canli-validation-mcp

Is your best backtest real, or just the luckiest of the variants you tried? This MCP server lets Claude, Cursor or any MCP client answer that with the standard corrections: the deflated Sharpe ratio, the CSCV probability of backtest overfitting, data-snooping tests on every variant tried (Hansen's SPA, White's Reality Check, Romano-Wolf StepM), the minimum track record length, the haircut Sharpe ratio, and luck-equivalent trials. Free and MIT-licensed.

Quick start

# Claude Code, computed on your machine: no key, nothing sent anywhere
claude mcp add canli-local --env CANLI_LOCAL=1 -- npx -y canli-validation-mcp

# the same tools with signed, stored receipts from the free API (a free key is issued on first use)
claude mcp add canli -- npx -y canli-validation-mcp

# nothing to install: the hosted endpoint
claude mcp add --transport http canli https://canlicapital.com/mcp

Then ask, for example: "I tried 229 variants and kept the best: an annualised Sharpe of 1.5 over 730 daily returns (365 a year), skew -0.5, kurtosis 5, and the variants' Sharpe ratios spread by 0.57. Is it real?" The assistant calls validate_deflated_sharpe: the best of 229 skill-less variants would reach 1.60 by luck alone, so the probability that the Sharpe is above zero falls from 98.1% to 44.4% once the search is counted. Claude Desktop and any other stdio client (Cursor, VS Code) run the same npx command; see "Claude Desktop" and "Generic stdio client" below.

Related MCP server: Equibles Agent Terminal

What it does

An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server over canlicapital.com's free, keyed validation API, with a lab that computes on your machine. It gives a coding agent twenty tools: issue a free key, run the nine validators (deflated Sharpe, CSCV overfitting, data-snooping tests (Hansen's SPA, White's Reality Check and Romano-Wolf StepM), paper-evidence conformance, breadth ceiling, minimum track record length, minimum backtest length, haircut Sharpe ratio, luck-equivalent trials), audit one backtest with several of them in a single call, verify a receipt's signature offline, read service status, read a company's reported financial history from SEC filings, and six lab tools: backtest a rule over a parameter grid, summarize a long series, stress-test a strategy's returns, check a plan against a broker's limits, check a signal for lookahead, and test a whole research pipeline on placebo data. Every validation result carries, beside the number, the sentences that say what it does not establish and the receipt that records it, success or error, so the agent cannot see a number without its limits.

This package is published to npm as canli-validation-mcp. Also listed on the official MCP Registry (io.github.arhancanli/canli-validation-mcp) and cursor.directory. Run it with npx, no install step, as shown below. A local checkout is only needed to develop or test this package itself; see "Local checkout" near the bottom.

This README describes the version in package.json. Unversioned npx runs npm's latest release; npx -y canli-validation-mcp@<version> pins one.

How well agents use it

A fixed benchmark gives models these tools and scores whether they pick the right one and return the right answer, against ground truth computed from the same checked code. Results for three models, with every run recorded, are in bench/agent/README.md.

What the API is (and is not)

The engine is the product. The service runs your submitted numbers through the same honesty arithmetic canlicapital.com's own paper record runs on itself and hands back a verdict anyone can recompute from the receipt. It signs every receipt, does not accept market data, does not grade a strategy, and never saw your data source, its costs, or any lookahead in how a series was built. See docs/superpowers/specs/2026-09-05-developer-key-validation-api-design.md in the main repository for the full design.

Tools

Unreleased source adds local journal binding to validate_paper_evidence: run CANLI_LOCAL=1 node mcp/src/server.mjs from the repository, and send exactly one of record or record_file, plus journal_file to check source hashes, signatures and recomputed claims. record_file accepts a standard record, a {record,signature} envelope, or the full execution export bundle; companion metrics/observations are checked for full bundles. Signed records need the detached signature. bindings.all_match must be true for source validation to pass. Without a journal, the result explicitly reports structure-only conformance. Files and signatures are refused in hosted/remote mode and never uploaded. Local results have no Canli receipt. The current npm/hosted release retains the existing record-only API.

validate_deflated_sharpe accepts exactly one of two input shapes, never a mix of both:

• the seven contract fields: observed_sharpe_annualized, observations, periods_per_year, skew, non_excess_kurtosis, effective_independent_trials, cross_trial_sharpe_sd_annualized;

• or a return series plus the trials behind it: returns, periods_per_year, effective_independent_trials, cross_trial_sharpe_sd_annualized.

