Narrative Dislocation as a Conditional Information Friction

Narrative dislocation is formalised as the conditional divergence between aggregate headline interpretation and reconciled material content of an event. The dislocation is treated as a friction parameter on the path between information arrival and price formation, not as an opinion about price direction.

Define dislocation Δ_t = ρ_t − μ_t where ρ_t is the inferred crowd posterior over outcome relevance and μ_t is the reconciled posterior under multi-source weighting. Signal formation conditions on |Δ_t| and on the sign of (ρ_t − μ_t).

The framework is deliberately agnostic: large Δ_t alone is not a trade thesis. It is a precondition under which a directional classification may earn higher conditional confidence, provided invalidation constraints are independently satisfied.

Memo construction explicitly separates the sign and magnitude of Δ_t from the BUY / SELL / HOLD classification. The two are concatenated only in the final synthesis pass.

Crowd posterior ρ_t is itself an estimate. Its instability around micro-cycle news bursts introduces a non-trivial measurement floor on |Δ_t|.