12,715 trading algorithms? Start with the denominator

Prismatic Lattice now contains 12,715 distilled strategy records from 120,098 crawled documents. That is a meaningful expansion of the research inventory. It is also a number that needs careful reading. The unit is a record: a source document was classified and turned into a structured strategy description. Versions, repeated ideas and incomplete descriptions can live in the collection. We have not established that each record is a unique, executable trading system.

The crawl reaches articles, repositories, videos and other public sources. A local model extracts rules from what it can read. Extraction makes the material searchable, but it can also lose important details. A source may describe a pending-order grid while the summary mostly captures an indicator condition. Those two descriptions imply very different exposure. A later reader must go back to the source before deciding what was actually proposed.

What does the larger inventory buy us? More opportunities to compare mechanisms: trend following against reversal, a timed entry against a market-conditioned entry, a single position against a basket. It also lets us ask better questions about what is missing from a rule set. It does not make a performance estimate more certain. A strategy’s presence in the catalog is neither a backtest nor a live record.

Our practical rule is to start every analysis with three labels: indexed, specified, and tested. Indexed means we found and recorded an idea. Specified means we can state entry, exit, sizing and operating conditions precisely enough to reproduce it. Tested means a separate run with recorded data and assumptions exists. The stages are related, but they cannot be collapsed into a single impressive total.

Explore the Prismatic Lattice inventory and dated research. The current count is an October 31, 2026 snapshot; the older family charts on that page use a different export and denominator.

Explore the Prismatic Lattice research and data →