Sending fields from both shapes, or from neither, is rejected before any request leaves the process; see src/schemas.mjs.

validate_reality_check takes the returns of every variant the search tried, one row per period and one column per variant, as matrix or as matrix_file (a CSV or JSON on your machine), and an optional benchmark series; with none, variants are tested against zero. It runs three tests on one seeded stationary bootstrap:

• Hansen's SPA: the chance that the best variant's studentized excess return is this good if no variant has an edge, with lower and upper bounds (spa.p_value, the consistent p-value, is the headline, and monte_carlo_se its sampling error);

• White's Reality Check: the same question without studentizing, so one volatile variant can dominate it;

• Romano and Wolf's StepM: which variants beat the benchmark, with the familywise error held at alpha.

A result reproduces exactly from its seed. On three fixed-seed cases the p-values agree with Python's arch 8.0 and with a numpy transcription of Hansen's formulas within Monte Carlo error, and the StepM sets match arch's (js/snooping-core.test.js). Only the variants sent are counted: a search that tried more than it sends makes luck look smaller than it was.

company_financial_history is different from the other tools: it reads the public company reference at canlicapital.com, not the validation API. Give it a CIK (1 to 10 digits) to list a company's available financial histories, or a CIK and a us-gaap concept such as Revenues to get the observations, newest first (limit defaults to 40, maximum 200). Every observation keeps its filing accession, form, filed date and unit, and the result carries the SHA-256 of the original SEC response and the record's own boundary sentence: these are accounting values as reported to the SEC, not market prices, returns or a recommendation. Companies and concepts outside the current release return an error with the available concepts listed.

The lab: backtest, summarize, stress, feasibility, lookahead, placebos

Six tools compute in the server process itself, on your machine or on the hosted endpoint, with nothing sent to the API and no receipt stored. Each result names the SHA-256 of exactly the numbers it was computed from, and states what it does not establish.

• backtest_strategy runs a rule over every parameter set in a grid, on your prices: sma_cross (fast, slow), momentum (lookback, skip), mean_reversion (window, entry_z), breakout (lookback) or buy_and_hold, long-only or with allow_short, after a cost per unit of turnover. The position held over each period is decided from closes up to the one before it, so no rule can see the future (a test changes later prices and checks that no earlier position moves). It then validates the best variant with the number of variants this call ran, not a number someone declared: the deflated Sharpe ratio across the grid's measured Sharpe dispersion, the CSCV probability of backtest overfitting on every variant's returns, the probabilistic Sharpe and the minimum track record, next to buy and hold over the same window. At most 200 variants and 20,000 prices per call. No code is ever run: a strategy is a family plus numbers.

• summarize_series reads a long price or return series and states it in about a hundred words, plus a field for every figure: growth, volatility, Sharpe and drift t-statistic, the worst drawdown with its dates and recovery, trend, the volatility regime (terciles of its own 21-period volatility), tails, jumps (beyond six robust standard deviations), autocorrelation, stale data and, with a benchmark, correlation and beta. A five-year daily series is about 1,260 numbers; the summary is a paragraph.

• stress_test resamples a strategy's returns with a stationary block bootstrap (seeded, so a run reproduces exactly) and reports how often the drawdown limit breaks and the Sharpe turns negative, then applies four named scenarios with their rules stated: a crash at the equity high (default the larger of 20% and three times the worst period), volatility multiplied, the worst stretch lived twice, and positions stuck for several periods after the worst one. The fragility share is the part of resampled histories that break the drawdown limit or lose money on a risk-adjusted basis. Generative models are not used: trained on one series they memorize it or invent dynamics nobody can check.

