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.

"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.

Across 18 midterm years since 1954 the S&P fell 17.7 percent from its high on average — but only 5 of them had a 19-percent drop inside the second half. What the number measures, how much of it reaches Bitcoin (through the S&P, not through yields), and why Bitcoin's own midterm-year bears come from the halving.

A network's value grows with the square of its participants — says Metcalfe's Law. Where it came from, where it was ever measured, why it describes 15 years of Bitcoin well, and why the "seven-year low in active addresses" headline still counts no users.

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.

Since 1 July 2026 every crypto platform serving the EU needs a licence. For you as a user that means no ban, but this: without a licence you lose protections — segregated assets, liability, a complaints route. Which platforms are in the register, what happens to DeFi, USDT and your own wallet, and how to check a venue.

TradingView's chart copilot can connect to your own MCP servers. Tested on the Backtesting Arena connector: it answered market questions correctly and invented instructions about its own settings four times. Why that happens, and how to tell which answers to check.

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.