25,484 tests, 60 discoveries, zero cascades: autopsy of a scan that passed everything — except reality

There is an idea everyone has had in front of a quote screen: "when A moves, B follows the next day." Oil leading currencies, copper leading equities, gold leading everything else. That is the snowball effect, the cross-asset cascade — and if it existed, it would be the simplest trading rule in the world.

In August 2026 we asked the question once and for all, at scale: 72 daily series, up to 40 years deep, every possible pair, every lag from 1 to 7 sessions — 25,484 exact tests. The protocol, thresholds and method were written and committed before the measurement ran, and the full report is public, like everything we measure (the report, with its pre-registration).

What this scan returned is not the most interesting part. The most interesting part is how close it came to fooling us.