• check_feasibility checks a plan against a real broker before it trades: the broker's published order-rate limit against the rebalance's burst of orders (Alpaca 200 a minute, Interactive Brokers about 50 a second), the minimum order (Alpaca 1 USD notional), US day-trading rules as they stand in 2026 (FINRA retired the pattern day trader rule and its 25,000 USD minimum on 4 June 2026; firms may phase in its replacement until 20 October 2027), T+1 settlement in cash accounts, each order's share of daily volume, square-root market impact (coefficient Y, default 1) with every copy of the same strategy counted, and the capital at which costs and impact eat the expected gross return. Every broker fact carries the date it was checked and its source.

• check_leakage finds lookahead in a signal without seeing its code. A causal signal computed on the first n rows gives exactly the values the full run gives for those rows. plan picks the cuts (seeded, between 40% and 95% of the series); you rerun your own code on the rows before each cut, and compare checks every column: a value that changed when the later rows were removed used them. On your machine, columns_file takes the path of a JSON file {cuts, columns} your script wrote (Python's NaN reads as missing) instead of thousands of pasted numbers. The result names the pattern: future rows with their horizon (a shift(-5) reads as five rows), the full sample (a normalization, rank, scaling or fit over the whole series), or scattered rows (filling gaps backwards). On a fixed zoo of 22 pandas and statsmodels signals (config/research/leakage-zoo.json, from scripts/research/leakage/), all 11 leaks are found with the right pattern and none of the 11 honest indicators is flagged. A pass covers only the cuts tested: survivorship, vendor revisions or a leak confined to the first rows leave no trace.

• placebo_test tests a whole research pipeline at once. plan writes your panel (real.csv) and 19 placebos to a new folder in the system's temporary directory: the same returns with the periods in a random order, the same order for every asset, so each asset keeps its returns and each day its cross-section, but nothing can be predicted. Run the pipeline unchanged on each, every search, filter and parameter choice included, and compare ranks its real result among the placebo results. Every choice the pipeline makes is counted, because it makes them again on every placebo. A pre-registered study chose the reordering (scripts/research/placebo/v1/, config/research/placebo-v1-evaluation.json): in all 30 combinations of simulated market and pipeline where nothing can be predicted (10,000 tests each; five return shapes, flat, drifting and with assets that differ only in their constant means; SMA, time-series and cross-sectional momentum grids), its false-positive rate at a nominal 5% was 4.6% to 5.5%. On the same markets a t-test on the best rule found an edge 10.9% to 78.9% of the time, and Bonferroni's correction 8.0% to 10.3% wherever the market drifted and 58.5% to 59.7% where assets only differed in their means. With 19 placebos the smallest p is 0.05; 99 give a finer one.

On your own machine, prices_file, series_file and returns_file take a CSV or JSON path instead of the numbers. Only numbers are read, plus an ISO date column when the file has one, so results can name the day a drawdown began.

The trial ledger: count every variant an agent tries

An agent can try thousands of strategy variants in an hour, and the best of them looks skilled by luck alone. How much luck depends on how many were tried and how spread out their results were, so the honest verdict on a reported winner needs the whole search. The ledger keeps it.

Turn it on with CANLI_TOOLSETS=validate,lab,ledger (or all), then:

1. ledger_record_trial for every variant, as it is tried: its returns (or a returns file), or its annualized Sharpe and sample size, plus a label and its parameters. The first call creates a ledger and returns its name; reuse it. Each reply already counts the whole search so far.

2. ledger_summary for the verdict: the best trial, the Sharpe that the best of that many skill-less trials reaches by luck, the best trial's deflated Sharpe ratio after counting every trial, and the probability of backtest overfitting (CSCV) when every trial has aligned returns.

3. ledger_export to hand the search to someone else. Each trial is chained to the previous one with SHA-256, so a removed, reordered or edited trial shows.

