7033099cf1025e5