Stock picks with their receipts.
Two validated engines — selling panic-priced puts on quality names, and tracking institutional options accumulation — with every pick cryptographically timestamped at publication. Behind them, a public pipeline of new strategies: the ones that fail are killed in public, and you can read exactly why.
How we know it's not noise.
Most stock picks are pattern-matching dressed as research. We validate every strategy against four gates before any signal contributes to the daily ranking, and we keep measuring them after they go live.
Permutation testing
Historical returns are shuffled 10,000 times to confirm the signal beats random. The strategy has to clear a Benjamini-Hochberg-corrected p-value below 0.05 — a real significance bar, not a number we made up.
Walk-forward out-of-sample
The historical sample is split 60/40 by date. The strategy is calibrated on the first 60% and measured on the last 40%. Out-of-sample profit factor must exceed 1.0 and out-of-sample win rate must exceed 50%.
Minimum sample size
Strategies have to accumulate real evidence before they're trusted with capital. 200 closed trades to graduate from the Emerging tier; 500 to reach Proven. Small-sample backtests don't ship.
Forward drift monitoring
After going live, every strategy is continuously measured against the validation benchmark. When forward performance diverges from expectations for long enough, the strategy is demoted or retired — and its historical picks stay in the track record.
From market signal to published pick.
Three stages, in order. A validated signal fires; the LLM investigates the context the signal can't see; the daily ranking is what you get.
Mechanical scanners
Continuously evaluate the equity and options universe against the validated patterns above. Scanners surface candidates; they don't make recommendations on their own.
LLM investigation
For every candidate, the advisor checks for catalysts, recent news, sector context, and known risk factors. Outputs a conviction score and a written thesis — published alongside the pick.
Daily ranking
The mechanical signal and the LLM investigation combine into a single sortable list. Higher-conviction picks appear first. Every pick links to the audit trail behind the score.
Every pick ships with its code.
We don't expect you to take "we tested it" on faith. The methodology, the audit trail, and the strategies we've killed are all public.
Audit trail per pick
Every pick links to the mechanical signal that fired and the investigation that scored it. You can verify the path from raw data to recommendation.
Published methodology
The strategies, the validation discipline, and what we deliberately don't do — all on the methodology page. No black box.
We publish the kills too
Most mechanical research is finding what doesn't work. When a strategy fails forward validation, we retire it — and don't quietly remove it from the track record.
A real pick from two weeks ago.
Every pick includes the mechanical signal, the LLM-investigated thesis, a conviction score, and the validated exit rule. Here's one we published recently.
Free to start. $290/yr for the full feed.
Three tiers. Free gets you the methodology, track record, and a look at what we publish. Standard is the full daily ranking. Pro is the advisor on demand.
The machine, in your inbox.
Every published pick as it lands — the exact order, the exit rule, the model's full reasoning — plus the nightly report: what fired, what the gates rejected, how open picks are tracking, and anything we retired. Free while we build the record in public.
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What we don't do.
The negative space of the product is the trust signal.
We don't give investment advice
c8alpha is information: the picks, the reasoning, and the record behind them. What you do with it is your decision, on your own brokerage.
We don't take compensation from companies we cover
No paid promotions, no sponsored picks, no affiliate relationships with brokers tied to a specific name.
We don't rewrite history
Every published pick is timestamped at publication and stays in the record — winners, losers, and the strategies we killed. Nothing is quietly deleted.
The questions a skeptic should ask.
Skepticism is the correct starting posture for any picks service. Here are the answers — and the checklist for judging anyone's claims, including ours.
What exactly is a “play”?
One specific, testable idea about market behavior — made mechanical (exact entry conditions, exact exit rule), validated against real statistics, then measured in public for as long as it lives. Full explainer: what is a play?
What will I actually be trading?
Mostly common stocks, held days to weeks. One live play sells cash-secured puts — a slightly more advanced options strategy where you collect a premium for agreeing to buy a quality stock at a lower price. Every options pick spells out the exact contract and the premium; the full mechanic is explained at cash-secured puts.
How do I know the record is real?
Every published pick is hashed and cryptographically timestamped at publication (OpenTimestamps, anchored to Bitcoin), and the full record is anchored nightly. A pick can't be backdated, edited, or quietly deleted — by us or anyone else.
Why do you publish your losers?
Because a record without losers is an ad. Averages and win rates only mean something when the denominator and the full distribution are visible — so ours are.
What happened to the strategies that failed?
They're published. 24 full strategies have been killed so far, each with the statistics that killed it — and far more ideas died in research before ever becoming strategies. Several kills are written up in full in research. A service that never kills anything either isn't testing or isn't telling.
How is this different from other picks services?
Judge any performance claim — ours included — with five questions: what's the denominator, was it out-of-sample, how often would random do this, where are the losers, and what happened to the failures. We wrote the checklist: the difference.
Is this investment advice?
No. c8alpha publishes impersonal research — the same content to every reader, tailored to no one's portfolio. See the disclaimer.