docs: record the live-seeded rules as a deliberate, bounded standing exception

[eaitbrahim]

What

keel-live.db rules 1–5 (turtle_breakout on BTC/ETH/PAXG/ADA/XLM) have carried status = live with promoted_at IS NULL since 2026-07-24 — against rules seed's own printed instruction:

⚠️ seeded at LIVE status, bypassing the promotion gate … Do not leave live-seeded rules in place afterwards.

Reviewed 2026-08-08. Kept deliberately. Now recorded rather than silent.

This applies the standard the project already set for PAXG in docs/experiments/2026-07-20-allowlist-screen-first-run.md:

The one thing not to do is leave it silently exempt because it was already there.

The exception was already load-bearing — it just wasn't written down anywhere.

Why keep them

min_trades is 100 per rule, and this strategy cannot reach it. Measured by backtesting each rule over ~5.02 years of daily bars:

rule	trades	rate	years to 100 trades
BTC	13	2.59/yr	~39
ETH	13	2.59/yr	~39
XLM	8	1.59/yr	~63
ADA	6	1.19/yr	~84
PAXG	4	3.20/yr	~31

Waiting for the gate is not a slower route to the same destination — it is no route. The sandbox exists to accumulate the live evidence the promotion gate demands and cannot itself generate. Demoting these rules would end that experiment without putting anything in its place.

What bounds the risk, since the gate didn't

The caps (max_exposure_usd 200 total at once, max_per_order_usd 100), the eighteen un-overridable guards.py rails, rail 1's allowlist, and rail 14's monthly allowance.

The bypass is of the evidence gate, not the safety rails — separate mechanisms, and only the first was skipped.

What it is not

Not a precedent for admitting assets. Not a reason to raise caps. Not a claim these rules are validated — no walk-forward or PBO run has ever covered ADA or XLM, and none of the five clears any promotion axis (see #185).

Revisit triggers

Named, rather than an open-ended pass: caps rising above this sandbox's few-dollars-of-damage scale; the rule set changing; a rule trading materially more often than the table above; or the sandbox being treated as evidence for anything beyond itself.

Where it's recorded

Two places an operator actually reads:

• config.live-sandbox.yaml — a block beside the allowlist it applies to.
• docs/go-live-runbook.md §3 — a new "Standing exception" subsection. §3 previously documented the act of short-circuiting the gate but not the ongoing state.

Verification

• load_config yields an identical allowlist, caps and weights; comment-stripped diff against main is empty.
• python -m pytest tests/ -q → 2078 passed.
• No database written, no rule status changed, no config value altered.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code