Working notes
from the desk.
Methodology, backtests, and risk philosophy from the Koryu research desk. New material every few days. No paywall, no email gate, no preface about why you should subscribe. Just the work.
73 notes
The crypto bear market timeline: show me your 2022. The rest is weather.
Crypto's most instructive bear market in four acts: the macro turn, Terra, the contagion summer, FTX. What 2022 did to leverage and track records.
AltSignals review: legit is a floor, not a verdict.
Running since 2017, monthly results published, products near $100 a month: real credit, and the gap between legit and verifiable, examined. Re-checked Oct 2026.
The relative strength vs BTC ratio: strong in dollars, weak against the tide.
The ratio chart that separates leadership from tide: four relative-strength readings, the strongest-corpse trap, and how the board reads it.
Are AI crypto trading bots legit? Pass the questions, any model. Fail them, no label helps.
What learning systems really do in markets, why crypto is hostile to them, the AI-washing taxonomy, and four separating questions that never mention AI.
VWAP in crypto, explained: average price since when? The anchor is the answer.
The crowd's average price, weighted by a statistic this market manufactures: the anchoring problem, execution vs signal uses, and regime dependence.
Probability of backtest overfitting (PBO): how much of the backtest is the act of choosing it?
Given every variant you tried, how likely is your winner just the luckiest? The CSCV method, our equity audit (128 trials, PBO 2.6%), and the crypto gate.
How to read a crypto candlestick chart: minutes of the meeting, not the next one's agenda.
OHLC anatomy, why equity gap playbooks fail in a gapless market, wicks as cascade footprints, the missing tape, and a verdict on pattern folklore.
Crypto market cycle phases, explained: the wheel is real. Its edges only show backwards.
The four phases mapped onto 2015-2026, the mechanics that turn the wheel, measurable phase signatures, and the honest limits of a broken script.
Crypto breakout volume confirmation. Volume confirmed by whom?
Participation as evidence from the market's most manufactured statistic: relative volume, trusted venues, dollar terms, and cross-venue agreement.
Crypto moving averages explained: a ruler laid on the past. Don't ask it for the future.
Smoothing filters on an invented close: calendar vs trading-day divergence, MAs as regime definition, and exactly how the monitor and dial use them.
Backtest the point-in-time universe. Not the one in your download.
Which assets qualified on each date, using only what was knowable then: why current-list backtests simulate a fiction, and what point-in-time requires.
Crypto slippage explained: paper fills at the print. You fill down the book.
Spread, impact and timing decomposed, a thin order book walked step by step, why slippage explodes at stops and in stress, and what backtests must disclose.
Crypto correlation goes to one: a hundred tickers. One position, honestly counted.
The asymmetry that voids diversification: dispersion in uptrends, correlation-one in stress, four positions that were one bet, and the dial's two faces.
Dollar volume in crypto, explained: the chart said buy. The book said how much.
Value traded, not tokens counted: why medians beat means, the printed-volume-vs-book-depth distinction, and why liquidity is a momentum problem at the exit.
Why your crypto stop loss keeps getting hit: the range visited. The close disowned it.
Why your stop loss keeps getting hit: intrabar wicks collect equity-calibrated stops without informing the thesis. The wick factories and tight-stop economics.
Alpha vs beta in crypto, explained: the tide moved the boat. Invoice says seamanship.
One regression strips the costume: beta as the tide of BTC exposure, alpha as what remains, and negative alpha hiding inside spectacular bull returns.
Does momentum work in crypto? Winners keep winning, until the regime snaps.
The premier anomaly's pedigree from Jegadeesh-Titman on, the crypto momentum evidence, the behavioral mechanisms, and the crash regime to respect.
Not your keys, your creditor's claim number.
An exchange balance is a company's promise; bankruptcy makes it an unsecured claim. The FTX sequence, proof-of-reserves and its limits, segmentation habits.
Proof of process, never proof of profit.
The evidence ladder from backtest to audited live, what attested paper trading proves about a track record, the fills and capital gaps, and the 8-week gate.
The ruler bent. Every measurement moved.
When the quote asset breaks, every pair priced in it prints a phantom move: depeg mechanics, the UST and USDC episodes, and contaminated backtests.
Rare, late-cycle, and measurable. Insist on the third property.
A computable definition of the market's most yearned-for phrase, history against the ruler, the three preconditions, and the cost of waiting for one.
There is no cash here. Only cash-shaped tokens.
The dollar-shaped tokens under the market: three collateral designs, their distinct failure modes, and why risk-off in crypto is itself a position.
Secret sauce protects the pricing, rarely the edge.
