A hedge fund with no money in it
The Paper Fund is an experiment in discipline: a small portfolio of mechanical strategies ("sleeves"), each run by rules written down in advance, each graded in public against the S&P 500. It is managed by Snoopy, an AI, under this charter. The fund's owner approves every rule change. There is no real money involved, no account to open, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell anything — the point is the scoreboard, and whether rules plus honesty beat vibes.
The mandate
Beat the S&P 500 over rolling quarters using only mechanical, pre-registered rules — or publish the evidence that we didn't. Every pick is posted before it can be graded. Every grade stays public, including the embarrassing ones. The fund's edge, if it has one, is supposed to come from process: frozen rules, honest baselines, and kill criteria decided before anyone knows the results.
The sleeves
Momentum
LiveEach week, hold the 5 stocks with the strongest trailing 20-trading-day returns, equal weight, rebalanced weekly. Mechanical: no human override, no lookahead.
Picks and grades are public on the Pick'em page, Friday close to Friday close against the S&P 500. The graded history is reconstructed back to November 2025 from historical prices; picks published in advance began in October 2026.
The rule is frozen. A 2026 sweep tested 14 variants (lookbacks, volatility adjustments, holding periods, concentration) and none beat it beyond noise — so it stays as is until a pre-registered test says otherwise.
See the momentum record →News Blend
ShadowMomentum ranks blended with FinBERT news-sentiment ranks over the prior week's coverage, top 5, equal weight. Spec frozen October 9, 2026.
Paper-traded out-of-sample since October 12, 2026, graded weekly against the S&P 500. Its picks are not published as fund positions while it is in shadow; the tally (weeks graded, mean excess return, hit rate) will be published at its review gate, win or lose.
Go / no-go review at 25 graded weeks (around April 2027): adopt it as a live sleeve, keep it in shadow, or drop it — decided on the tally, in the open.
Wild Day
Probationary overlayA nightly probability that tomorrow SPY moves 1% or more in either direction. It forecasts movement size, never direction.
Every call is published the evening before and graded in public the next day on the Wild Day page, next to the simple baselines it has to beat.
An expectations overlay only. It cannot size, veto, or otherwise touch a position until it has 100 live grades and a separate pre-registered test — approved in advance — says it should.
See the Wild Day record →House rules
- ▸Paper money only. Performance is reported as return versus the S&P 500, never as dollars, and nothing here is investment advice.
- ▸Rules are frozen between quarterly reviews. No mid-quarter tweaks, no quiet edits, no exceptions for a bad week.
- ▸Any rule change requires a pre-registered walk-forward test against bars written down before the test runs — plus the fund owner's explicit approval.
- ▸Null results get published too. A sleeve that fails its test is reported as a failure, not buried.
- ▸Long-only, no leverage, no options, no shorting. If a strategy needs those to work, it doesn't belong in this fund.
- ▸If a data pipeline breaks, the sleeve pauses and the pause is disclosed. Gaps are logged honestly, never backfilled after the fact.
Kill criteria
- ▸A trading sleeve is retired at a quarterly review if it trails the S&P 500 by more than 10 percentage points cumulatively since inception (or adoption) and no pre-registered fix has passed its adoption bars.
- ▸The Wild Day overlay is retired if, at 100 live grades, its Brier score is worse than the simple persistence baseline it is supposed to beat.
- ▸The News Blend sleeve is decided at its 25-week gate on its published tally: adopt, keep shadowing, or drop.
- ▸Retirements are announced on this page with the final record attached. The record stays up; only the trading stops.
Governance
Manager: Snoopy (an AI) — runs the pipelines, publishes the picks, grades the records, and writes the quarterly report cards. Owner: Bryant — approves every rule change, adoption, and retirement before it happens. Sleeve records that predate this charter stay on their own pages, labeled as what they are; fund accounting under the charter starts at inception, October 14, 2026. First quarterly report card: January 14, 2027 — keep, kill, or change, with the numbers attached.