The "brown" economy — conservative-leaning, hard-asset industries: oil & gas, mining & natural resources, farming & crop production, firearms, and private prisons.
Brown is a member of the Blaque Baux family. The core repo
is the engine and blueprint. Brown points that engine at traditional, tangible-asset and
conservative-leaning sectors — energy (XLE, XOP), metals & mining (XME), agriculture
(MOO, DBA), firearms (RGR, SWBI), and private prisons (GEO, CXW). It inherits the
engine's governance wholesale, which matters because some of these corners are thin and volatile.
Not investment advice. Educational/research software. Several of these names are small, illiquid, and politically/headline sensitive. Nothing here is validated. See LICENSE.
git clone --recursive https://github.com/blaquebaux/brown.git
julia --project=engine -e 'using Pkg; Pkg.instantiate()' # one-time engine setupThese sectors share a common driver — real-asset supply/demand and policy — and often move counter to the growth/tech complex. Two family threads apply directly: the base's agriculture (DBA) sleeve is already a validated diversifier in the spine, and Blunt's crude→refiner lead-lag lives in energy. Brown's distinctive idea is the Brown-vs-Blue spread: a direction-neutral long conservative-sectors / short progressive-sectors position (paired with Blue, run market-neutral in Bore) that expresses a rotation without a market bet.
- Real-asset sector trend — energy/metals/ag baskets, vol-targeted; the honest baseline.
- Brown−Blue rotation spread — long Brown / short Blue as a market-neutral rotation signal.
- Illiquid-corner discipline — firearms and private prisons are small and headline-driven; test whether any edge survives realistic liquidity/impact (Bottom's discipline applies).
- Policy/commodity event studies — do supply or policy shocks give tradeable follow-through?
Nothing above is implemented or validated. This is the map, not the territory.
Full detail in research/README.md. Brown and Blue are a pair; the
same research lives in both repos. The scorecard:
| # | Question | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Is the static Brown−Blue spread alpha? | ❌ no — a disguised value/rate bet (−0.10, beta −0.32, corr +0.51 to value−growth) |
| 2 | Is the rotation tradeable? | ✅ keeper — trend the spread +0.73; rotate camps +0.85 (vs +0.72 hold) |
The synthesis: the two camps are distinct (corr 0.54) but each underperforms SPY standalone, and the static Brown−Blue spread is a value/rate bet, not alpha. The rotation is the edge: trend-following the spread (+0.73) and momentum-rotating to the stronger camp (+0.85 vs +0.72 hold) ride the big macro regimes (2020–21 growth: spread −35%; 2022 inflation: spread +40%). Honest caveat: it's sector/style momentum resting on a handful of big regime swings — trade the rotation, never a static side.
Research: first pass complete; rotation keeper — standalone driver built (research/ + live/).
Really style/sector momentum on a few regime swings.
live/camp_live.jl runs the Brown/Blue camp rotation on its own through the engine's governed order
path + Layer-3 safety gate: hold the stronger-trending camp (126-day), equal-weight, long-only.
Dry-run by default (logs the target, places nothing); graduates to Alpaca paper with its own
isolated keys/ledger. (Identical driver ships in the blue repo — it's one rotation across both camps.)
Not validated to the spine's bar.
BB_DRYRUN=1 julia --project=engine live/camp_live.jl # compute + log today's camp, no ordersBlaque Baux is a quantitative research initiative and a subsidiary of Carter Warrens. BlaqueBaux.com is the home for the work; the code lives here on GitHub — open to study, test, and build bespoke strategies on top of.
Anyone can point an AI at a market. The edge is understanding what the data actually says — and turning it into something you can act on. We test relentlessly and put most of it on the record as rejected, with the reason; what survives is built, governed, and validated before it is ever called real. That combination — honest research, reproducible evidence, and execution you can trust — is why Carter Warrens leads on strategy and implementation, not merely uses the tools everyone now has.
This repo is one sleeve of the Blaque Baux family — a single governed engine steered in many directions. The core repo is the base/blueprint and holds the full family roster.
engine/ the Blaque Baux platform (git submodule → blaquebaux/base)
research/ two Path-A sketches (pair & spread, the rotation keeper) + scorecard
live/ governed live drivers (once a sleeve graduates to paper A/B)
Explore the production site, interactive LABS, and open research CORPUS.
MIT. © 2026 Carter Warrens.