Arena Blog

In December 2025, the X account Whale Factor wrote that since November Bitcoin had been consistently dropping 2 to 3 percent within minutes of the US market open, and named Jane Street as the cause. The opening hour really was the weakest of the day. But Bitcoin did not fall 2 percent in the first 15 minutes on a single day.

The market maker Keyrock says 90 percent of token unlocks push the price down. Counted across 1,247 unlocks since 2021, an unlock does cost something, but not on unlock day. And the bigger loss comes from somewhere else.

Polymarket has offered perps with up to 20× leverage since September. A Bitcoin long there is liquidated after a 2.5 % move against it. Since 2024, that happened within a week after 64 % of all entry days, including 38.5 % of the weeks Bitcoin ended higher.

A YouTube rulebook promises +71 % on margin for 5× long grids when price rises and −20 % when it falls. Rebuilt on BTC, ETH and SOL, the gain comes from leverage, and falling markets cost 59 to 86 % on average.

If a strategy is almost always wrong, doing the opposite sounds like a winning strategy. Tested on the three weakest daily strategies on the platform and ten large coins since 2017: the flipped version beats buy and hold in 5 of 30 cases. A bad strategy rarely has a wrong signal. It usually has an arbitrary one, plus fees, and flipping keeps the fees. Two numbers tell you beforehand whether flipping can work at all.

"3 for 3" sounds like a perfect Bitcoin indicator until you ask: three out of how many? Pi Cycle, where the count is known, hit four tops and stayed silent at four others, the highest among them.

Across 405 crypto pairs, buy and hold loses money on 83 % of them. What 197,435 backtests say about what a strategy does first, what decides whether it earns, and why the bar for any altcoin is Bitcoin.

The most detailed factsheet among three providers checked lists hit rate, best trade and worst trade — but not how far the portfolio fell or for how long. Five questions that make a return readable.

A backtest has more parameters than the strategy description lists. The start day of a 3-day candle grid alone moves annual return by 6.66 points on average. What that means for every interval comparison, and the three questions that make the effect visible.

A leveraged long grid was liquidated in 1 of 70 ninety-day windows since 2017 — because a grid never deploys more than half its notional. What leverage does instead: it deepens every drawdown and pays funding in the down windows.

A grid bot had the flatter drawdown in 138 of 138 windows since 2017, ranges set in advance. Not because it trades well: because it never invests more than half the money. What that protection costs in rally windows, and what a hindsight range was worth.

Four findings you can trade on — win rates, timeframes, regime filters, costs — and four questions that expose any performance claim. From 100,000 systematic backtests.