Re-framed prelim. ATLAS is 3 weeks old, not 8 months. The crypto alpha portfolios are 8 months old and contain Sharpe-1.0+ strategies. The first principle: profitable traders exist. Learning to faithfully replicate their strategies is Priority 1. Then sourcing other strategies. Then self-learning + cross-pollination. ATLAS is multiple components linked together — FRE, HSP, PLE — not a monolith.
The Sharpe gap (0.31 vs upstream 2.42-3.19) is the central diagnostic problem. Closing it forces every part of the replication infrastructure to be honest. Sections below: the reframe (1), FRE MUST (2), HSP SHOULD (3), PLE COULD (4), critical path (5), tripwire (6), uncertainties (7).
Priority 1: Faithful Replication Engine (FRE). Build the infrastructure to take a known-profitable strategy spec and reproduce its Sharpe, PF, and equity curve within tolerance. Calibration test set: SMA-4 BTC, SMA-4 ETH, a3_btc_lead_lag (or alternative).
Priority 2: Hypothesis Sourcing Pipeline (HSP). Once we can faithfully replicate, search the public domain (papers, books, YouTube, Substack) for other strategies, codify them into the spec language, run them through FRE.
Priority 3: Pattern Learning Engine (PLE). Once we have a population of FRE-validated strategies, look for structural patterns; generate variants; cross-pollinate gates and signals; verify the variants survive parity tests.
Why this ordering matters. HSP without FRE produces noise (Phase D 0/1525). PLE without HSP has nothing to learn from. Building FRE first means everything downstream rests on a foundation that has demonstrated it can reproduce known truth.
The crypto alpha portfolios contain documented Sharpe 1.0+ strategies on real funded deployments. SMA-4 BTC: Sharpe 3.19. SMA-4 ETH: 2.42. a3_btc_lead_lag: 1.46. These exist. Not "we hope they work" — they have years of backtested + live track record. The job is to reproduce them inside ATLAS at parity. If we cannot reproduce a known-profitable strategy, we cannot trust ATLAS to validate any new strategy.
SMA-4 ports inside ATLAS show Sharpe 0.31-0.46 against upstream 2.42-3.19. That's not noise. The gap is caused by missing EMA22 gate, CRASH-9d gate, argus_allow gate, stuck-LONG handling, and likely cost-model differences. Every one of these is a piece of replication infrastructure that doesn't exist yet. Build it as a first-class system, calibrated against the known-profitable reference. Closing the gap is not "fix the SMA-4 port" — it is "build FRE."
Take a strategy spec, reproduce upstream Sharpe / PF / equity within ±tolerance. Calibrated against SMA-4 BTC + ETH + 3rd reference.
Ingest public-domain trading literature, extract specs, codify, send through FRE. Built on top of FRE — never bypasses it.
From FRE-validated population: structural pattern discovery, variant generation, cross-pollination. Self-learning loop with calibration metering.
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