expected-value-and-kelly

expected-value-and-kelly is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from deciqAI/knowledge-skills. It costs 132 tokens per session (2,543 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A decision method that estimates whether a repeated bet or investment is worthwhile and then sets its size according to the estimated advantage and risk. The Kelly criterion is a formula for choosing that size.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for position sizing, capital allocation, advertising budgets, venture portfolios, or repeated experiments with measurable outcomes.
Why use it?
It addresses two separate risks: choosing a losing opportunity and risking too much on a potentially good one.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it for position sizing, capital allocation, advertising budgets, venture portfolios, or repeated experiments with measurable outcomes.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/deciqai/knowledge-skills/expected-value-and-kelly
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add deciqAI/knowledge-skills --skill expected-value-and-kelly
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/deciqAI/knowledge-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

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README.md
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Per session 132 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,543 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00132 $0.02543
Opus 5 $0.00066 $0.01272
Sonnet 5 $0.00026 $0.00509
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00254

Measured 7d ago against content hash 46dce06f6fd9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

expected-value-and-kelly scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

expected-value-and-kelly/SKILL.md · 124 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 124 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Expected Value and the Kelly Criterion

Overview

Two questions decide most repeated bets: is this bet good? (EV) and how big? (Kelly). Most professional ruin comes from positive-EV bets sized wrong. EV = p · W − q · L. If EV ≤ 0, do not bet. Kelly f* = (bp − q) / b maximizes long-term geometric growth (Kelly, Bell Labs, 1956). Full Kelly requires casino-grade certainty; default to half- or quarter-Kelly for estimated edges.

Neighbors: first-principles · occams-razor · second-order-thinking · inversion · regret-minimization (for non-repeating life decisions).

When to Use

  • Decision repeats many times — capital allocation, position sizing, VC portfolio, ad spend, A/B test budget
  • How big to bet matters as much as whether to bet; you have a measurable or estimable edge
  • Someone says: "expected value," "EV," "Kelly," "optimal bet size," "how much should we put on this?"
  • Sizing bets in a boom with power-law payoffs and possible ruin — how much to allocate to AI startups / GPU-compute capex / AI-exposed equities given frothy AI valuations, uncertain AI adoption, and correlated bets

When NOT to use: one-shot life decisions → regret-minimization; negative-EV bets (don't bet); unestimable probabilities; correlated bets without portfolio adjustment.

Coaching Novices (Adaptive Front Door)

Engine mode: user has a concrete repeated bet → run The Process directly. Coach mode: user is unfamiliar → guide step by step.

In Coach mode, respond one step at a time. Each [WAIT] is a hard stop — output only that step's question, then stop.

  1. One-line what-it-is: EV tells you whether the bet is worth taking; Kelly tells you what fraction of bankroll to stake — sized to maximize long-term growth without ruin.
  2. Check fit against When to Use / When NOT to use. If one-shot life decision, redirect to regret-minimization. If EV is negative, say "don't bet" and stop.
  3. Elicit their real bet. Ask for a concrete repeated decision with measurable inputs. > [WAIT — do not advance until user responds]
  4. Walk The Process one step per turn: outcomes → probabilities → payoffs → EV → Kelly → fractional Kelly. > [WAIT — do not advance until user responds]
  5. Close by naming their sizing rule: "bet f* × bankroll, use half-Kelly given estimation uncertainty" — and the trigger that would change it. > [WAIT — do not advance until user responds]

Read the full file on GitHub · 124 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 7d ago First seen · 124 lines · 132 tokens per session scan A 46dce06f6fd9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

expected-value-and-kelly is a skill published in the GitHub repository deciqAI/knowledge-skills (10 stars, last pushed 9d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 132 tokens to every session and 2,543 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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