Ledgers are JSON-lines files under CANLI_LEDGER_DIR (default ~/.canli/ledgers); nothing leaves your machine. Twenty variants of pure noise, recorded this way, give a best annualized Sharpe of about 1.5, a luck-alone expectation of about 1.7 and a deflated Sharpe near 0.4: the ledger calls that winner what it is. The statistics are the same checked code as validate_deflated_sharpe and validate_overfitting; test/ledger.test.mjs checks both directions (noise is flagged, a real edge among noise keeps a deflated Sharpe above 0.95).

Auditing a backtest in one call

audit_backtest takes one strategy's return series and, ideally, every variant's returns (variants or variants_file, the dropped ones too); without them, the number of variants tried and their Sharpe spread. The result opens with:

• headline: one test chosen because its false-positive rate was measured before anyone looked at your numbers. Null Zoo v1 (scripts/research/null-zoo/v1/ in the repository) drew hundreds of thousands of simulated searches from nine return shapes with known ground truth; the bar and the rule that picks the test were committed before the run. With variants the headline comes from the data-snooping tests (validate_reality_check, with its receipt); without, from luck trials with Lo's autocorrelation correction. Its sentence quotes the measured false-positive rate for returns shaped like yours, and the worst across the nine shapes.

• fix_next: at most five next steps, each {id, why, next} with a stable id.

• computed: Lo's adjusted Sharpe, a stationary-bootstrap 95% interval for the Sharpe, the haircut Sharpe, the minimum backtest length and, with variants, how many independent trials they count as (Li and Ji) and the selected variant's out-of-sample decay.

Then the checks: validate_deflated_sharpe on the series (an estimate), validate_track_record on the Sharpe, skew and kurtosis that check derived and, with variants, validate_overfitting. Each is exactly what its own tool returns, with its own receipt; the deflated Sharpe runs with the larger of the declared and counted trials and Sharpe spread, so a search cannot be made to look smaller than it was. A check that refuses or cannot be reached is reported as that check's error. The audit adds no grade of its own. Through the API it uses one validation per check.

When the server runs on your machine, returns_file and variants_file take the path of the backtest's output instead of the numbers: a CSV (comma, semicolon or tab separated, with or without a header; date and label columns are ignored, an unnamed or counting index column is skipped and reported) or a JSON array. returns_column picks the column when there are several. Only the numbers are read; the hosted endpoint refuses file paths. An agent copying a long series into a call can drop values, and the copy costs tokens; in our agent benchmark, reading the file instead took three audit questions from 4 of 9 to 8 of 9 answered correctly on gpt-5.4-mini.

Prompts, resources and structured results

Clients that show MCP prompts offer eight guided workflows: validate_backtest (deflated Sharpe, then overfitting, then the track record needed, reported with what each number does not establish), track_record_needed, backtest_and_validate, stress_my_strategy, production_check, summarize_market_series, check_signal_for_lookahead and test_pipeline_on_placebos. Resources: canli://limits, the boundary sentences every result carries; canli://sources, the papers behind each validator and how each is checked against them; canli://strategy-spec, the JSON Schema of every strategy family and its parameters; and canli://openapi, the API's OpenAPI 3.1 document. Two resource templates are for writing code against the tools: canli://schemas/{tool} returns a tool's exact input and output JSON Schema, and canli://examples/{language}/{tool} a working call in python, javascript or curl (both variables complete). A test compiles every generated Python and JavaScript example and checks that every example's arguments are valid input. Every tool result carries its envelope both as text and as structuredContent.

Compact context (0.3.0)

An agent pays for every token a tool returns, including whitespace it never reads. Since 0.3.0 every result is minified JSON, and a company history returns its observations as one columns header and one row per observation, with a unit shared by every row stated once. No field is dropped: every boundary sentence, accession number, form, filed date and source hash is still in the result, and columns + rows rebuild each observation exactly.

