Concepts
Protected markets
Markets whose price is held regardless of what the strategy computes, and how to tell a real recommendation from a data artifact.
A protected market keeps its current price. The calculation still runs and is still explained — you can see exactly what would have been recommended — but the recommendation is the price you already charge.
Why protect a market
Two reasons, and they are different.
Commercial. A market where you have a deliberate pricing position: a launch market, a market with a distribution partner, or one where a change would breach an agreement.
Data quality. A market whose published economic indicators produce a nonsense factor. This is more common than it sounds.
Spotting a data artifact
A protected market requires a current price — the calculation refuses without one, since there would be nothing to hold.
The signal to watch for is a market pinning to a strategy bound. Dollarized economies are the classic case: when a country uses the US dollar in practice but the World Bank publishes a PPP figure against a nominal local exchange rate, the resulting ratio is arithmetic rather than economics, and the market pins to the strategy ceiling.
When that happens, the ceiling is catching bad data. It is not expressing a recommendation to charge more, and treating it as one would be acting on a measurement error.
Markets known to behave this way in the current registry include Zimbabwe and Somalia. Both should be protected.
Markets that cannot be analyzed at all
Distinct from protection: some markets have no usable indicators. Taiwan is not a World Bank member and has exchange-rate data only. Gibraltar, Liechtenstein, Monaco, and the Vatican publish no indicators at all.
These should read as explicitly unanalyzable rather than as missing data — a known gap and an unexplained blank are different conditions and should not look the same on screen. Presenting them correctly is an open item.
Effect on confidence
Protection does not raise a market's confidence score. The score still describes the quality of the evidence behind the calculation; protection describes what you decided to do about it. Keeping them separate means protecting a market never disguises the fact that its data is poor.
What is not implemented
Per-market confidence thresholds — requiring a higher score before a protected or high-revenue market can be changed — are specified but not built. Today the bands are global.