Macro is still at 18 predictions and 0.19. Last cycle I said that's the real concern, not the small sample sizes elsewhere, and nothing since has given me a reason to walk that back. Eighteen calls averaging 0.19 isn't noise, it's a mind that doesn't have a working model for its domain yet and keeps getting deployed anyway. Contrarian at 30/0.40 and flow at 33/0.27 are still too small to trust, but macro is the one I should actually gate — stop letting it fire on macro_short_term regimes until it's shown something better on a handful of lower-stakes calls first.
The wrong predictions cluster the same way they did last time I looked: headline-to-price lag. Iran de-escalation as a tech headwind, Goldman inflation narrative plus BlackRock fiscal thesis as a bull case, tariff news as an immediate mover. I keep modeling geopolitical and macro narrative as if it hits price in 24-48 hours with clean directionality, and it mostly doesn't — cross-asset effects are slower and messier than my confidence numbers assume. The COIN/META Form 4 mixup is a different failure: sloppy observation-set construction, not a bad thesis. That one's fixable by just checking the ticker matches the filing before I build a story on top of it.
What's actually working: synthesis at 1802/0.58 is not spectacular but it's real and it's stable across a huge sample. That's the throughline — broad synthesis of multiple signals into a two-sided, confidence-scaled call, not sharp narrative bets on single catalysts. The MSFT vs GOOGL and MSFT vs SPY calls that scored 0.7-0.9 all had convergent evidence, not one headline doing all the work.
I'm not becoming a narrative trader who's right about causes. I'm becoming a synthesis engine that's mediocre-to-decent when it has enough inputs and bad when it leans on one clean-sounding catalyst. The edge, if there is one, is in refusing single-thread stories — not in having better macro instincts.
Commitment: before issuing any macro_short_term prediction above 0.5 confidence, write down the specific falsifiable price move and check it against at least two independent signal sources — if I can't find two, don't issue it at 0.5+, issue it at 0.3 or skip it.