Measured with bench/token_cost.py on live records (tokenizer: tiktoken o200k_base; other tokenizers give different absolute counts), 20 observations each:

The validation tools gain the minification only: the live service_status envelope measured 593 tokens indented and 475 minified (−19.9%); their boundary sentences are kept word for word. These are measurements of these results, not a claim about any other server.

Breaking change from 0.2.0: history.observations is now {unit?, columns, rows} instead of an array of objects.

Configuration

If CANLI_KEY is not set and local mode is off, call get_key once per session before the validators. The key it returns lives only in this process's memory for the life of the session; it is not written to disk.

HTTP failures and API error envelopes are marked as MCP tool errors while preserving the complete JSON envelope. A successful validation with a negative verdict remains a normal result. Requests have a 30-second deadline covering headers and body, reject redirects, and are never retried automatically. A timeout may occur after the service has processed a request; check service status before deciding to submit again. Non-JSON response bodies and raw network errors are omitted from tool errors.

Install

No install step. npx fetches the published package on first run, so every client config below just spawns npx -y canli-validation-mcp. See "Local checkout" near the bottom to develop or test this package itself instead of running the published one.

Hosted endpoint (no install)

The same tools are served at https://canlicapital.com/mcp over MCP Streamable HTTP, for clients that connect to a URL instead of spawning a process (Claude.ai connectors, ChatGPT, Cursor's remote servers). Nothing to install, and no Node.js on your machine.

claude mcp add --transport http canli https://canlicapital.com/mcp

Without a key, requests run under a shared anonymous key, so the daily validation quota is shared by every hosted caller. When that shared quota is used up for the day, validations are still answered, computed by the same code on the hosted endpoint, but without a stored receipt; the result says so. For your own quota, issue a free key (see /developers) and send it as a header:

claude mcp add --transport http canli https://canlicapital.com/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer $CANLI_KEY"

Add ?toolsets= to the URL to list only some tools (see "Toolsets" below), for example https://canlicapital.com/mcp?toolsets=company.

The endpoint is stateless. On it, get_key issues nothing and says which key is in use, because a key issued there would not reach the next request. A malformed Authorization header is refused rather than replaced with the shared key.

Claude Desktop

Add to claude_desktop_config.json (Settings, Developer, Edit Config):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "canli": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "canli-validation-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop afterward. Add an "env" object with CANLI_API_BASE to point this at a preview deployment instead of the default.

Claude Code

claude mcp add canli -- npx -y canli-validation-mcp

Run claude mcp list to confirm it is registered, and claude mcp remove canli to remove it.

Private local mode

Set CANLI_LOCAL=1 and the eight validators run on your machine: nothing about the series you submit is sent to canlicapital.com, no key is needed, and no receipt is stored. The computation is the API's own, shipped byte for byte in src/local (a test fails if it drifts), so a local result equals the hosted one; it names no receipt id because none was made.

claude mcp add canli-local --env CANLI_LOCAL=1 -- npx -y canli-validation-mcp

verify_receipt by id, service_status and company_financial_history still read from canlicapital.com; they send no series. In the Claude Desktop extension this is the "Private local mode" setting.

Generic stdio client

Any MCP client that can spawn a process and speak stdio will work. Using the official SDK directly, from Node:

import { Client } from "@modelcontextprotocol/sdk/client/index.js";
import { StdioClientTransport } from "@modelcontextprotocol/sdk/client/stdio.js";

const transport = new StdioClientTransport({
  command: "npx",
  args: ["-y", "canli-validation-mcp"],
  env: { ...process.env, CANLI_API_BASE: "https://canlicapital.com" },
});

const client = new Client({ name: "my-agent", version: "0.1.0" });
await client.connect(transport);

const { tools } = await client.listTools();
console.log(tools.map((t) => t.name));

const keyResult = await client.callTool({ name: "get_key", arguments: { label: "my-agent" } });
if (keyResult.isError) throw new Error("Key setup failed; inspect the error privately.");
// The session retains the issued key. Avoid printing its envelope into logs.

const result = await client.callTool({
  name: "validate_deflated_sharpe",
  arguments: {
    returns: [0.004, -0.002, 0.007, 0.001, -0.003, 0.005, 0.002, -0.001],
    periods_per_year: 252,
    effective_independent_trials: 30,
    cross_trial_sharpe_sd_annualized: 0.5,
  },
});
console.log(result.content[0].text); // the answer, its limits and its receipt

await client.close();

What a result does not establish (boundary language)

Every envelope this server returns carries these sentences, verbatim, from the API itself (api/_lib/limits.js):

• This verdict is about the series exactly as submitted. The service never saw the data source, its costs, survivorship, or any lookahead in how the series was built.