What secrecy protects, why a published trading method doesn't decay with adoption, the index-provider precedent, and the one boundary we keep, with an expiry.
One of these you own. The other owns a piece of you.
Spot ownership vs margined, funded, liquidatable perpetuals: why perp volume dominates the tape, and the three costs the screenshot leaves out.
The ladder is real. The timetable never was.
The alt-rotation folklore is half true: the liquidity-ladder mechanism, where the script breaks, the 2024-2025 dominance era, and a measurable alternative.
The chart shows demand. The schedule shows supply.
Vesting cliffs, linear unlocks, continuous emissions: how scheduled token supply reaches the market, what unlocks reliably do, and the calendar's value.
Same daily behavior, different year. Check the calendar.
The calendar hiding inside volatility, Sharpe and drawdown figures, three traps when comparing crypto and equity statistics, and the conventions we pin.
Compute where the cliff is. Then stand well back.
The growth-optimal bet size and its violence: the Kelly formula, 50/50 odds of halving at full Kelly, zero growth at double, and why fractional is sane.
Trends digest their levels. Ranges recycle them.
Ranges recycle the levels trends digest: the meat-grinder arithmetic, why chop-sensitivity is an exit-design property, and what one regime gate changed.
We found a way to make the short work. Our own validation gate told us to slow down.
The short side of our candidate strategy had a drawdown problem. How patience and profit-taking fixed it, and why our validation gate still withheld approval.
Survival first. Compounding is for the survivors.
The probability the game ends: ruin as an absorbing state, streak arithmetic at 1/2/5/10% risk, why losing streaks are scheduled, crypto's accelerants.
The curve looks magnificent. That was the selection criterion.
Memory versus understanding, the five amplifiers that make crypto the easiest market to fool yourself in, the trial-count arithmetic, and the plateau principle.
Up 50, down 50 is down 25.
The gap between average and compounded returns: the half-sigma-squared rule, a fair coin losing 69% a year, and leveraged decay at crypto volatility.
Everyone can see the average. Almost no one can follow it.
The moving-average family on Bitcoin: the 2022 dodge, the whipsaw invoice nobody advertises, why the effect survives being public, and its honest limits.
Risk is losing money, not making it irregularly.
Sharpe with a fairer denominator: downside deviation only. Why right-skewed momentum profiles deserve it, and how the Sharpe/Sortino gap detects skew.
Tune on one era. Grade on one it never saw.
Why full-window optimization takes the exam with the answer key, the holdout and walk-forward designs, what validation costs, and our pre-registered split.
Return per unit of risk, flattered by the calendar.
Return per unit of risk, and the 20% flattery crypto's 365-day calendar adds to every annualized Sharpe: the definition, failure modes, and our deflation.
Outside the noise, inside the disaster: crypto redraws both lines.
Why equity stop geometry gets destroyed on crypto, the liquidation cascades behind the wicks, the layered design space, and the no-gap gift that offsets it.
We went looking for an edge in picking coins. The data kept pointing at the regime.
We searched hard for a coin-picking edge in crypto. On data that includes the dead coins, one decision kept paying: whether to be in the market at all.
How far does it actually move? One number answers it.
Average True Range from zero: Wilder's formula, why 24/7 trading shrinks true range, percentage ATR, and its three jobs: stops, sizing, and regime.
Every ranking hides its biggest call in the guest list.
The monitor and research universes, every inclusion rule with its reason, the ledger for rebrands and delistings, and why public criteria resist gaming.
The short now respects one more thing: priced-in panic.
Strategy v2.3 adds one clause: the short book stands down when Bitcoin implied volatility hits its capitulation zone. The rule, the untuned threshold, the test.
Three majors up, eighty alts bleeding: breadth is how you know.
The share of the board actually participating: the standard breadth measures, why breadth matters doubly in a one-factor market, and our dial's input.
Three out of four fail. The mechanics explain which.
The order-book mechanics of a crypto breakout, who sells into it, the 25% base rate from our five-year test, and the four ways breakouts die.
Fix the loss first. The position is just division.
Risk-first position sizing with a worked example: why volatility shrinks size, the portfolio-heat trap when correlations hit one, and survival arithmetic.
Price needs capital to move. Volume just needs a printer.
Why reported crypto volume lies more than anywhere, the landmark evidence, four detection heuristics anyone can apply, and how our pipeline mitigates it.
Equities have industries. Tokens have stories.
Equities have industries; tokens have stories. The working crypto sector taxonomy, what membership predicts, the diversification illusion, the fine print.
Half the audit came back clean. We published the other half too.
