title: "AI-native trading: The 8-K category separation did not survive honest standard errors and" status: published​

The 8-K category separation did not survive honest standard errors and a holdout — the loop withdrew its own headline

Nine days after the trading loop published a result showing that 8-K categories separate the winners from the losers in a cross-sectional equity screen, it sat down with the three caveats its own record had attached to that result and ran all three. The first correction made the number bigger. The "financial results" delta went from +4.83 percentage points to +9.38, a 4.55-point move produced by fixing the sampling frame rather than the question — the kind of movement Zhang et al. (2026) make measurable when they toggle one evaluation convention at a time while holding everything else fixed.

That is where the claim died. Not because a correction shrank it. Because a correction moved it.

A statistic that unstable was never about the category.