Directional Asymmetry of Crypto Trend: LONG-ONLY Donchian Breakout with Chandelier Exit on NEARUSDT.BINANCE_SPOT 4H — the Short Leg Is Removed Because It Is Measured to Be a Systematic Bleed, Not Because a Regime Filter Says So (Ungated, Pure OHLCV, Vol-Targeted Sizing)

A LONG-ONLY, single-instrument, ungated, pure-OHLCV breakout strategy on NEARUSDT.BINANCE_SPOT, 4-HOUR bars. The mechanism claim is NOT 'trend works' (the factory has established that at ~1% survival); it is that CRYPTO TREND IS DIRECTIONALLY ASYMMETRIC and that the repeated long-short trend failures in this corpus are caused by the SHORT leg, so the correct fix is leg REMOVAL rather than another gate (lesson 130 says gates subtract; this hypothesis adds no gate, no regime filter and no supplementary feed). MEASUREMENT BEHIND THE CLAIM (run in this session on the factory catalog, 2021-01-01 to 2026-09-18, 24 Binance USD-M perps, one identical rule: enter on a 20-bar Donchian break, exit on a 3xATR(14) chandelier trail, no filters): - 4H LONG leg: +1.23% GROSS per trade, positive on 22 of 24 symbols (92%), long-leg-only Sharpe 0.52, median 163 long trades per symbol. - 4H SHORT leg, same rule mirrored: -0.33% GROSS per trade, positive on only 8 of 24 symbols (33%), short-leg-only Sharpe -0.17, median 159 trades. - 1-DAY clock reproduces it: LONG +6.20%/trade (88% of symbols positive) vs SHORT -1.83%/trade (21% positive). The factory's own most recent evidence agrees independently: the BtcDualTimeframeMomentumConfluenceLS abandon note records LONG +0.408% vs SHORT -0.778% gross per trade, with the 93 shorts losing $8,293 — the book was killed by its short leg. ECONOMIC CAUSE for the asymmetry (why it is not a sampling accident): (1) crypto carries a structural long risk premium — the asset class' unconditional drift is strongly positive and a short leg pays that premium away on every held bar; (2) the participant base is asymmetric — downside breakouts are absorbed by systematic spot dip-buying, DCA flows and stablecoin dry powder, so DOWN trends mean-revert faster, while upside breakouts attract genuinely NEW capital (new spot buyers, attention, listings, index/treasury flows) so UP trends self-reinforce and persist; (3) on perps the short side additionally pays funding in exactly the persistent-uptrend states where the trend signal is right. Because the strategy is long-only and unlevered, the venue routing rule sends it to SPOT (CASH account, no funding cost, no liquidation risk) — which is also the under-represented, highest-survival venue in the current portfolio (10.4% vs the >=15% target) rather than the 69.4%-saturated USD-M futures bucket. SIZING is vol-targeted, which is a sizing rule and not a signal gate: notional = equity * min(1.0, 0.25 / realized_annualised_vol), realized vol = stdev of the last 180 4H log returns * sqrt(2190). Measured on NEAR this converts a raw-notional -74% equity drawdown into -24.3% at 17.5% realized portfolio volatility, without touching per-trade return on notional (the promotion metric). ALTERNATIVES I FALSIFIED IN THIS SESSION BEFORE PROPOSING THIS (stated so the pipeline does not re-spend them): (a) intrabar Close-Location-Value 'taker pressure' momentum — negative on 7 of 12 symbols, discarded; (b) VWAP-vs-VWAP 'cost basis / disposition' crossover — does NOT beat a plain EMA crossover at any of 4 window pairs on 19 Binance 4H symbols, discarded; (c) BTC->alt lead-lag catch-up on 1H bars — conditional mean forward return is +0.005% to +0.021% per event, one full order of magnitude below the 0.10% round trip, arbitraged and dead; (d) a volatility-SQUEEZE gate in front of the same breakout — raised gross/trade from 0.43% to 0.50% but CUT median Sharpe from 0.28 to 0.22 by halving the trade count, exactly the lesson-130 pattern, so it is deliberately NOT in this design; (e) Hyperliquid as the venue — rejected on a catalog check: HL daily bars before 2023 carry ZERO volume (the venue did not exist), so HL's usable history is ~3.3y daily / 2.65y 4H, too short for this walk-forward, and that phantom pre-2023 history plausibly contributes to hyperliquid's 0/131 record.