Reading the Campaign Phase table without fooling yourself | Where ZEME is weak - our own numbers, against ourselves

A real taxonomy, and the two traps in reading it

Campaign Phase is ZEME's description of where a stock sits in an operator's campaign. It is a real taxonomy with measured numbers behind it - which is more than most market vocabulary can claim. Here is the whole table on one definition, over the research panel:

Campaign Phase	next-session lock rate	lift vs base	n
DISTRIBUTING	5.998%	1.75x	21,224
RUNNING	5.591%	1.63x	74,528
LAUNCHING	5.118%	1.50x	87,978
LOADING	3.614%	1.06x	34,170
EARLY LOAD	3.149%	0.92x	81,364
WATCHING	2.585%	0.76x	132,051
FULLY LOADED	2.422%	0.71x	231,692
EXITED	1.930%	0.56x	5,804

Base rate on this same definition: 3.421% over 668,811 liquid stock-sessions. Every lift above is that phase's rate divided by that base, and both come from one pass over the same rows, so they cannot drift apart.

Trap one - the lift is not a return

A phase with a lift above 1 locks more often than average. That is all it says. It says nothing about what the stock returns, nothing about what it costs to hold, and nothing about the drawdown along the way. Lesson 4 of this course is why that distinction matters: a higher lock rate that yields less than 3.04 pp is a losing trade with a flattering statistic attached.

Trap two - the ranking is not stable, so the WINDOW must travel with it

This table is measured over the full panel. Measured over a different, shorter window the order changes - notably, the phase that leads over ten years is not the one that leads over the last twenty months. Neither measurement is wrong. They are answers to different questions, and a phase ranking quoted without its window is not a finding.

This is the same failure that ZEME-101 lesson 2 documents for the lock definition, wearing a different costume. Definition drift and window drift are the two ways a real number turns into a false claim without anybody lying.

The useful way to hold this

Treat the phase as a description of state, not a forecast. FULLY LOADED does not mean "about to fire" - on this measurement it locks below base. It means the operator appears to hold a position and is not yet moving. That is genuinely worth knowing; it is simply not the same thing as a prediction.

Evidence - History - Confidence - Counterargument

Confidence - high on the rates, moderate on the ordering, low on any of it being actionable on its own.

Counterargument - the strongest case against this table: the phase is assigned by our own engine, so this measures the consistency of our labelling as much as any market truth. A phase that locks more often may simply be a phase we tend to assign to stocks that are already moving. That is a circularity we can describe but cannot fully remove.

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.

phase_lock_DISTRIBUTING = 5.998% (n = 21,224)

what it is: next-session lock rate for liquid stocks in Campaign Phase DISTRIBUTING. research panel column locked_next - a threshold flag, NOT the cap rule. Its liquid base rate is ~3.42%, not ~0.98%. Never compare a number computed on this flag with one computed on the cap rule.
window: 2016-01-01..2026-07-30
source: zeme_uat_panel.parquet
how it was computed (pandas over the panel, not SQL):