# Research source brief

DCA modeled costs and candle quality: source evidence. Documentation date: 2026-10-18.

Reproducible extraction and arithmetic from stored fitted historical simulations; no fresh independent market replay.

- All 6 source presets are included, with primary and secondary venue results at base and doubled modeled costs. This is a selected preset release, not the universe of strategies tried.
- Stored primary cumulative cash returns range from 31.09% to 125.63% over the declared four-year window; these are historical fitted simulation outputs, not annual or expected returns.
- Doubling modeled costs reduces stored primary cumulative returns by 5.74 to 12.36 percentage points. The largest stored primary peak-equity drawdown is 17.89%.
- The stored primary buy-and-hold return exceeds the preset return in 4 of 6 rows. These source benchmarks are context, not a risk-adjusted or independently reproduced comparison.
- The primary 15-minute BTC source reports 594 missing candles in 465 gaps, including a longest missing interval of 26 candles. Its completeness percentage alone does not establish strategy robustness.

## Limits that must accompany reuse

- No historical simulation was independently rerun for this publication. Source verification flags are retained as provenance, not an independent audit, live execution proof, or future profitability claim.
- Presets were selected and fitted using historical data. The selection process and unknown rejected trials can bias all displayed returns upward; the positive release table does not show every losing strategy or market path.
- The adverse cost case is a stored sensitivity scenario, not a new losing-path experiment. Missing stress drawdown, stress stops, and other unavailable metrics remain null; base-case metrics must not be copied to a stress case.
- Candle gaps are described, but a controlled gap-removal or imputation sensitivity experiment has not been run. Their causal effect on returns is unmeasured.
- OHLC simulation omits some intrabar sequence uncertainty, live liquidity, queue position, outages, order rejection and venue-specific execution effects. Trade-only permissions and risk controls cannot remove market or operational losses.
- Base fees and slippage are model assumptions. Actual exchange fees, spreads, access, taxes, funding and subscription costs may differ; futures funding and liquidation are outside this spot study.
- Raw candle redistribution rights and complete independent replay inputs have not been cleared here. This pack publishes source-declared checksums, summaries and derivation code, without redistributing raw market candles.

[Read the complete study](https://www.klineo.xyz/research/dca-cost-stress). [Download the dataset and provenance](https://www.klineo.xyz/research/dca-cost-stress.json). Questions: support@klineo.xyz.