Arena Blog
Data-driven insights on trading strategies, backtests, and market analysis.
25–33 of 33 posts · page 3 of 3
Look-Ahead Bias in Macro Data: Why We Rebuilt Our Regime History
Look-ahead bias corrupts backtests when macro data is revised after the fact. Why we rebuilt our regime history to be strictly point-in-time — and proved it.
The Gap Tax: Your Daily Backtest Fills at a Price You Can't Trade — How Big Is the Error Really?
Daily backtests compute the signal from the close and fill at that same close — a price you can no longer trade. We recomputed 7,000+ trades twice (close fill vs. next open) to size the distortion. Result: smaller than the myth.
40,000 Backtests — What the Data Says Now (and What Changed Since 10k)
Five weeks ago it was 10,000 backtests; today it's over 40,000. With 4x the data, the "beats Buy & Hold" rate falls from 64% to 52%, four in five runs land below 50% win rate, and one memecoin still holds its 197,923% record. What selection bias does to sample size — on real numbers.
Why your Sharpe ratio lies — and how we correct for it
Every additional backtest run increases the chance of finding good results by luck. The Deflated Sharpe Ratio (DSR) corrects for exactly this: it measures whether your result is real — or the best noise from N trials. Pro+ feature.
Look-Ahead-Bias — The Most Common Mistake in Self-Built Backtests, and Why 200% Returns Usually Lie
Most traders writing their own backtests accidentally look into the future. The result: spectacular backtests, collapsing live performance. A look at the subtlest methodology mistake in systematic trading — from the common `shift(-N)` to the innocuous `.mean()` aggregation without rolling window — and why we manually check every Backtesting Arena strategy for bias before release.
How to Backtest Token Unlocks: FDV, Dilution & the Hyperliquid Lesson
A buy signal fires — but the unlock calendar says a large tranche of supply hits the market in nine days. Do you take the trade? Using Hyperliquid and the FDV debate as the case: what the FDV-to-market-cap ratio really means, what token unlocks empirically do to price — and the one point-in-time trap that quietly makes almost every retroactive test worthless.
10,000 Backtests in 6 Weeks — What the Data Says About Us
41 days ago, the first backtest ran in the Arena. Today, we crossed **10,000**. Average pace: **248 backtests per day**, every day. We didn't see this coming — and the numbers say more about you than about us.
Tokenized Commodities — What Backtesters Should Know About SLVon, USOon, and COPXon
Tokenized commodities are a $5.3B market — almost entirely gold. But silver, oil, and copper on-chain are now growing fast. What that technically means — and why these tokens can't (yet) be backtested like a classic ETF.
Why We Currently Use Binance Data Only — And What That Has to Do With Honest Backtesting
MEXC lists 3,000 coins, Binance 'only' 400. We still deliberately use Binance data exclusively. The reason is simple: a backtest is only as good as its price history. Here's why data quality beats coin count.
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