Every major shock to US containerised trade since 2018 — tariff waves, COVID, the great queue, a strike, a war on a shipping lane — run as pre-registered studies against seven years of gateway physics (174,440 vessel stays from NOAA AIS) and the full US Census port record. Pre-registered means the hypothesis was written down before the data was touched, and the verdict is printed whichever way it falls: this wave ruled 7 confirmed, 2 mechanisms found, and 2 null — and the null is the page we are proudest of. 32 further watches (elections, alliance reshuffles, a government shutdown) are registered as designated nulls: effects we expect not to see, kept on file so the method can be caught overfitting.
Prefer to watch it happen? The Shift plays all of it — eight years, twelve countries, every beat a ruled study — as one narrated, animated picture.
Method rules 1–13 (seasonality, announcement-vs-effective windows, difference-in-differences counterfactuals with named donor pools, two-track discovery) are part of the registration and live in how the numbers are made. Studies are frozen artifacts: a ruled page does not change when next month’s data lands. Ruled 2026-08-06.