Arena Blog

"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.

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.