Until recently, every strategy on VoidOrigin had a hand-picked risk tier. The label said Conservative or Moderate or Aggressive, and it was a judgment call made when the strategy was published. That worked when there were two strategies. It stopped working when there were nine.
The problem with labels
Judgment drifts. A strategy labeled Moderate six months ago might be running a 15% drawdown today because a regime shift widened its worst trades. A strategy labeled Aggressive might have calmed down. The label does not update itself.
Worse, labels picked by humans tend to cluster. Everyone wants their strategy to be Moderate, because Moderate sounds safest and Conservative sounds boring and Aggressive sounds reckless. The result is a catalog where half the strategies are in the same bucket regardless of how they actually behave.
What we did instead
The tier is now derived at read time from the strategy's 120-day max drawdown.
- Conservative: max drawdown under 15%.
- Moderate: max drawdown between 15% and 25%.
- Aggressive: max drawdown at or above 25%.
No human picks the label. If the drawdown profile shifts, the tier shifts. If a strategy's volatility changes week over week, the badge on its card tells you. You do not have to trust us to keep the taxonomy honest, because we are not in the loop.
Why 120 days
Shorter windows (20 or 60 days) react too fast and flip strategies between tiers as noise passes through. Longer windows (six months plus) react too slowly and miss regime changes entirely. The 120-day window is long enough to cover multiple regimes in US index futures and short enough that a sustained change will show up within a reasonable subscriber time horizon.
What this does not tell you
Max drawdown is one metric. It is an important one, but it is not the whole picture. Two strategies can share the same drawdown and have very different recovery speeds, different winrate profiles, and different performance in different regimes. That is why the strategy card shows four other metrics next to the tier badge, and the detail drawer shows twenty more across five lookback periods.
Use the tier as a starting filter, not a final decision.