Strategies

BtcSingleVenueCashCarryFundingHarvest implemented the analyst's exact prescription — same-exchange long-spot/short-perp BTC carry, near-always-on, tiny parameter count — to fix the cross-venue funding failures, and funding was indeed credited (+$69k) on continuous trading with large capacity. But the hedge broke on crash bars: a +2461% LUNA-day return, kurtosis 184, and a 268% drawdown betrayed a net-short book from the CASH-bounded spot leg undersizing the MARGIN perp, and once the artifact days were stripped the strategy bled to a negative total return on fees and decayed funding. The analyst ruled it a hedge/accounting artifact that fails DSR (0.0), significance, and the holdout (ratio 0.04), with no further reframe available and the viable carry already captured by advanced siblings. It ended at the attempt limit as abandoned, reaching optimization and analysis but never risk review.

EthDualTimeframeMomentumConfluenceLS was the closest the run came to a second survivor — a faithful port of the BTC dual-TF momentum survivor onto ETH as an honest generalization test, with short capability to earn in down-regimes rather than bleed bull beta. Its backtest was outstanding (+1219%, Sharpe 1.04, alpha 0.27, positive every year including the 2022 bear), it earned two optimization attempts, and an over-leverage fix cleared every direct overfit gate (PBO 0.28, holdout 0.761, all OOS windows positive, DSR up from 0.04 to 0.758). But on the terminal attempt deflated Sharpe stalled at 0.758 versus the 0.95 requirement — a structural ceiling imposed by ETH's fat tails at a realistic ~1.3 Sharpe. The analyst abandoned it at the ANALYZING stage: the generalization was real, but after multiple-testing correction the edge was not distinguishable from noise, leaving the original BTC 4H+1D as the family's only survivor.

EthCoinMDualTimeframeMomentumConfluenceLS faithfully reproduced the factory's one proven survivor mechanism — 4H/1D momentum confluence, flat on disagreement, ATR-trailing exit — long-short on the ETH coin-margined inverse perp, wagering that the venue's ~0.06% round-trip fee would let the edge survive. The base backtest cleared the COIN-M viability floor but was thin (Sharpe 0.338, PF 1.119, CI straddling zero), so the analyst approved it for optimization. The 3-phase run then exposed it decisively: in-sample Sharpe 1.37 reversed to -0.746 out-of-sample, PBO 0.53 and deflated Sharpe 0.087 confirmed best-of-N overfitting, and drawdown ballooned to 38% against a 20% pre-registered cap. It was abandoned after one iteration, with the lower fee unable to rescue a family that had already died repeatedly on this venue.

LinkTakerFlowConfirmedMomentumLS bet that single-name TSMOM whipsaws could be filtered by requiring net taker aggressor flow to agree with the trend sign, on LINK USD-M perps at 4H. The initial backtest cleared the pre-optimization gate (analyst verdict: optimize) with +27.49% and a 0.304% per-trade return — twice the USD-M fee floor — though the analyst already flagged thin profitability and return concentration in 2023. Optimization then made everything worse: return collapsed to +1.26% (and realized closed-trade PnL was actually -$3,126), drawdown doubled to 48.1%, walk-forward OOS Sharpe went to -0.370, PBO hit 0.619 and the 364-day holdout returned -0.653. The analyst abandoned it after one iteration as an overfit mechanism rather than a fee-edge failure, and recommended the Research Lead stop re-instantiating taker aggressor-ratio confirmation as a directional gate on single-name Binance USD-M perps.

This strategy traded classic floor-trader pivot-point bounces both directions on BTC daily, computing support/resistance from the prior bar's HLC and fading tests of those levels. The signal fired cleanly across 688 balanced trades, but it had a real, undistorted negative edge — profit factor 0.87, Sharpe -0.32, -79.3% total return, an 80.6% drawdown with a fat left tail, and losses in most years. The analyst abandoned it at the backtest-review gate on its second iteration, identifying the core flaw as fading a trending asset (the 3% stop catches continuation before the 5% target catches a reversal), a hypothesis-level failure with nothing for optimization to tune toward, so it never advanced to optimization or risk review.

LinkDailyWideRangeBarVolatilityBurstLong introduced a structurally novel trigger to the portfolio — Crabel's Wide Range Bar, the only total-bar-range volatility-expansion signal in the book — applied to the underutilized LINK on its reliable daily path, on the thesis that a wide bullish bar in an uptrend signals momentum initiation. The implementation was clean, but over an adequate 60-trade sample the signal carried no continuation edge: a 35% win rate, a 0.921 profit factor, negative expectancy, and a flat ~0.71% return across 6.4 years, negative in four of six. The reviewer abandoned it pre-optimization, concluding the wide bullish bar gets faded as often as it follows through and that no parameter tuning can make a non-predictive signal predictive. The lesson logged: single-bar range/volatility-expansion patterns on daily alt majors join the candle-geometry and inside-bar-cluster families as low-win-rate triggers without a continuation edge.

