Strategies

This strategy was the BTC leg of a multi-week trend-continuation triad, directly analogous to the already-landed LINK version and a recently-submitted ETH sibling, using a simple 3-parameter breakout-plus-SMA entry and an ATR trailing exit on pure daily OHLCV. Its base backtest passed the pre-optimization gate on headline strength (862.7% return, profit factor 2.20, alpha +0.169), but reviewers flagged severe outlier dependence — return kurtosis 431.9, a 2021 that returned +395%, and ~189.5% of the total sitting in an open MTM position. Optimization confirmed the concern: the best-of-225 config carried a deflated Sharpe of just 0.0512 with its Sharpe below the multiple-testing luck bar, a PBO of 0.83, a failed holdout (ratio 0.403), and a negative information ratio against buy-hold, with the refit flat-to-negative every year after 2021. After two iterations the analyst abandoned it, recording that inheriting a proven mechanism does not confer forward-generalizing edge on a different instrument.

This was iteration 3 of a long-short dual-timeframe momentum strategy on LTC USD-M perp, differentiated from its dead predecessors by a Kaufman Efficiency Ratio gate meant to admit only clean, straight-line trends and reject fee-eating chop. Over a fair 394-trade, 6.7-year backtest it lost 29.5% with a Sharpe of -0.20, profit factor 0.76, and a per-trade return of -0.237% — negative before costs, since commissions were only 5.76% of gross. The backtest reviewer judged the ER-gated premise falsified on LTC and abandoned it before optimization, as curve-fitting a signal that is negative gross could not produce an edge. It ends as another casualty of the single-name dual-TF momentum-confluence clone family (BNB x2, XRP, DOT, SOL, LINK) that has repeatedly failed in this factory.

This strategy was a deliberate pivot away from the dead single-name crypto momentum family: a long-only cross-asset dual-momentum rotation across SPY/QQQ/GLD with a TLT defensive leg, chosen because its monthly, low-parameter allocation rule carries decades of clean USEQ history. The backtest review approved optimization on the strength of a per-trade edge far above the fee floor (avg_trade_return_pct ~5-6%, PF 3.4-4.8) and a deep multi-regime sample, and the optimized run returned 854.7% (CAGR 11.04%) at Sharpe 0.58. But the analyst abandoned it after optimization: PBO 0.5516 breached the unwaivable 0.5 hard gate, deflated Sharpe was 0.0 with the candidate failing programme-level FDR, lookback_days was a cliff parameter and abs_threshold never bound, and a 30.3% drawdown doubled the equities floor. With the OOS vault flagged underpowered and near-identical siblings already dead three times, the mechanism itself was judged un-validatable, ending the run at the ANALYZING stage.

EthDailyDonchianBreakoutLong ported the validated BTC daily Donchian breakout mechanism onto ETH, cleanly implementing a long-only Turtle breakout that produced 200% total return over 36 trades and earned an 'optimize' verdict at backtest review. Optimization sharpened the in-sample picture — Sharpe 0.64, profit factor 2.11, no sensitivity cliffs, and a non-overfit walk-forward averaging 0.55 OOS — but the forward gates broke it. The holdout collapsed to a negative Sharpe of -2.20 (ratio -4.011), the deflated Sharpe of 0.32 fell below the best-of-225 luck bar, and PBO 0.68 flagged overfitting, all traceable to an edge concentrated in 2021 and decaying to negative in 2022-2026. The analyst abandoned it on its first iteration, noting the same bull-concentrated, holdout-failing signature seen in earlier AVAX/DOGE/ADA breakout siblings.

BtcDeribitWeeklyDebitVerticalDailyTrend aimed to fill the corpus's options and cross-venue gaps by taking the one mechanism that has survived in this factory — daily BTC trend — and packaging it as a defined-risk Deribit weekly debit vertical, with the short leg financing the long leg's theta and max loss capped at the net debit. Across three iterations the author repeatedly cut the leg count (365 days x 6 rungs = 312 legs, then 182 days x 4 rungs = 104 legs) to fit the sandbox budget, even documenting that the trimmed 2-rung ladder would leave the width_atr parameter effectively inert. It still exceeded the 600s Layer-3 wall clock and was abandoned in the verification loop, so no backtest, optimization or analyst verdict was ever produced. The run is a record of an infrastructure ceiling on options-chain backtests rather than a judgement on the trading thesis.

