The null-info diagnostic is the fourth validation check — null information — pulled out as a tool you can run on its own. No strategy, no account: an entry rule, a stop and a target are enough.
What you give it
- Market— a symbol and timeframe from forex, commodities, indices, crypto or stocks. It runs over the symbol’s full price history. Futures aren’t supported here.
- Indicators — picked from the indicator library, the same one the strategy builder uses.
- Entry condition and direction— a condition in the same language as a strategy’s entry rules. It can use your indicators, like
ema200, and each bar’sopen,high,lowandclose.volumeworks on crypto and stocks only: forex, commodities and indices carry no volume data. - Stop and target — the stop sits a multiple of ATR from entry; the target sits R times that stop distance.
What it computes
It simulates every trade that entry would have taken over real bars, then compares two numbers: your observed hit rate — the fraction that reached target before stop — and the null hit rate, which is 1 / (1 + R), the win rate a zero-skill entry produces with that target on a driftless random walk. The gap between them is reported as a z-score.
The result reads Beats chance, Does not beat chance, or Inconclusive — the last one when there is nothing to judge, such as zero trades generated or a degenerate baseline at exactly 0% or 100%.
What it does not do
It checks direction only — whether the entries lean the right way — not formal significance. A full strategy submission’s pre-registration and placebo checks are what judge whether an edge that beats chance is also large enough and stable enough to believe.