FIN-3 — the OOS monitor's verdict vocabulary cannot say "computable but uninformative", so it printed OK the day the sample crossed 60 while live Sharpe was -1.33

status: open · raised 2026-09-10 (external financial review F4, confirmed — see research/2026-09-09_financial_review_verification.md) · class: loudness & calibration · judgement: YES · effort ~0.25 pd · horizon: must land before the December gate

Plain-language summary. On 09-01 the monitor said INSUFFICIENT_DATA at 56 live returns. On 09-09 it said OK at 61. Nothing about the evidence improved — live Sharpe moved from -1.70 to -1.33, both deeply negative. The sample crossed an integer threshold and the label changed from an honest statement of ignorance to a word that reads as reassurance. The monitor's own design note says "do not false-reassure."

Mechanism

MIN_OOS_DAYS = 60, with the comment "below this the Sharpe CI is so wide the test has no power; declaring OK or DEGRADED would be theatre." The threshold is right and the mechanism is defensible — OK means the live metric has not fallen below the in-sample bootstrap CI lower bound, and at n=61 that bound is +2.830, so almost nothing could breach it. But the project's own interpretation memo (research/2026-07-13_december_gate_interpretation_memo.md) puts the power at ~12% even at 126 days. At 61 it is far lower. The vocabulary (OK / DEGRADED / INSUFFICIENT_DATA) has no way to say "we can now compute a number and that number is uninformative."

Qualification the review omitted, recorded so severity is not overstated: no machine reads this OK as a pass. thales go-live-gate evaluates a separate criterion, forward_sharpe_lower, which FAILS (95% lower -5.456 < 0). The false-reassurance risk is to a human skimming a verdict word.

Fix shape (propose-only)

Either a fourth state (UNDERPOWERED / COMPUTABLE_LOW_POWER) that reports the number with its power beside it, or raise MIN_OOS_DAYS to where the interpretation memo says the test has power. The first is preferable: it keeps the number visible instead of withholding it.

The timing constraint is the point

Do this before December. A verdict-vocabulary change made while looking at the gate's result is gate-shopping, however well intentioned. That is the whole argument for doing it now rather than when it matters.

Test design + negative control

A fixture at n just above the minimum with a wide CI must produce the new state, not OK. Negative control: restore the three-state vocabulary and assert the fixture goes back to OK.

Kill criterion (pre-registered)

If adding a state would require touching the pinned DEGRADED criterion that the retire-rule counts, the item drops to the MIN_OOS_DAYS change instead — the retire criterion's wording is pinned and this row may not soften it.