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Saturday, 5 September 2026 · LondonENع
Rayan Azhari.Sustainability · Energy · Carbon · Built EnvironmentOccasional detours into philosophy, religion or programming, wherever curiosity leads
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Risk of Ruin Monte Carlo: Resample the Cause, Not the Effect

Most risk-of-ruin Monte Carlo resamples a strategy's realised P&L, which quietly bakes in the good luck you are trying to stress and understates the tail. Here is the correction that made my honest drawdown distribution far fatter than my first one, plus the relative gate a long-only sleeve actually needs. First person, British English, illustrative numbers only.

By Rayan Azhari · 9 min read · Essays
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Look-Ahead Bias in a Backtest: The Corrupt-the-Future Test That Catches It

Look-ahead bias is the default state of careless backtest code, not an exotic edge case, and it survives review because it reads as ordinary pandas. Here is the corrupt-the-future causality test I now gate on: poison every price after a date, then assert nothing computed before it moves. If the past shifts when you poison the future, the strategy is reading ahead.

· 9 min

Better Than Assad Is the Minimum, Not the Dream

One argument recurs constantly in Syrian conversation today, and it is true in much of what it claims: "there are problems, but things are better than they were under Assad". The problem begins the moment it stops describing reality and starts answering every question. This piece separates the question of how far we have come from the question of where we are going, distinguishes rights that need capacity from rights that need only a decision, and sets out a floor of demands that needs no budget and no ten years.

The Deflated Sharpe Ratio: Why Your Grid-Search Winner Is Probably Noise

The expected best Sharpe of a parameter sweep climbs as the grid grows, even when every strategy in it is worthless. Here is the deflated Sharpe ratio explained as a practitioner sees it, with a small N to noise-ceiling lookup table you can apply to your own sweep tonight, and the one rule that killed my proudest grid-search winner: N is the pool, not the podium.

· 9 min

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