Strategies
BTC Single-Asset Macro Trend Regime Long-Short on BINANCE Daily (50d/200d MA Crossover, Months-Long Holding, Macro Horizon)
Outcome: Abandoned
BtcDailyMacroTrendRegime50200CrossLS
Outcome Summary
This strategy applied the textbook 50/200-day macro crossover to BTC long-and-short, aiming to fill the nearly-empty months-long horizon quota with a multi-horizon stack. A prior iteration crashed in Layer-2 on a staticmethod descriptor issue; the iter-2 fix (module-level SMA helper) let it run, producing 12 regime trades over 6.4 years. But the slow crossover whipsawed on BTC's regime transitions: profit factor 0.66, negative expectancy, a 42% drawdown, and a ~-30% realized record hidden behind an open-position MTM that flattered the headline to -1.4%. The analyst abandoned it before optimization, judging it both edgeless and far too sparse (~2 trades/year) to validate — a single-asset macro crossover simply cannot generate enough regime cycles to extract or test an edge.
Hypothesis
Implementation
Long-short BTC macro trend regime on BTCUSDT.BINANCE USD-M futures, DAILY bars, pure OHLCV single feed. Uses the 50/200-day SMA crossover with a widening-spread confirmation: LONG when 50d > 200d and the normalized spread is wider than 5 bars ago (confirmed bull), SHORT when 50d < 200d and the spread is widening on the downside (confirmed bear), FLAT during unconfirmed transitions. Rides the whole multi-month regime, exiting on the opposite crossover or a 25% catastrophic stop. The signal is the continuous normalized 50/200 spread (varies every bar); the discrete regime direction gates entry. leverage 1.0.
Verification Results
Backtest Review
- Sharpe
- -0.07
- Total return
- -1.43%
- Max drawdown
- 42.02%
- Trades
- 12
- Win rate
- 41.7%
- Profit factor
- 0.66
Implemented correctly and trades as specified: 12 macro-regime entries (6 long / 6 short), 0 dropped, months-long holds — no code bug; fills the macro-horizon gap
Headline masks a heavy realized loss: end_unrealized_pct 28.7 exceeds total_return -1.4, so realized closed-trade return is ~-30% (the -1.4% is an open-position mark-to-market)
No realized edge: profit_factor 0.664, expectancy -$2,513/trade, Sharpe -0.066 (CI -1.17 to 0.53), omega 0.90, max_drawdown 42%; avg_loss > avg_win, kurtosis 397
Too sparse to optimize/validate: 12 trades over 6.4 years (~2/yr, avg hold 154d) — walk-forward windows get ~4 trades, holdout ~0
50/200 crossover whipsaws on BTC: negative in 3 of 6 years (2021 -36%, 2022 -13%, 2025 -28%), largest_loss -$24,940
Outcome Summary
A slow 50/200 MA-crossover regime signal needs a broad cross-section or many regime cycles to extract an edge — neither of which a single BTC instrument over 6 years provides — so it whipsaws on false golden/death crosses, produces a net-losing ~2-trade/year record masked by open-position mark-to-market, and is structurally unvalidatable.
The analyst abandoned it at backtest review as a refuted premise plus structural sparsity rather than a bug — the code traded exactly as designed, but the 50/200 crossover whipsaws on a single asset's bull/bear transitions (avg loss > avg win, negative realized expectancy), and ~2 trades/year is far too few to support walk-forward (3 windows would get ~4 trades each) or a holdout, so optimization would only fit noise.
A long-short single-asset macro trend-regime strategy on BTCUSDT daily perpetual futures (pure OHLCV) using the classic 50/200-day SMA crossover — going long in a confirmed widening bull regime (50d > 200d), short in a confirmed widening bear regime, flat during transitions, and holding for whole multi-month regime cycles with a catastrophic 25% stop, to fill the under-represented macro horizon.
Over 6.4 years it made only 12 trades (6 long, 6 short, ~2/year, ~154-day average hold, none dropped) with no realized edge: profit factor 0.664, expectancy -$2,513/trade, Sharpe -0.066 (CI -1.17 to 0.53), 42% max drawdown, kurtosis 397; the -1.4% headline was illusory since end-unrealized 28.7% exceeded it, leaving realized closed-trade return around -30%, and it lost in 3 of 6 years (2021 -36%, 2022 -13%, 2025 -28%).
Backtest and paper results are hypothetical. Trading involves risk of loss.