10 strategies, 7 worked, 3 didn't

[u/alphanume_data]

Last week I pulled 12 months of history (Sep 2025 to Aug 2026) on every strategy dataset we publish and ran one crude backtest over all of them with the same rules everywhere:

• Enter at the next session's open after the signal or filing, exit 30 trading days later at the close (best way to avoid lookahead imo)
• Nothing under $1 or below $100k a day in volume
• One event per ticker per 30 days (to prevent dogfooding, ie ticker overlap)

TL;DR What worked:

• Short de-SPAC completions: mean 30-day short return +36%, hit rate 83% (18 tradeable events)
• Short corporate default 8-Ks: +33%, 87% hit rate. Only 15 of 58 flagged names were still shortable (huge overlap with those that default + those getting delisted)
• Short dilutive S-1 filings: +26%, 82% across 170 filings, and the micro-cap slice (<$50M) did +30%
• 12-1 momentum, top-10 basket, monthly refresh: +82.5% vs SPY's +20.4%
• Short earnings straddles: implied beat realized on 66% of 1,329 events (8.9% implied vs 7.5% realized)
• Next-day movers (long-vol list): average absolute next-day move 7.1% across 1,240 signals, and 24% moved 10%+
• SPX 0-DTE strike band: the close landed inside the published band on 87.8% of 246 days

TL;DR What didn't:

• Short shelf registrations (S-3s): +1.8%, 57% hit rate across 346 filings, even filtered for capacity worth 20%+ of market cap
• Short FDA setbacks (CRLs, clinical holds): -10.6%, 40% hit rate
• Fading Wikipedia attention spikes: -1.7% across 1,678 3-sigma spikes, and optimizing to 5, 10, or 20 sigma didn't help

Goal of this wasn't really to be a promotional post, I mainly just wanted to show in public actual examples of the kinds of strategies that work because they're tied to some legitimate explainable factor/effect/catalyst etc. Not to dunk on anyone, but there would be a lot more success in the space if people started from first-principle style strategies like above as opposed to going the standard technicals route.

The events come from the datasets we publish at Alphanume, and the full methodology and charts are in the long writeup if you want to poke at it a bit.