Trend
The direction a price has been moving in for weeks or months, not today. A trend is up while each dip stops higher than the last one.
Start here
If you have never run a system like this
No experience is assumed on this page. It covers the words the rest of the site uses, how to start, the ordinary ways people turn a mechanical system into a discretionary one without noticing, and the size of the loss you have to be able to sit through.
PART 01
The words first
Eight terms that make the rest readable
If you do not follow markets daily, read this block once. Everything after it uses these words.
Major
The biggest coin of the moment, either Bitcoin or Ethereum. The system picks one of the two and calls it the major.
Mid cap
A smaller coin: SOL, BNB, SUI, XRP, DOGE or HYPE. They can rise faster than the major and they can fall harder. SOL and BNB are treated as core here, the other four as satellites with a tighter limit.
Score
One number between minus one and plus one that summarises a market’s trend. Above zero means up, below zero means down.
Ratio
One coin measured against another instead of against the dollar. SOL against BTC rising means SOL is beating BTC, even on a day when both fall in dollars.
Floor
The slice of the book that always stays in the major. At a 33.33% floor, a third is locked there and at most two thirds can go to smaller coins.
Open and close
The daily candle. It opens at 00:00 UTC and closes 24 hours later at the next 00:00 UTC. A close is final. Anything before it can still change.
Drawdown
How far the account fell from its own high point before recovering. A 65% drawdown means $100,000 was worth $35,000 on the way through.
PART 02
Getting in
How to enter for the first time
There is no special entry procedure. The system is always fully allocated to something, so starting simply means catching up to wherever it already is. You do not wait for a signal to flip, because the same test runs every single day and today's answer is as valid as any future one.
- 01
Decide the amount, once
Pick the figure you are running the system with and treat it as fixed. Adding money later is fine, but decide it away from the screen and never on a day when something just moved.
- 02
Wait for the next 00:00 UTC
Do not enter in the middle of a day because you happened to finish reading this. The first action lands on a close like every other action.
- 03
Read the ladder from the closed day
Question one, then two, then three or four. Write down the answer as a list of target percentages before you look at any price.
- 04
Convert to money and place the orders
Multiply each target percentage by your amount. Place every order at the open. If the target is 100% cash, then cash is the position and you have entered correctly by doing nothing.
- 05
Write the day down
Date, what each leg scored, what you held, what you traded and at what price. The log is what lets you tell a bad run apart from a broken system three months from now.
- 06
Come back in 24 hours
From here it is the same five steps every day, and on most days step four is empty.
Should you go in all at once?
The rules have no opinion on this, so it is your call and it is a real trade-off. Entering in one go is what a tested result assumes, and it is the only version where your experience matches the numbers. Spreading the same amount over four or six weekly entries cuts the chance that your first month is defined by one unlucky day, and it also gives up return whenever the trend simply continues.
Neither is wrong. What is wrong is starting to phase in and then abandoning the schedule because the first entry went badly, which converts a plan into a mood.
One honest warning about timing. If you start on a day when the book is fully in a coin that has already run for months, the first thing you may experience is a drawdown, because the system holds a trend until it breaks and you arrived late in one. That is normal behaviour and not a malfunction.
PART 03
Where it goes wrong
The mistakes that cost real money
None of these are exotic. They are the ordinary ways a person turns a mechanical system into a discretionary one without noticing.
What people do
- Check the score at lunchtime and trade on it
- Skip a signal because the move looks too extended
- Hold a coin that dropped out because it is down and they want to get back to break even
- Add money on a green day and stop looking on a red one
- Trade every day to fix a 0.3% drift
- Change the floor after a bad month
What the rule says
- Only the 00:00 UTC close counts, everything else is noise
- Every signal or none, the system has no opinion on how far a move has gone
- Your entry price is not an input anywhere in this system
- The amount is decided once, away from the screen
- Under 2% of the book it is not worth the fee
- Settings change after research, not after a feeling
The last one is worth sitting with. If you move the floor down after a flat stretch and up after a scary one, you have built a machine that buys high and sells low and given it a rulebook to hide behind.
PART 04
What to expect
The number you have to be able to live with
Crypto trend systems, this one included, go through falls of well over half the account. Not as a freak day, but as a slow grind lasting a year or more, with the account below its old high the entire time.
Translate it before you start. A 65% fall on $100,000 is watching the screen say $35,000 for months. On $500,000 it is $175,000. The question is not whether you would enjoy it, nobody does. The question is whether you would still place the orders on the morning it hits the bottom, because the recovery only belongs to people who were still there. If the honest answer is no, the fix is to run a smaller amount, not to run the same amount and hope.
Two more expectations worth setting. Most days are boring. The typical day is a glance at a closed candle and no trade at all. And the system will be wrong regularly. It gets chopped up in sideways markets and buys back in a few percent above where it sold, several times a year.
Be honest about the numbers
No performance figures are published here yet
The allocation rules changed recently and the testing has not been re-run against the current version. Rather than publish a figure produced under different settings, this site publishes none until the work is finished and checked.
When it does appear it will carry its assumptions in the open: the fees and funding charged, the rebalancing frequency, and the fact that the coins in the list are partly there because they survived.