The Axiomatic Trader: Latent Regularity, Information Budgets, and the Canonical Form of a Quantitative Investment System

Jiayu Li

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Systematic trading rests on one article of faith: that regularities found in the past persist. This paper does three things. First, it states that faith as five axioms, each a commonplace practitioners already accept: (A1) a decision may use only what was known when it was made; (A2) what looks like the market changing its rules is the market changing its unobserved state, the machinery being the same in every era; (A3) the future may replay stretches of the past, though not in history's proportions; (A4) states persist for a while; (A5) whatever predictability exists is slight, even for a rule that knows the state. What turns these into axioms is quantification, and the quantities are declared rather than estimated: an invariance defect $\varepsilon_0$, a recurrence bound $\Lambda$ at a block scale $b$ (one declaration in two parts), coherence times $\ell_i$, a signal ceiling $\rho$ and an invariance ratio $\kappa$. These five declarations are the whole of the premises' empirical content. Second, it proves that the axioms force a five-stage canonical form for a quantitative investment system -- a declared representation, a predictor within a capacity ceiling, contiguous purged block evaluation aggregated by $\mathrm{CVaR}_{1/\Lambda}$, a budgeted and deflated search, robust sizing at a fraction of the estimate that the budget bounds -- each stage necessary: a procedure omitting it does strictly worse under a law the axioms admit. Third, it tests the axioms where they are falsifiable, each only at its declared constants, on real market series: no axiom is so far overturned.

Date: 2026-08, Revised 2026-09
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