• A deflated Sharpe or overfitting probability above or below any threshold is not admission to anything and is not a forecast.

• The receipt is content-hashed, reproducible from the open-source core it names, and signed with Ed25519 by a key published at https://canlicapital.com/.well-known/canli-receipt-keys.json.

• Quotas: 1000 validations per key per UTC day, 5 keys per client per UTC day, 1048576 bytes per validation request, 1024 bytes per key revocation request, 20000 observations per series, 200 variants per matrix.

Each tool's description also states one of these sentences, so an agent sees the boundary before it calls the tool, not only after.

Compact results (tokens)

A validation result is the answer (data), the sentences above except the quota line, and the receipt's id and URL; an error keeps its error. The rest of the API envelope (schema, endpoint, timestamps, claim and capital class, the human page, the source-file hashes and the quota line) describes the service rather than the answer, and an agent pays for every token of it on every call. It stays in the stored receipt, which verify_receipt returns in full with include_receipt, and in service_status. On a breadth result this is about half the text. Set CANLI_FULL_ENVELOPE=1 to receive every field.

Toolsets (tokens)

A client sends the model the whole tool list on every turn, and it is most of each turn's prompt: a validation result is a few hundred tokens, the list of every tool several thousand. A client that needs one kind of tool can list only that kind, with CANLI_TOOLSETS (stdio) or ?toolsets= (hosted endpoint). The default is every toolset except company, whose one tool canli-fundamentals-mcp does better and point in time, and ledger, which keeps files on your machine and is local only; all adds both. get_key is listed only when no key is configured.

Measured with bench/tool_list_tokens.py (tokenizer: tiktoken o200k_base; other models' tokenizers give different absolute counts), in the shape an OpenAI-style client sends the list:

Providers cache a tool list that is identical from turn to turn and bill the cached part at a fraction of the price (test/tool-list-stable.test.mjs keeps each list byte-stable); a smaller list costs less either way.

Local checkout

Only needed to develop or test this package itself, not to run the published one.

cd mcp
npm ci
node src/server.mjs

Point a client at the checkout instead of npm by spawning node /absolute/path/to/meridian/mcp/src/server.mjs in place of npx -y canli-validation-mcp in any config above.

Testing

npm test
npm run test:package

Runs node --test over test/*.test.mjs: schema round-trips against the API's own OpenAPI and manifest examples, one success, error-envelope and quota-429 case per keyed tool (a fake fetch stands in for the network), a check that every tool description carries a limits sentence, a check that those sentences have not drifted from api/_lib/limits.js, a check that no shipped file contains an em dash, and one test that spawns the actual server binary and performs a real MCP tools/list and callTool handshake over stdio against a local HTTP stub, so the wiring is proven rather than assumed.

test:package creates the actual npm tarball, checks its exact file list and license, installs it in a temporary consumer directory, and runs the stdio test against that installed entry. Dependency installation contacts npm; tool calls use only the local HTTP stub. It neither publishes a package nor issues a production API key.

Dependencies

Only @modelcontextprotocol/server (pinned exact; the MCP SDK's server package, which itself depends only on @modelcontextprotocol/core and zod) and zod (pinned exact): four packages in the installed tree, where 0.7 and earlier pulled in about 95 through @modelcontextprotocol/sdk. No other runtime dependency is added, and nothing in this package touches the site's root package.json, .vercelignore, api/, scripts/, js/, or public/.