Trained, Frozen, or Absent: Identifying What a Quantum Layer Contributes to Cross-Sectional Equity Ranking

arXiv:2611.10801v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hybrid quantumclassical models are increasingly proposed for nancial prediction, but reported gains are rarely separated from the classical components around them. We study a hybrid quantum temporal convolutional network for daily cross-sectional ranking of 2000 Tokyo Stock Exchange equities under a protocol built to make the quantum contribution identiable: six conditions (circuit trained, frozen or absent, a parameter-matched classical surrogate, and the circuit alone, trained or frozen) through one code path; four walk-forward folds with ve seeds; bootstrap intervals, Deated Sharpe Ratios, backtest-overtting probabilities and family-wise error control; ve classical baselines including a gradient-boosted tree; and a locked holdout.