ETH Daily Counter-Rally Short in Confirmed Downtrend (Bear-Flag Bounce Failure)

A SHORT-ONLY strategy on ETHUSDT.BINANCE perpetual futures (Binance USD-M) using DAILY bars. Entry on 2 consecutive UP closes WHILE the instrument is in a confirmed long-term DOWNTREND (close < 200-SMA, 50-SMA < 200-SMA). This is the EMPIRICAL INVERSE of the just-falsified XRP pullback strategy: the XRP failure proved that bounces in uptrends do NOT hold and prices keep falling. The contrapositive is that BOUNCES IN DOWNTRENDS also do not hold — rallies during confirmed bear regimes are failed bounces that resume the underlying downtrend. This bear-flag-bounce-failure pattern is documented in price-action literature (Brooks 2009 'Trading Price Action Trends' calls it a 'major-trend-reversal-rejection' setup) and historically works in trending markets where counter-trend rallies fail to reclaim the broken support. ETH is selected because: (1) the pipeline has TWO ETH LONG strategies and ZERO ETH shorts — adding a short directly diversifies within instrument; (2) ETH has clean Binance USD-M data since 2019 with no deprecation risk; (3) ETH had multiple multi-month downtrend regimes (2022 bear, March 2024 pullback, 2025 chop) that produce many qualifying setups; (4) ETH precision is in the map (proven by 2 existing pipeline strategies). Structurally distinct from every pipeline strategy and failed mechanism: NOT a long-only strategy (only the BTC death-cross is short, but it uses SMA-crossover entry not consecutive-up-day count); NOT a pullback long (the just-falsified class); NOT supp-data dependent; NOT calendar; NOT accumulation; NOT cross-asset. The mechanism explicitly leverages the session's most-decisive empirical finding (XRP pullback −7.15 Sharpe = prices keep moving with regime) by inverting the trade direction. Critical advantages over the failed XRP setup: (1) trades WITH the documented regime persistence (short in downtrend), not against it; (2) ETH not XRP — different microstructure to avoid pattern-specific overfitting; (3) shorter holding period (7 days max vs XRP's reclaim-wait) so trades resolve quickly into the dominant trend direction.