Arena Blog

The band softens the crash in Bitcoin, Ether and stock indices. In half of the large altcoins it brakes too little, and in gold not at all. 35 coins, three indices and gold, tested.

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.

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.

Ichimoku is usually traded with 9, 26 and 52 and with the rule "only buy above the cloud". Both were tested on crypto from 2018 to October 2026. The cloud rule lowered the result on all ten of today's largest coins, and on bitcoin and ether the traditional numbers did no better than randomly drawn ones. What that means for your settings.

A popular framework says: cut a strategy's position in half when its 90-day Sharpe drops below the backtest's 5th percentile, pause it at 1.5x the backtest drawdown. Simulated, those rules cut eight in ten healthy strategies to half size within three years and leave four in five strategies without any edge running through their first year. What to check instead.

The anchored VWAP strategy draws an average-price line from a starting point you pick, such as the last low, and buys while price stays above it. Its result depends on that starting point. On six years of Bitcoin, none of five common anchor rules placed the line better than chance, and the 52-week low did worse than 99 percent of random anchors. Why that happens, why the charts still look convincing, and what to use instead.

"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.

"Stocks have recovered from every war" is true — for one country. After the April 1940 high the Dow needed four years and nine months to get back to even, in 1914 the exchange was closed for four and a half months, and St Petersburg, Vienna, Tokyo and Shanghai are missing from the statistics because their exchanges ceased to exist. Across 39 markets, a diversified investor is down in real terms after 30 years in 12 % of cases.