LinkDailyMultiWeekTrendContinuationLong aimed to ride multi-week LINK uptrends with a minimal breakout-plus-SMA entry and an ATR trailing stop, deliberately using only three parameters to keep the overfitting surface small. In backtesting it executed 85 clean long entries with no min-notional or cash-short drops, but the mechanism had no edge: profit factor 0.757, Sharpe -1.17, a 78.2% max drawdown, and an unfavorable win profile where average losses exceeded average wins at a 44.7% win rate. The seemingly positive 75.7% total return was exposed as un-exited open MTM, while avg_position_pct of 567% showed leverage ballooning far above the intended ~1.2x as equity drew down. The analyst abandoned it at the backtest-review gate after 4 iterations — declining to spend hours optimizing a fundamentally edgeless, blow-up-prone strategy that matched a recurring single-asset daily trend-following failure pattern seen in sibling hypotheses this session.

This strategy aimed for a simple, whipsaw-resistant daily trend follower on LTC, using a continuous 50-day channel-position signal for two-sided entries and ATR volatility targeting to stabilize risk. The mechanism fired cleanly across 401 balanced trades with textbook-clean sizing (12.7% exposure, 28% drawdown), but it had a genuinely negative edge — profit factor 0.70, Sharpe -1.52 with the whole CI below zero, -24.3% total return, and losses in every year but 2020. The analyst abandoned it at the backtest-review gate on the first iteration, identifying a fatal payoff structure (avg win ≈ avg loss at a 41.4% win rate, with ~1-day holds cutting winners short) as a hypothesis-level failure with nothing for optimization to rescue, so it never advanced to optimization or risk review.

AaveBinanceDualTimeframeMomentumConfluenceLS extended the ADA-validated confluence recipe into the DeFi sector, and AAVE fit the winning profile well: +210%, Sharpe 1.01, PF 1.82, a 7.6% drawdown, low kurtosis 6.77, positive every year including the 2022 bear, and $85M capacity — clearly in the clean-trending class unlike the SOL/AVAX/DOT/ATOM/ETC laggards. That earned it a full optimization, but the run showed the family's recurring overfit signature: deflated Sharpe 0.882 (indistinguishable from best-of-N noise), a hard holdout failure (ratio 0.326), and a parameter cliff. The analyst abandoned it at the ANALYZING stage, noting the identical mechanism has now failed on every asset beyond BTC — a momentum_confluence_overfit pattern; it reached optimization and analysis but not risk review or promotion.

This strategy introduced a new mechanism class — volatility regime change — entering LINK long when ATR expanded sharply alongside a bullish bar, a new 5-bar high, and an uptrend filter, on the thesis that LINK's narrative-driven vol spikes carry directional continuation. The 4-condition confluence fired correctly across 45 trades, but it had a clearly negative edge: profit factor 0.61, Sharpe -3.30, -28.2% total return, and losses in every year except 2024, with a doubly-adverse profile of a 44.4% win rate and average wins below average losses. The analyst abandoned it at the backtest-review gate on its second iteration, concluding the vol-expansion-continuation premise fails on this instrument (it buys climactic breakouts that mean-revert) and that the thin 45-trade sample left nothing to optimize, so it never advanced to optimization or risk review.

This strategy set out to exploit a documented pattern of US-session institutional flow reversing large Asian-session retail moves, trading BTCUSDT 4H long and short with pure OHLCV time-of-day signals to fill under-represented long-short and session-based portfolio buckets. The implementation was sound — 498 balanced trades, no pipeline drops — but the economics were not: it lost -73.7% with a -1.66 Sharpe (full CI below zero), a 0.73 profit factor, and losses in six of seven years, with fees eating 18.5% of gross. The analyst abandoned it at the pre-optimization backtest-review gate, judging the contrarian session-flow edge simply nonexistent rather than a fixable sign or parameter issue. Optimization, analyst promotion review, and risk review were never reached; the premise, not the code, was the failure.

This strategy proposed an execution-cost thesis rather than a new signal: an ADX-regime-gated z-score mean-reversion fade on the BTC COIN-M inverse perpetual, arguing that COIN-M's 0.06% round-trip fee would make a marginal MR edge viable where USD-M's 0.10% could not. After three prior iterations spent fixing sizing/liquidation code defects (this run finally traded cleanly with no blow-up, max drawdown 9.8%), the backtest over 230 trades and 2109 days revealed the fatal flaw: avg_trade_return_pct was -0.058%, a negative gross edge, with PF 0.95, total_return -7.06% and Sharpe -0.37. The analyst abandoned it at the backtest-review gate before optimization, since no amount of tuning can manufacture positive expectancy that the near-frictionless-fee version already fails to reveal. The regime filter, meant to be the distinguishing edge, produced losses across all three volatility terciles, confirming the strategy belonged to the single-name fade/reversion graveyard.

