Blog

Long-form notes from the research lab.

Methodology pieces, fee-drag findings, calibration retrospectives, and whatever else the data shows. Posts include the negative results, by design. RSS.

• May 1, 2026·6 min read·walk-forward, parameter-search, take-profit, postmortem, methodology

  Same entry, four take-profits: how a 4% target turned a profitable signal into 0/8

  We had four sibling strategies with identical entries and only the take-profit changed. Three were profitable in forward test. The fourth went 0 for 8 with every exit on the timeout. Here's what the data showed and why our parameter search should have refused to generate that variant.

• Apr 30, 2026·12 min read·backtesting, fee drag, paper trading, methodology

  I paper-traded 22 popular crypto strategies on real fees for 10 days. 16 of them lost money. Here's the data.

  Across 26,765 paper trades, the average per-trade P&L is -0.078% and cumulative is -2,081%. The 6 strategies that survive are all in one indicator family. The 16 that don't share another pattern. Real-fee data, not zero-fee marketing numbers.