Sharpe-based early stopping kills every hyperopt trial at epoch 4 because compute_epoch_financials() is deterministic (greedy argmax on fixed validation data) — the model doesn't change enough in 8 short epochs to shift any argmax decisions, making Sharpe bit-identical across epochs and triggering plateau detection immediately. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>