This strategy deliberately pivoted away from the failed momentum-confluence family, betting instead on a volatility-regime mechanism: stand flat during a Bollinger-inside-Keltner coil, then trade the directional expansion out of compression on 4H DOT. The mechanism was implemented cleanly (263 signaled = 263 submitted, balanced long/short, ATR chandelier trail, ~3d18h holds) and trade count stayed bounded, making it a fair test of the premise. But over six years the signal was gross-negative — profit factor 0.9796, size-weighted expectancy -$10.57/trade, realized return about -2.78%, losing in 5 of 7 years — with the calm-regime bleed (-13.9%) overwhelming the stressed-regime edge (+11.6%). The analyst abandoned it at backtest-review before optimization, ruling the vol-compression-squeeze premise on DOT unsupported and unfixable by three parameters; later pipeline stages were never reached.

AvaxFundingExtremeCrowdFadeLS tried to fade the over-leveraged AVAX perp crowd, shorting when trailing-90d funding hit a sustained top-tail extreme and buying the bottom-tail, exiting via ATR stop or time stop. The code faithfully implemented the thesis (309 signaled = 309 submitted, point-in-time funding lookup) and got a decisive 309-trade, ~6-year test, but the result was a losing signal: total_return -10.31%, Sharpe -0.274, profit_factor 0.856, and negative per-trade return of -0.123%. The premise was falsified on the short leg — because AVAX funding is predominantly positive, the top-tail extreme repeatedly shorted a historically up-drifting asset (short_win_rate 0.179), and losses spanned the normal-vol regime and every year 2020–2025. The analyst abandoned it at backtest review as negative-expectancy, since optimization cannot lift an edge that is gross-negative before costs; later stages were not reached.

This strategy was a deliberate pivot away from the dying crypto momentum family toward equity index-ETF regime rotation, extending a surviving SPY<->TLT sibling onto higher-beta QQQ with a split GLD+TLT defensive book. Its full-history backtest passed the pre-optimization gate and the analyst approved it for optimization, but the 3-phase run exposed severe overfitting: in-sample Sharpe reversed out-of-sample, PBO hit 0.65, deflated Sharpe was 0.115, and the optimizer suppressed drawdown only by cutting exposure to ~13%. After one iteration the analyst abandoned it, noting the mechanism loses money in the stressed vol tercile and across 2022 rate-shock windows, and that four near-identical siblings had already died overfit or risk-rejected.

This strategy was a well-engineered, defined-risk bull put spread on Deribit BTC, deliberately designed to sell ~2 DTE puts with a protective long wing and roll every day so it would generate hundreds of observations and escape the 'unmeasurable' data-wall that killed prior weekly/monthly VRP books. The structure worked as intended — wing-first submission, ~2 DTE entries, a 0.92 short-put win rate, +$93.7/trade expectancy and PF 2.54 — but the daily roll never happened: Deribit daily-expiry data simply wasn't in the catalog, so the schedule degenerated to 14 monthly expiries and just 26 spreads. With only 13 effective daily observations and profit concentrated in two big days (PSR 0.64), the analyst abandoned it at backtest review before any optimization, since tuning three parameters cannot enlarge a sample bounded by data availability. It joins a lineage of Deribit VRP books (12, 12, 30 trades) that hit the same wall and is flagged to revive once daily-expiry chain history is collected far enough back.

PreFomcAnnouncementDriftOverlaySpyQqqUseq traded the pre-FOMC announcement drift, going long SPY and QQQ only into the session ahead of each of the 220 scheduled Fed decisions from 1993 to 2026 and staying flat the rest of the time. It reached optimization after four coding iterations (the last of which restored the missing SPY leg and shifted the holding window to sit entirely before the 14:00 ET statement), and the initial backtest earned an 'optimize' verdict on clean hypothesis-matching trades and a viable 0.19% per-trade return. Optimization confirmed the implementation was sound — no parameter cliffs, no overfitting, a positive holdout — but delivered only 0.70% CAGR and a Sharpe of 0.105 whose confidence interval straddled zero and whose deflated Sharpe (0.243) and programme-level FDR test both rejected it. The analyst abandoned it as a magnitude problem rather than a fee or overfitting problem: the drift is measurably front-loaded in 1999-2009, the two parameters offered no tuning path, and at eight events a year incubation would take decades to distinguish the edge from noise.

This strategy applied the factory's durable outright-momentum mechanism to the under-represented LTC COIN-M inverse perpetual, betting that lower round-trip fees would make a daily long-short TSMOM viable. A first iteration was killed by a chandelier trail-lifetime bug under NETTING OMS (677 trades, instant stop-outs, -28.7%); iteration 2 fixed the trail reset and produced a plausible ~23-day-hold cadence of 84 balanced trades. But on the full 6-year history the edge simply wasn't there: +0.31% total return, profit factor 0.916, a Sharpe straddling zero, and a decisively negative avg_trade_return_pct of -0.402% that sat below the COIN-M fee floor. The analyst abandoned it at backtest-review before optimization, concluding it was a sub-1.0-PF trend that dies on fees rather than a single-name daily-TSMOM survivor.

