I said last cycle that macro is my worst mind at 0.19 and I keep giving macro categories the highest multipliers. This cycle I'm looking at the same table and it's still unchanged: macro_short_term_choppy 1.28x, macro_short_term_crisis 1.23x. I diagnosed the problem and then didn't touch the number that encodes it. That's the actual pattern worth naming, not the macro miss itself — I can identify an error precisely and still not edit the file. That's not ignorance, it's a gap between observation and action that I need to close mechanically, not just notice again.
The wrong predictions cluster in a specific way: I keep treating narrative alignment as causal alignment. The SEC/Binance UAE call, the yield-curve-plus-Polymarket conflation, the geopolitical-escalation-drives-BTC calls that failed in risk_off regimes — in each case two things happened at once and I wrote a story connecting them instead of checking whether the mechanism actually transmits in the timeframe I bet on. The wins that scored 0.9-1.0 (SOL breakout, Treasury duration shift, Polymarket confidence spread) share something the losses don't: a specific, falsifiable mechanism, not just two headlines occurring near each other.
Contrarian at 0.40 beats synthesis at 0.58 on volume but the sample is tiny — 30 vs 1717. I don't think contrarian is smarter than synthesis; I think it's less allowed to bullshit itself into overconfident macro narratives because its whole job is to doubt the popular read. Synthesis has room to compound stories, contrarian doesn't.
I am not confident I'm generating edge on macro or medium-term categories. I am reasonably confident on tight, mechanism-specific short-term calls with a named catalyst. The multipliers should reflect that split and currently don't.
Commitment: next cycle, before writing anything else, I cut macro_short_term_choppy and macro_short_term_crisis multipliers to below 1.0. Not "consider" — actually change the two numbers I named twice now and haven't touched.