From idea to tested strategy
Market context, building and testing a strategy without fooling yourself, the risk of a whole portfolio and the habits of people who trade for years.
5 modules · 17 lessons · 65 min
Risk warning
This course is educational and is not investment advice. Trading crypto is highly risky – you can lose all the money you put in. Read the risk warning
Who it is for
People who trade with a plan, keep a journal and want to know whether their strategy actually works – or why it does not.
What you will learn
- Read the market regime, volatility and correlations before you trade
- Turn an idea into exact rules and test them without the common traps
- Judge a strategy by the right metrics and on data it has never seen
- Manage the risk of the whole portfolio and know when to stop
Course outline
Module 1Market context
- 1.Market regimes and volatilityWhy the same strategy works one time and fails the next, how to tell a trend from a range and how to measure volatility with ATR.5 min
- 2.Correlation and Bitcoin dominanceWhy cryptocurrencies move together, how much more altcoins fall than Bitcoin and what that means for choosing trades.3 min
- 3.Cycles and macro without fortune-tellingHalving, interest rates, liquidity and ETFs: what we really know, what is just a story and why three cycles are not statistics.5 min
- 4.Derivatives data as informationFunding, open interest and liquidation cascades: how to read the mood of the leveraged market even if you never trade with leverage.3 min
Module 2Building a strategy
- 5.From idea to rulesHow to turn the feeling that “this might work” into a hypothesis and exact rules that can be tested.3 min
- 6.Types of strategiesTrend following, mean reversion and breakouts: what their results look like, when they work and when they fail.4 min
- 7.Volatility-based entries and exitsA stop-loss and trailing stop from ATR, a position size that adapts to the market, and an honest example of when it did not work out.4 min
Module 3Testing
- 8.The backtest and its trapsHow to test a strategy on history without fooling yourself: look-ahead, survivorship, overfitting and costs.4 min
- 9.Strategy metricsWhy total return is not enough: maximum drawdown, profit factor, the average trade, the number of trades and a comparison with simply holding.3 min
- 10.Out-of-sample testing and walk-forwardHow to test a strategy on data it has never seen, what happened to our “best” setting and how walk-forward works.3 min
- 11.Forward testing and going liveHow to try a strategy in real time without money, when to move to small amounts and by what rule, set in advance, to switch it off.3 min
Module 4Portfolio risk
- 12.Correlated positions are one betWhy three trades on Bitcoin, Ether and Solana are not three different risks, how many independent bets you really have and how to cap the total risk.4 min
- 13.How much to risk: the Kelly criterionWhat the Kelly criterion says about the ideal bet size, why professionals use only a fraction of it and what happens when you overestimate your strategy.5 min
- 14.Drawdown rulesWhat drawdown is normal for your strategy, how to step down risk by rules set in advance, and what such a rule costs and gains – in a simulation.4 min
Module 5Professional habits
- 15.Reviewing your own performanceHow to review your trading honestly once a month: results in R, a comparison with the backtest, execution mistakes and the difference between a good decision and a good result.4 min
- 16.When a strategy stops workingWhy a strategy's edge fades over time, how to tell bad luck from a broken strategy using the number of trades, and what to do once it is clear.4 min
- 17.Sustainable trading and what nextA summary of the course, an honest look at how much time trading costs, how to do it for years without burning out and what to learn next.4 min