The operator's track record predicts the next month BACKWARDS | Where ZEME is weak - our own numbers, against ourselves

The most expensive belief we have tested

The belief: find the stocks whose operator has historically won - a high campaign success rate - and follow that operator, because a good operator keeps being good.

We can measure this directly. Every stock in the panel that carries an operator history also carries that operator's historical success rate. Sort them into five equal groups and look at what the stock did over the next 20 sessions:

operator's historical win rate	mean forward 20-session return	n
top fifth (best record)	+1.272%	120,903
bottom fifth (worst record)	+2.264%	126,765

Best minus worst = -0.99 pp, with t = -13.84 on 247,668 stock-sessions.

Read the sign first, then the size

A t-statistic beyond roughly +/-2 is unlikely to be chance. This one is far beyond that, and it is negative. So this is not "the operator's record does not help" - that would be a t near zero. This says the stocks with the best operator records went on to do worse than the stocks with the worst ones, and the effect is too large and too consistent to be luck.

Why would that happen?

The honest answer is that this lesson measures the what, not the why. But the most likely mechanism is not mysterious: a great historical record is itself the evidence that the move already happened. An operator's success rate rises after successful campaigns. By the time the record looks good, you are late. The record is a rear-view mirror being read as a windscreen.

What this does NOT say

It does not say to go and buy the worst-performing operators. The bottom group's return is positive but it does not clear the round-trip cost either (see lesson 4), and inverting a broken signal is a classic way to fit noise. The correct conclusion is narrower and more useful: historical operator win rate should not be an input to a forward decision, and where ZEME's own surfaces omit it, they omit it for this reason and say so.

Evidence - History - Confidence - Counterargument

Confidence - high that the effect is real and negative; low that anyone should act on its inverse.

Counterargument - the strongest case against: the top quintile may be crowded with stocks that have already run, so this could be measuring plain mean-reversion after a run rather than anything about operators at all. That is a real alternative explanation, and it happens to lead to the same practical conclusion - do not use the record as a forward input.

Evidence - where every number came from

Every figure in this lesson is listed below with its definition, its sample size, its window and the exact query that produced it, so you can re-run it rather than take our word for it.

opwr_top_ret = +1.272% (n = 120,903)

what it is: mean 20-session forward return of the stocks whose operator has the BEST historical win rate (top quintile)
window: 2016-01-01..2026-07-30
source: zeme_uat_panel.parquet
how it was computed (pandas over the panel, not SQL):

``text Split liquid rows that carry an operator history (camp_success_rate >0, a PERCENTAGE 0-100) into quintiles of camp_success_rate; compare mean fwd_ret_20_e0 of the top quintile against the bottom; Welch t. ``

opwr_bot_ret = +2.264% (n = 126,765)

what it is: mean 20-session forward return of the stocks whose operator has the WORST historical win rate (bottom quintile)
window: 2016-01-01..2026-07-30
source: zeme_uat_panel.parquet
how it was computed (pandas over the panel, not SQL):

opwr_spread = -0.99 pp (n = 247,668)

what it is: best-operator minus worst-operator forward return. A POSITIVE number would mean the operator's record predicts the next month; a NEGATIVE one means it predicts it BACKWARDS
window: 2016-01-01..2026-07-30
source: zeme_uat_panel.parquet
how it was computed (pandas over the panel, not SQL):

opwr_t = -13.84 (n = 247,668)

what it is: Welch t of that difference. |t| above ~2 is unlikely to be chance
window: 2016-01-01..2026-07-30
source: zeme_uat_panel.parquet
note: sign matters more than size here: a significant NEGATIVE t means the belief is inverted, not merely useless
how it was computed (pandas over the panel, not SQL):

ZEME Academy is educational analysis of Pakistan Stock Exchange data. It is not investment advice, not a recommendation, and not a solicitation to trade. Every number here is measured history, and history is not a forecast. ZEME is not SECP-registered.