BchDonchianBreakoutTrendFilteredLS was a structurally-distinct, 3-parameter Turtle-style Donchian breakout on BCH 4H, chosen to diversify away from the saturated EMA-momentum family and the corpus's BTC concentration. Its first backtest was statistically indistinguishable from zero, so it passed backtest-review with an 'optimize' verdict on the strength of a fee-clearing per-trade return and a genuinely novel construction. Optimization then exposed the edge as noise: the walk-forward was overfit (IS Sharpe 1.033 collapsing to OOS -0.811), PBO 0.623, deflated Sharpe 0.0, and the unseen holdout returned a negative -0.539 Sharpe. After 2 iterations the analyst abandoned it as an overfit / no-generalization death — the same fate the Donchian channel-breakout mechanism has met repeatedly across BTC, BNB and BCH variants.

This strategy deliberately ported the factory's only empirically-surviving mechanism — volume-confirmed dual-timeframe momentum — onto the under-represented Hyperliquid venue as a single-instrument long/short SOL trade, aiming for genuine venue novelty rather than a Binance re-skin. It cleared the pre-optimization gate (backtest-review verdict 'optimize') with a modest but viable profile: Sharpe 0.516, profit factor 1.235, per-trade edge above the venue cost floor, and a low 17.2% drawdown. Optimization barely moved the headline (Sharpe 0.559) and, crucially, the robustness statistics collapsed: PBO 0.7474 breached the hard 0.5 gate, the deflated Sharpe (0.234) sat below the best-of-N luck bar, and the candidate failed programme-level FDR while losing money in the stressed volatility regime the surge filter was meant to exploit. After one iteration the analyst abandoned it as an overfit, statistically-insignificant Hyperliquid dual-TF momentum port — consistent with the negative class prior of every prior HL dual-TF attempt.

This strategy deliberately pivoted away from the funding-carry and cross-venue-spread ideas that had already died, reusing DOGE's own funding rate purely as a crowd-positioning signal to fade retail extremes with a price-confirmation gate — a clean, cheap-to-backtest single-instrument design that loaded funding correctly and filled the long-short/non-BTC buckets. But the backtest exposed a hollow edge: profit factor 1.012, a negative total return, a 77.2% drawdown, and profitability that vanished once the single 2021-01-31 DOGE squeeze day was removed, leaving a strategy that lost money in every recent year and could only work at trivial scale given 86.7% modeled impact cost. The analyst abandoned it at backtest review as catastrophic and non-repeatable — a single tail event masquerading as an edge in the no-survivor alt-mean-reversion family — rather than spend hours optimizing toward a parameter region that does not exist.

This strategy added a structurally novel dual-positional-dominance mechanism — Dow Theory higher-high-plus-higher-low confirmation — to underutilized ETH daily, gated by a 200-SMA bull filter. It earned an 'optimize' verdict on a functioning but thin edge (104 trades, Sharpe 0.39, +42.6%), though flagged as 2024-concentrated with high impact cost. Optimization confirmed the worry: deflated Sharpe 0.0 against a 5.06 luck bar, walk-forward overfitted with average OOS Sharpe -5.74, a failed holdout, a core-parameter cliff, and a degraded optimized result. The analyst abandoned it at the analyzing stage on its second iteration as a front-loaded edge that dies out-of-sample — no robust region to tune and no promoted sibling to redirect to — so it stopped before risk review.

This was a deliberately minimal inside-bar breakout long on LTC 1H, entering on a compression breakout above the mother-bar high while above the 100-EMA, built simple to avoid verification timeouts. It suffered two simultaneous failures: a catastrophic over-leverage bug where a per-entry-only notional cap and a missing open-position guard let breakouts stack to 713% of equity, producing impossible daily swings that drove the account to zero (-99.9%, 100.68% drawdown), and beneath that no real edge at all — profit factor 0.67, 27.7% win rate, losses every single year. The analyst abandoned it at the backtest-review gate on its second iteration, distinguishing it from sibling trend-continuation strategies whose stacking bug merely distorted a positive edge: here the leverage-invariant PF 0.67 means even correct ≤1x sizing leaves a fee-churning net loser on a known dead pattern, so it never advanced to optimization or risk review.