About
A small lab with a narrow job
Holdout Labs tells traders how much of their backtest is evidence and how much is search. We do not trade client strategies, publish signals or manage money.
Principles
Four rules we do not bend
Preregister
Decide the test, the statistic and the pass mark before looking at the data that decide it. Write it down; timestamp it.
Publish nulls
Report what failed, including our own ideas. A result is only informative if it could have come out the other way.
No signals
We never tell anyone what to buy or sell. We analyze evidence about a rule; the decisions stay with you.
No performance promises
A grade describes the fragility of past evidence. Nobody can promise future performance, and we do not try.
Founder
Raghuram Vadapally, founder
Raghuram Vadapally is the founder of Holdout Labs and a technology executive with more than 20 years of experience building software for trading, investment research, risk and financial markets.
Before founding Holdout Labs and Synexar, Raghu spent nearly a decade at Carlson Capital, a multi-strategy hedge fund, where he served as Managing Director and Head of Software Engineering. He led technology across investment research, trading, data and operations, including research platforms, order and execution systems, portfolio-manager tooling and applied AI.
Earlier, he built risk and trading technology at Eton Park Capital Management, Sculptor Capital Management and J.P. Morgan. His work included portfolio revaluation and risk Greeks, same-day risk reporting, real-time compliance systems, order-management integrations and program-trading technology.
Holdout Labs grew out of a question he met again and again in quantitative work: how much of an apparently successful strategy is real signal, and how much is the result of selection, overfitting or a favorable backtest? The goal is to make that question testable, with published statistical methods, explicit holdouts, reproducible audits and forward tests, rather than another layer of trading claims.
Contact
Holdout Labs serves clients in the United States first. We do not provide services that require registration as an investment adviser, research analyst or commodity trading adviser.