ADASequentialHigherLowBreakoutLong adapted the analyst-validated two-bar higher-high breakout onto LOWS, entering when a rising-support staircase of 3+ higher lows resolved into a Donchian-high breakout in an uptrend, capturing stealthy accumulation rather than momentum acceleration. Its base backtest looked like the session's strongest candidate — Sharpe 1.81, profit factor 1.44, positive in 6 of 7 years including the 2022 bear, low kurtosis, an 8.8% max drawdown, and a Sharpe CI clear of zero — earning an 'optimize' verdict. But optimization exposed the same fragility as its abandoned higher-high sibling: the walk-forward was overfit (IS 3.40 → OOS 0.07), it failed deflated Sharpe (DSR 0.035, optimized 1.575 below the 2.85 luck bar), and the untouched forward holdout was negative (-0.475). On the second and final iteration, with the binding failure being forward non-generalization rather than a tunable region, the analyst abandoned it, concluding that a clean base and sensitivity grid cannot rescue a strategy that loses money out-of-sample once deflation and a time-ordered holdout are applied.

This strategy applied canonical long-only daily TSMOM to SOL on Hyperliquid, explicitly engineered to dodge the prior ADA 4H optimization collapses by switching timeframe, instrument, and venue, and notably with clean sizing (123% ≈ intended 120%, no over-exposure defect). Its headline looked promising (+77.4%, Sharpe 1.18, Sortino 17.7), but the entire edge came from a single suspected-bad daily bar on 2024-04-17 showing an impossible +459% return, with every other year losing and unmistakable artifact signatures (skew 9.67, kurtosis 95, 730% vol, -7.88 Sharpe CI low, 14.7% win rate). The analyst abandoned it at the backtest-review gate on its second iteration as a data artifact rather than a real edge — recommending the data team verify the 2024-04-17 HL SOL OHLC — and noted the ~3-year/34-trade sample was too thin to validate anyway, so it never advanced to optimization or risk review.

BtcCmUsdmFundingSpreadCarryNeutral tried to monetize the structural funding gap between Binance's coin-margined and USDT-margined BTC perpetuals as a delta-neutral, market-neutral carry trade, reframed after prior absolute-carry books decayed. The mechanism worked as designed — funding was credited, both legs traded, and the book was genuinely neutral (beta -0.01) — but over six years it earned nothing net of costs: profit factor 1.0013, -1.39% total return, Sharpe 0.039, and $2.57 expectancy per trade against a ~0.06% CM fee floor, with impact eating 89% of gross and capacity capped near $125k. By iteration 6 the developer had already lowered the entry band to the 1e-6 noise floor just to generate trades, confirming the spread was real but far too small to clear its own costs. The analyst abandoned it, noting that a venue-mechanics differential inherits the same fatal economics as absolute-carry once fees and impact apply, and that filling under-weight buckets does not rescue a phantom edge.

This strategy aimed to buy pullback exhaustion on ADA 4H — entering the first bullish bar after a 3+ down-close streak while price held above its 100-SMA — explicitly betting that pullback-reversals would thrive in the 2025+ low-vol regime where breakouts had decayed. It was implemented correctly over 172 trades but was decisively negative-EV: profit factor 0.79, Sharpe -0.98, -70.5% return, a 72.7% drawdown, losing in six of seven years. The analyst abandoned it at the backtest-review gate on its second iteration, finding the premise refuted (2025 and 2026 were the worst years), the entry catches falling knives the SMA filter misses, and — unlike a sibling with a hidden positive edge — there was no artifact to recover, so it never advanced to optimization or risk review.

This ETH daily long-short momentum strategy aimed to fix the deep drawdowns of prior trend runs by scaling exposure inversely to realized volatility, hard-capped at 1.5x leverage. It traded cleanly through 7 iterations (the last several resolving a recurring Layer-3 wall-clock timeout) and passed the pre-optimization gate with an 'optimize' verdict despite a weak 0.33 base Sharpe. Optimization did improve the stated objective — max drawdown fell from 59.4% to 42.9% and profit factor rose to 3.15 — but the underlying Sharpe (0.46) stayed far below the 225-trial luck bar of 1.09, with a deflated Sharpe of 0.0, PBO of 0.65, an overfit walk-forward, and a negative information ratio versus buy-and-hold ETH. The analyst abandoned it as overfitting-to-search on a fine target rather than a genuine mechanism, since the vol-targeting overlay delivered risk cosmetics but no forward-generalizing edge.