We tested over 100 causal chains. None cleared the bar.
Most causal claims in finance don't survive contact with data.
Yes No Signals was built to test relationships between prediction market events. Academic literature offers dozens of plausible mechanisms — inflation depresses incumbent vote share, oil spikes precede recessions, tariffs raise consumer prices, war depresses markets, rate cuts move equities, credit spreads forecast corporate distress. More than a hundred such chains, each sourced to a peer-reviewed paper.
Each chain is tested the same way: when the cause resolves, did the effect follow more often than it would by chance? A chain earns a PREDICTIVE verdict only when it holds up across the full history, not just in hindsight. Everything else is NO EDGE, INVERTED, or INSUFFICIENT.
After more than ten thousand resolved pairs, not one clears the strict bar. A handful show a weak positive signal, the strongest of them barely. None hold up across the full history the way a PREDICTIVE verdict demands.
The majority of chains show no edge despite 500+ pairs each. Inflation → elections. GDP → elections. Oil → inflation. Tariffs → GDP. At scale, the "obvious" macro relationships don't discriminate prediction market outcomes. Keyword pairing is not causation.
This is why backtests are easy to publish and hard to trust. Sample-cap an hour earlier, filter by volume, restrict to a favorable window, and any chain can look predictive. The honest version of a scoreboard is rarely what publication incentivizes.
Why most of them fail
The guardrails are built to catch the usual ways a backtest flatters itself: an edge that existed once but has since decayed, a result that only appears when you cherry-pick the window, and a relationship that looks strong on average but can't actually tell a YES outcome from a NO one. Most of them trip at least one of these. That is the point: the honest test is the one most relationships don't pass.
The scoreboard at yesnosignals.com/track-record is updated hourly as new events resolve. Chains auto-deprecate when the evidence is in — the library is self-cleaning.
Zero chains clearing the bar is not a failure of the test. It is the test working. The point was never any single chain; it is that most things don't work, and making that visible is the only honest version of this kind of tool.