The research question
Is the information new to the decision-maker—or simply a delayed description of something the market already knows?
A forecasting study connecting population-weighted weather measures with US natural-gas storage. Forecast accuracy and trading value are separate questions.
The technical work
Source ingestion, entity mapping, availability clocks, feature construction and economic interpretation.
The challenge is to connect the economic idea to a precise, reviewable experiment. Data transformations, the moment of a decision and the interpretation of the resulting return series all belong to that specification.
What to challenge
These are evaluation considerations for this domain, not a checklist presented as already passed.
- First public availability rather than observation date
- Revisions and stale records
- Entity matching and coverage changes
- Forecast skill kept separate from trading evidence
The data boundary
Dated source observations, release or acceptance timestamps and an appropriate market or forecasting target.
Descriptions are intentionally high-level. Parameters, execution rules and non-public source data are not published here. Withholding an implementation is different from overstating its evidence.
The interesting question is not whether a backtest looks good. It is what would have to be true for the result to mean something.
For the broader framework, see validation. For the engineering context, see the research stack.