Why the book is break-even (proven over 7 refuted levers): the ORB entry converts poorly and
the profitable trades are diluted by the negative majority. The 2026-07-02 quality-gate backtest
(6217 setups, adversarially verified across 3 seeds) isolated where the profit actually lives:
setups whose breakout CONFIRMS within ~10 bars of the open run +1R 71% / +0.42R expectancy —
even C-grade ones — while late-confirming setups are dead regardless of grade (bar-26+: 9% +1R,
-0.81R; time-of-day expectancy decays monotonically to -0.94R late-day). The edge is
confirmation TIMING, not the grade (the B-grade lift was mostly this confound).
ExecutionSettings.entry_confirm_by_minute (env TRADING_ENTRY_CONFIRM_BY_MINUTE, 0=off):
- auto path: request_approvals_for_ready_signals skips signals whose ready-timestamp landed
more than N minutes after the 09:30 open, shadow-logged rule_type=late_confirmation (visible,
measurable). Midday re-triggers are late by construction -> also cut (they were -0.75R).
- fast path: submit_breakout_now gates on now() (a live trigger fires in near-real-time, so
now() IS the confirmation time) -> skipped: late_confirmation. This also closes the fast
path's no-time-gate hole the all-day analysis flagged.
Deliberately KEEPS min_quality_score at 0.50 (C+): the gate retains the profitable early
C-band (+0.42R) that a B-grade gate would wrongly discard. Fail-open on unparseable timestamps.
4 new tests (late skip + logged, early passes, off-by-default, fast-path block); 50 pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