PBO, deflated Sharpe, and a survivorship bound aimed at our own flagship: selection came back clean, the universe did not, and the report became our rules.
The backtest says 773x. That is why we don't trust it yet.
Our candidate crypto strategy backtests at 773x with the bear years flipped to gains. The full evidence, the bug we caught, and why it runs in shadow, not live.
A dozen ideas went in. One seatbelt came out.
We ran every idea through a fixed validation battery: social attention, alt rotation, mean-reversion, vol sizing. One survived: a funding-crowding risk filter.
A real mechanism, a real correlation, and a sample of four.
A real mechanism, a real correlation, a sample of four: the halving supply-shock theory stated fairly, the confounders, and the post-ETF divergence.
We ran our stock engine on crypto. It lost. Here is the anatomy.
We ran a validated US-equity breakout strategy on five years of crypto bars, zero re-tuning, and published the losing backtest: what failed and what carried.
The coins that aren't there are the whole story.
Exchange APIs only remember the living. How many coins die, what the graveyard does to crypto backtests, and the point-in-time universe rules we commit to.
Every number on the board, recomputable by you.
The full public specification of the daily board: universe rules, every column's formula, the 4-hour refresh, and why nothing on it is a proprietary score.
The market has weather. This is our barometer, in full.
One fixed formula for crypto market regime: the BTC trend stack plus top-100 breadth, its three states, the evidence behind it, and its honest failure modes.
What the market is doing, never what you should do.
The design decision behind the site, and the line between analytics and advice: published measurements now, predictive claims only after pre-registered gates.
Screenshots ask for trust. Hashes make it unnecessary.
How cryptographic commitments make a published record tamper-evident: the hash chain, Bitcoin timestamps, what it proves, and how to verify a day yourself.
The feed can be edited. That is the whole review.
The direct answer, the tracked-vs-claimed accuracy gap, the referral economics that make dishonesty structural, and what a legitimate provider must show.
Ninety-five percent accurate, and broke by winter.
The catalogue of accuracy-manufacturing tricks, why win rate is the wrong metric even when honest, and the two-question test that collapses the act.
Seven questions, fifteen minutes, no statistics degree.
A fifteen-minute audit anyone can run: editable history, hidden losses, undefined wins, no bear market, no method, referral economics, the screenshot test.
The tide came in. Everyone learned to swim.
Why bull-phase performance carries almost no information, how crypto amplifies the illusion, and the two tools that recover the signal: benchmarks and winters.
Predictions are the pitch. Discipline is the product.
Predictions decay when sold; risk management compounds and can be proven. What this service is for: the mission, the economics, and four concrete artifacts.
Four guardians hold the directions. The fifth holds the ground.
The origin story in the four-guardians mythology: an equity house of four beasts, the fifth position at the center, and the transplant that carried the system.
A real catalogue, an unfalsifiable oracle.
The largest AI crypto ratings platform, reviewed on verifiability: the product, which claims can be checked, the seven-checks scorecard, and who it suits.
Ranked by proof, not by promises.
Every kind of crypto signal service, ranked by whether its claims can be verified: copy trading, analytics, AI ratings, Telegram groups, measurement boards.
The records are real. The leaderboard still lies.
Venue-verified records make copy trading the most honest signal category, yet leaderboards still mislead: survivorship, capital-arrival curse, execution drag.
The anomaly is real. The industry mostly isn't.
The anomalies are real; the industry mostly is not. Four structural leaks between a genuine edge and a subscriber's account, and when a signal can work.
Ninety percent of the dashboard, for exactly zero dollars.
The free screening stack that covers most of what paid dashboards sell: aggregators, charting screeners, exchange tools, on-chain tiers, measurement boards.
A fine thermometer, a terrible oracle.
One division, two distortions: the stablecoin denominator problem, summed market caps, what dominance readings have accompanied, and the joint read.
The chart shows the market cap. The obligation is the FDV.
Market cap vs FDV: the low-float worked example, unlock cliffs and emission drips, the float-ratio habit, and why momentum screens attract this failure.
A poll where every respondent pays to vote.
The mechanism that anchors perpetuals to spot, the annualized arithmetic that makes 0.01% expensive, and funding as a paid poll of positioning.
No news behind the candle. Just leverage meeting thin bids.
The forced-selling chain reaction behind crypto's newsless crashes: the mechanics, why this market breeds them, famous episodes, and how to read one.
The drawdown is the result. The return is the compensation.
BTC has lost three quarters of its value twice in a decade; alt drawdowns start at 90%. The base rates, the recovery curve, and what depth does to decisions.