Who and why
About
A solo quantitative research programme on Indian equities, run by one person alongside a full-time job. It consists of a tick-capture system that records the order book of a fixed universe every trading day, a decade of daily history reconstructed to be free of survivorship bias with every corporate action hand-verified, a replay engine, and a set of scoring harnesses that measure whether a candidate signal predicts anything.
Everything runs unattended on a single cloud machine. Nothing about this site touches that machine.
What is not on offer
Being explicit about this is not modesty. Each of these would require something I do not have, and saying so is more useful than the alternative.
- No track record. Every figure published here is simulated — backtests, or paper trading with virtual money. No real capital has ever been deployed. Forward-paper validation of the single surviving strategy began in August 2026; its first scheduled verdict is due around February 2027, and six data points cannot support a claim about edge in any case.
- No advice, signals, or tips. I am not a registered investment adviser and nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell anything. If you trade something because you read it here, that is entirely your own decision.
- No data for sale. The archive exists and is described openly. It is not offered, priced, downloadable, or waitlisted. Redistribution rights for the underlying exchange data are unresolved, and until that is settled the honest position is that there is nothing to buy.
- No tradeable parameters. Methodology, war stories, and dead hypotheses are published in full — including their measurements, because they are dead. The construction of the one strategy currently being traded forward is not.
- No clients, no fund, no endorsements. There are no testimonials on this site because there are no customers, and no logos because there are no affiliations.
Why publish at all
Because the failures are the interesting part, and almost nobody publishes them. The public record of retail quantitative research is a highly filtered sample: the strategies that worked, described after the fact, by people with a reason to describe them favourably. The base rate is invisible.
The Ledger is an attempt at the opposite — the complete denominator, including every idea that looked good in preview and died out of sample. If it is useful to one other person building something similar, that is enough.
Contact
Corrections are especially welcome — if something here is wrong, I would rather know. The working code lives at github.com/arkagimt.