Arena Blog

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.

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.

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.

A backtest showing +900% is usually an illusion — built from one lucky entry, too few trades, and the wrong benchmark. Four principles we hold ourselves to: the average of all entries, the 30-trade line, Average Buy & Hold, and out-of-sample testing.

Auditing 40,000 backtests, our Fibonacci strategy came up short. Before cutting it we asked: is it our config? A better exit made it 20 points better — and we retired it anyway. Why "beats Buy & Hold" isn't the bar.

We audited 40,000 of our own backtests — and benched several of our own strategies in the process. Here is what we killed, what we reactivated, and the uncomfortable core lesson: whether a strategy is "good" depends less on the strategy than on the asset class it runs in.

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.

We ran the same RSI/SMA crossover across the top 50 coins and the top 50 US stocks — identical rules, identical window. On crypto it beats the buy-and-hold benchmark 80 % of the time; on stocks, 4 %. Why a trend-following strategy works in one market and bleeds in the other.

Dual Momentum supposedly beats Buy & Hold on return AND drawdown. Our GTAA-5 backtest (2007–2026) says otherwise: not on return — but clearly on drawdown.

The 200-day line is the most-cited trend filter in markets: invested above it, out below it. We tested it as a standalone strategy across 110 assets. The result is not one-size-fits-all — on crypto it beats Buy & Hold on return AND drawdown AND Sharpe; on index ETFs it gives up almost no return while nearly halving the drawdown; on single stocks it works poorly. An honest map of where regime timing pays and where it doesn't.

RSI(2) mean reversion, honestly backtested (2018–2026): on stocks it loses badly to buy & hold; on crypto it wins — for an uncomfortable reason.

A backtest with 34% CAGR looks impressive. But is the result trustworthy? Four questions decide whether any backtest is worth taking seriously — from total return vs. CAGR to maximum drawdown to trade count.