Arena Blog

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.

Rising Bitcoin while long-term holders sit still counts as deeply bullish on-chain. We replicated the pattern — and asked the one question missing: compared to what?

Screeners label altcoins "uptrending vs BTC" and stop there. We measured what followed the label across 370 pairs and 458,000 days — and what followed any day.

When is a backtest result a false positive? Four of our own studies failed — against four rules we locked before looking. What each one caught.

The baseline in a backtest is what everything else is measured against. Ours was 62 % runs with a filter switched on. What that shifted, and what we changed.

A leverage backtest rarely shows more return – often less. Why effective exposure = position × leverage decides, and where 5× would have liquidated your strategy in 2018.

We pre-registered a Wyckoff spring backtest: rules locked first, 10 pairs, placebo control. The result is a clean nothing — and short-term even negative.

Stacking more sats by rotating between altcoins, BTC and stablecoins sounds compelling. We measured it across 45 test cases. The result: less BTC than doing nothing.