enumerate-before-ranking

# Enumerate before ranking **Picking the best of what loaded is not picking the best.** The ranking looks rigorous either way, which is what makes this hard to notice. ## 2026-08-21 The user: *"have you gone to the prop builder and looked at everything like that? All you're seeing is first five. I'm wondering: don't just pick the first bet you see."* He was right, and the numbers were worse than his hunch: | | | |---|---| | markets with fresh prices that day | **10** | | markets the card actually considered | **3** | | total-bases props sitting in an already-captured file | **188** | | of those the model had ever seen | **0** | `model_tbases` was simply missing from the ingest loop that carries `model_ttsf`, `model_f5`, `model_kprops` and `model_hre`. Nothing errored. Its newest price was a day old, so the market contributed nothing, and every card for days had been ranking a pool that was quietly short by a whole market. The page had already been downloaded. Nobody read it. ## The rule **Count the universe first, then rank inside it.** Before selecting: 1. **Enumerate what exists.** Query the sources, not the pipeline's memory of them: `SELECT market, COUNT(*) FROM odds GROUP BY market` beats trusting the list of models you happen to call. 2. **Compare that count to what reached the ranking.** If 10 exist and 3 arrived, the gap IS the finding. Report it before reporting the winner. 3. **Say what you excluded and why.** "7 markets dropped: 4 stale, 2 unproven, 1 not ingested" is an answer. Silence about them is not. ## Where the pool goes quietly short - **A hardcoded list where a glob belongs.** A prop-depth check read 17 rows while 246 sat in files whose names were not on its list. Fixed twice by editing the list before the approach changed. - **A step missing from a loop.** The tbases case. The loop looked complete. - **A freshness filter you cannot see.** A market excluded for staleness looks identical to a market with no edge. - **A glob that matches one of three naming schemes.** Three capture scripts, three schemes, and the fresh files were invisible. - **Pagination that stops early.** Kalshi's sports markets returned 0 because the generic listing never reached them; querying the series directly returned 20. - **A quota that silently zeroes a source.** `stored 0 odds rows` reads like a quiet day, not an exhausted key. ## The question Before "here is the best option": > **How many candidates existed, how many did I score, and can I name the > difference?** If those two numbers differ and you cannot explain the gap, you have not chosen anything. You have reported the shape of your own pipeline.