The Gecko research universe.

The research universe is a work in progress. Sector and industry classifications are being added as the underlying Gecko instrument metadata is enriched, and the universe itself may change over time. Individual research posts will identify the dataset used for that particular experiment.

Worth being upfront about a bias baked into this list: every instrument here is a large, well-capitalised, heavily-traded UK blue-chip — as of August 2026, all 28 are FTSE 100 constituents (though index membership shifts quarterly, so that won't necessarily have been true for the whole seven-year test window). There's nothing from further down the market-cap scale — no small caps, no AIM-listed stocks — and no other instrument types at all: no index funds, futures, commodities, forex or crypto. That wasn't a deliberate methodological choice so much as how the list grew — familiar, liquid, well-covered names were the easiest to source clean historical data for.

That matters for how to read every finding on this site: it says something about large, liquid UK blue-chips, not about markets in general. A small-cap stock, a thinly-traded instrument, or a completely different asset class like a commodity future could easily behave nothing like this universe does — nothing tested here says anything about that one way or the other.

The later research used more coverage than these 28 instruments give — not because of anything specific to one strategy, just because more instruments means more trades to draw conclusions from. Now, there's an expanded research scope covering a wider LSE basket. It's a separate dataset, so results from the two scopes aren't directly comparable without saying so.