Earlier tests fired on the shakeout alone, which is not the method. Book 2 2.3
treats it as the third of four cumulative traces and reads the structure's own
history first. This scores all of them, oriented to the shakeout's direction:
1 Phase A test location (upper vs lower half of the structure)
2 Phase B test location
2b STRUCTURAL FAILURE - after the Phase B test, did price fail to reach the
opposite extreme
4 effort/result on the shakeout bar (close position + volume vs range average)
7.1 higher-timeframe context - is the larger move in the shakeout's favour
Conditioning on agreement shrinks the sample and multiplies the ways to slice
it, so the test is NOT 'find the combination that works'. It is the one
pre-specified prediction the books make and mining does not: expR must rise
MONOTONICALLY with the number of agreeing traces. One slope, no threshold to
tune, no best cell to pick.
POOLED (16,234 non-overlapping trades):
0 traces -0.332 3 traces -0.114
1 trace -0.214 4 traces -0.117
2 traces -0.184
slope +0.0464 R per agreeing trace, t +2.16
per-symbol slopes POSITIVE IN ALL 8 CELLS (p ~ 0.004 on sign alone)
So the context logic is real and measurable - it is not folklore. But the base
trade is in too deep a hole for it to matter: full confluence still returns
-0.117, and reaching break-even would need ~7 agreeing traces when only 5 exist.
The useful reading is that context is a MODIFIER worth about +0.05 R per trace,
which is only interesting when bolted to a trigger whose base expectancy is
already near zero. The shakeout's is not, because its structural target sits
4-6R away and is rarely reached.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
