Choosing strategies to follow
There's no "best" strategy and no beginner badge on the Strategies page. What you can do is find a few whose past behaviour you understand and could live with, and compare them fairly.
With so many strategies, dozens of them for BTC alone, sorting by Total return and picking the top card is tempting. It's also the least useful way to choose. The top spots mostly go to strategies with the longest history in the fastest-rising market, and the number says nothing about how rough the ride was. The routine below takes ten minutes and tells you far more.
Nothing here is advice on what to buy. Golden Path Strategies shows how rules behaved in the past; whether you follow any of them, and with how much, is your call.
A short routine
- Pick one market. Open Strategies and choose a folder, such as BTC. Comparing a BTC strategy with a gold strategy mostly compares BTC with gold.
- Fix one window. Click 5Y. Now every card covers the same five years, which also tells you how each strategy did in the recent market, not just in BTC's wild early years.
- Sort for calm, not for size. Set Sort by to Max drawdown and Order to Low → high to see the shallowest falls first, or sort by Calmar, which weighs yearly growth against the worst fall.
- Shortlist three or four. Click the scale icon scales icon on each card you like.
- Compare them side by side (see below).
- Open each strategy page. Look at the equity chart against Buy & Hold and scroll the trade list. Do the long flat stretches and the losing trades look like something you could sit through?
The two numbers to read together
CAGR is how fast the account grew per year on average. Max DD is the deepest it fell from a high along the way. Read them as a pair: the second is the price of the first.
| Strategy A | Strategy B | |
|---|---|---|
| CAGR | 30% | 20% |
| Max DD | 55% | 25% |
| At its worst moment | 100 had become 45 | 100 had become 75 |
Neither is better. A grew faster but would have asked you to watch more than half the account disappear, and most people sell at exactly that point. The best strategy for you is one you'd still be following at its worst moment. Drawdown goes deeper.
Count the trades
Most strategies here trade a few times a year, because they decide on five-day bars and wait for real trends. That's by design, but it means every number about trades rests on a small sample. RMSE Envelope Trail - BTCUSD has won all 5 of its trades, a 100% win rate. Five trades is five coin flips that happened to land well, not proof. Strategies on young markets like HYPE and VVV have only two or three trades each, so be extra careful there. See Trade statistics.
Compare them side by side
The compare view puts up to four strategies (or portfolios) on one chart and one table. It works on the free version too.
- Click the scale icon scales icon on a card or a strategy page. As soon as you've added something, a bar appears at the bottom of the screen with its name and a hint to pick one more, up to four.
- That bar is your basket, and it follows you around. It stays in place while you scroll, and it comes along when you move between Strategies, Portfolios and strategy pages, so go back to the folder, or into another one, and click the scales icon on the next strategy. You can add portfolios the same way from the Portfolios page. On About, Pricing and the Docs the bar is hidden, but your picks are kept.
- Once there are two or more, click Compare (2) (or 3, or 4) in the bar. The Compare button in the folder's control row does the same.
[Each pick appears as a chip. The small x removes one, Clear empties the bar, and Compare (2) opens the comparison.]
To get rid of the bar, click Clear, or remove the chips one by one. It stays filled for as long as your browser tab is open, so you can close the comparison, browse a bit more and come back to it.
[Every line restarts at 100 on a shared start date, and the dashed line is Buy & Hold BTCUSD. In the table the best value in each row is bold and coloured.]
The chart restarts every line at 100 from the first date all of them have data, so they're directly comparable. It opens on a log scale, where equal heights mean equal percentage moves; the button at the top right switches to linear. When all picks trade the same market, a dashed Buy & Hold line is added. Below the chart, the table lists the card's twelve numbers with the best value in each row highlighted.
The example shows the trade-count lesson in one picture: RMSE Envelope Trail "wins" Win rate and Worst trade, on 5 trades. Von Lohengramm T7 wins most other rows with 16.
The table shows each strategy's numbers over its own full history, while the chart starts at the shared date. If your picks start in different years, say a BTC strategy from 2015 and an ETH one from later, set the same window on each strategy page before trusting the table. On the free version, everything in the comparison stops at the free cutoff, and a "Free version" row says so.
Watch for overlap
Five BTC trend strategies can be the same bet under five names: they buy and sell at nearly the same moments. On the compare chart, lines that move in lockstep are the warning sign. If you're planning to combine strategies, pick ones that behave differently, and check how alike they are with the Correlation chart on a portfolio board; see Reading the portfolio charts.
Keep your shortlist
Members can bookmark strategies with bookmark icon to keep them at the top of every list, add them to a portfolio, and set an alert so they get an e-mail when a strategy turns Long or Flat. On the free version you can still keep the folder's address, with your filters and window in it, as a browser bookmark.
The honest limit
This routine helps you choose strategies whose past you understand and could stomach. It can't tell you which will do best next. A strategy that fitted the last eleven years beautifully can disappoint in the next three. Overfitting and how we test for it and Risks and limits are worth reading before you act on anything.