Equity DCF Value-Driver Forecasting

You have inherited a buy-side equity-research desk's intrinsic-value model. The desk values companies with a fixed, trusted discounted-cash-flow (DCF) engine that turns a set of forward value-drivers into a per-share value; the open problem is forecasting those drivers for every name in the coverage universe. You inherit a deliberately weak first-pass model (a sector-reversion blend) plus a second weak stab and a few notes — improve one or write a better method. Your forecaster is re-run on a sealed held-out universe whose true drivers you never see, and scored by how close the DCF values it implies land to the truth: lower error is better.

Hard Constraints

• Submit an algorithm (solve(problem)), not precomputed drivers — the grader re-runs your code on hidden companies.
• Keep the exact signature solve(problem) -> {company_id: drivers}, returning a record for every id in problem.holdout_ids and no others.
• Each drivers record must be well-formed and in range: rev_growth, ebit_margin, reinvest are 5-element lists; wacc and terminal_growth are scalars; and terminal_growth < wacc (the Gordon terminal requires it). A malformed / out-of-range / wrong-id-set submission scores 0.
• solve is handed a problem object; it must not read data files or look up answers — the held-out truth is sealed in the grader and there is no network at grade time.
• Grading budget (stated so you can size your method). Your solve is run once, in a fresh subprocess capped at a 1200 s wall-clock budget, inside a container declared at 2 CPUs / 512 MiB; the whole verifier stage is capped at 3600 s. Your own agent container is the same size (2 CPUs / 512 MiB). Relative to your own self-check the grading side is about 0.1x the wall clock (measured end-to-end at 2 CPUs / 512 MiB: 4.85 s of fit_calibration.py versus ~0.5 s for the whole grading stage) — grading is cheaper because the self-check refits your method 60 times (leave-one-out over the 60 calibration names) while grading calls solve exactly once. Do not read that as slack in the other direction: that single call must produce drivers for 4x as many companies (240 held-out versus 60 calibration names), so a method whose cost grows with the universe size sees 4x the work in one shot. A run killed by the time or memory cap produces no drivers and scores 0; the grader records the timeout and the subprocess's exit status separately from "produced no output", so both show up in the run log.

What You Have

• The workspace /app/ as your predecessor left it (/app/README.md orients you):
• Data (/app/data/): coverage.csv (per-company as-of facts + metadata), fundamentals.csv (the messy observable per-year history), calibration_truth.csv (realized drivers + true value for the calibration names only), and data_dictionary.md. Read the dictionary — histories vary in length, cells are missing (MNAR), some fiscal years carry one-off special_items, and sector / beta_proxy are sometimes blank; how you treat the mess is a large part of the task.
• The public DCF bridge (/app/lib/): valuation.py / fin_compute_engine.py value a driver record with the same mechanics the grader uses (you may import them for your own checks); paneldata.py builds the problem object.
• The editable baselines (/app/methods/): main/forecaster.py — this directory is what gets graded — is a weak sector-reversion blend; own_history_trend/ is a second, different weak stab. Improve one in place, or rewrite the method entirely.
• Your self-check surface (free, unlimited): python /app/fit_calibration.py /app/methods/main refits your method leave-one-out over the visible calibration names — fit on the other 59, forecast the one held back, rotated over all 60 — and reports the median absolute out-of-sample valuation error. Pass --kfold K to spend K fits instead of 60 if your method is slow. This matches the grading regime, where your method fits on all visible calibration truth before forecasting the sealed names. This is your only feedback loop, and it is a proxy: the sealed grade is on other companies, so a low calibration error is necessary but not sufficient.

What You Submit

Edit /app/methods/main/forecaster.py to expose this exact signature:

def solve(problem) -> dict:   # {company_id: drivers} for every id in problem.holdout_ids

where each drivers record is:

{"rev_growth": [g1, g2, g3, g4, g5],   # revenue growth per year (0.12 = +12%)
 "ebit_margin": [m1, m2, m3, m4, m5],  # EBIT margin per year    (0.25 = 25%)
 "reinvest":    [r1, r2, r3, r4, r5],  # reinvestment as a fraction of NOPAT, in [0,1)
 "wacc": 0.09,                         # discount rate, in (0,1)
 "terminal_growth": 0.025}             # long-run growth; MUST be < wacc

problem exposes holdout_ids, load_companies() (each a dict with id / set / sector / beta_proxy / facts / history / ipo_year / …), companies_by_id(), and load_calibration_truth() (realized drivers + true value for the calibration names — your fitting data). You may add helper modules next to forecaster.py or restructure the method entirely; the whole methods/main/ directory runs. The runtime provides numpy. There is no submit step and no per-attempt feedback — self-check for as long as your run window allows, then leave your best forecaster.py in place; it is graded once at the end on the hidden universe.

How It Is Judged

After your run, the grader runs your solve on the sealed held-out companies' observable panel (no truth), then recomputes — with its own sealed engine — each company's intrinsic value V_hat from your drivers and the perfect-foresight value V* from its hidden realized drivers, and scores the panel median absolute valuation error:

MAVE = median over a sealed TEST subset of the holdout companies of
           |V_hat - V*| / V*                                        (per-company error capped at 2.0)

You must still return a record for every id in holdout_ids — a missing (or extra) id is a structural violation and scores 0 — but only the sealed test tier counts toward the reward; the rest is a held-back dev tier you never see the composition of. So you cannot tune to the graded subset, and a solver that works on only part of the universe is not safe.

The metric is MAVE (lower is better); push it as low as you can. Only the submitted drivers are trusted — both V_hat and V* are recomputed by the grader's engine, so a reported value cannot be gamed.