8 years of Bitcoin data taught me more than any trading book
What happens when you backtest every popular trading strategy against real market data. Spoiler: most of them don't work.
Series: CRYPTOBACKTEST B.LOG
- 1. Ship Week Diaries: How v8.5 Turned into a Product Identity Rewrite
- 2. 8 years of Bitcoin data taught me more than any trading book ← you are here
- 3. The Mobile Menu Trilogy: One Button, Three Fixes, Mild Emotional Damage
- 4. The i18n + SEO Cleanup Chronicles: Canonical Chaos, hreflang Therapy, and Other Adventures
The premise
Every crypto influencer has a "proven" trading strategy. RSI crossovers, MACD divergences, Bollinger Band squeezes — the technical analysis world is full of confident claims.
I wanted to test them. All of them. Against real data.
The data
CryptoBacktest uses 8+ years of Bitcoin price data from Binance. That's over 70,000 hourly candles — enough data to test any strategy across multiple market conditions: bull runs, bear markets, sideways chop, and black swan events.
What I found
The results were humbling:
- Most popular strategies underperform buy-and-hold over long periods
- The strategies that "work" are heavily dependent on parameter tuning — and the optimal parameters change over time
- DCA (Dollar Cost Averaging) outperforms almost everything for non-professional traders
- Combining indicators helps, but not as much as you'd think
The DCA revelation
The most powerful insight from building this tool wasn't about complex strategies. It was about the simplest one.
Dollar Cost Averaging — buying a fixed amount at regular intervals regardless of price — beat 73% of the technical strategies I tested over 5+ year periods.
Not because it's clever. Because it's consistent. It removes the human element — the fear, the greed, the "I'll wait for a dip" that turns into "I'll wait for a bigger dip" that turns into "I missed the entire rally."
What AI added
The Strategy Lab feature uses AI to analyze your backtesting results and suggest modifications. It's not generating alpha — it's helping you understand why your strategy performed the way it did.
"Your strategy underperformed during the March 2024 consolidation because the RSI never reached your oversold threshold. Consider adjusting from 30 to 35 for range-bound markets."
That kind of feedback, generated from your actual data, is genuinely useful.
The meta-lesson
Building CryptoBacktest taught me that the best tool isn't always the most sophisticated one. Sometimes the best tool is the one that shows you the truth — even when the truth is boring.
DCA isn't exciting. It doesn't make for good YouTube thumbnails. But it works.