Home / Ideas / Time-Series Momentum / Trend Filter on Crypto Majors
Time-Series Momentum / Trend Filter on Crypto Majors
ride persistent trends, sit out chop
Crypto TSMOM is one of the best-documented crypto anomalies. Huang/Sangiorgi/Urquhart (2024, SSRN) report a volume-weighted TSMOM winner-minus-loser gross Sharpe of 2.17; Zarattini/Pagani/Barbon and volatility-adaptive Donchian ensembles report Sharpe > 1.5 with ~10% alpha over buy-and-hold BTC. A trend/regime filter is exactly the tool for the current directionless-to-bearish tape (BTC ~$62k, >50% below the Oct-2025 high).
Why it's relevant now
BTC has round-tripped from $126k to the low-$60ks in a choppy, macro-driven 2026; a long/flat trend rule sidesteps the drawdown that buy-and-hold suffered while staying long when trends resume.
Universe
BTC-USD, ETH-USD, SOL-USD (yfinance daily OHLCV). Optionally add IBIT/ETHA as regular-hours proxies.
How it works
Long when price is above its N-day breakout / moving average (e.g. 50/100-day Donchian or 100-day MA), flat/short otherwise; position sized inversely to trailing realized volatility (vol targeting).
Expected performance
Research-derived Sharpe estimate: 0.6–1.3. papers 1.5–2.4 gross; applied ~25% realism discount plus crowding/decay haircut).
Backtest this idea with SignalChain
This is a research lead — not a finished backtest. SignalChain takes an idea like this and runs the whole pipeline inside Claude Code: it researches the concept against academic and practitioner sources, sets benchmarks, writes and lints a VectorBT backtest, runs it, and grades the result PASS/FAIL. One command:
/signalchain Time-series trend-following on BTC-USD, ETH-USD, SOL-USD: long when price above 100-day breakout, flat otherwise, volatility-targeted sizing.
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Research & sources
- papers.ssrn.com — papers.ssrn.com
- papers.ssrn.com — papers.ssrn.com
- arxiv.org — arxiv.org
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Not financial advice. This page describes a research idea, not a recommendation. Any performance figures are hypothetical, research-derived estimates and are not indicative of future results. SignalChain is a research and educational tool; you are solely responsible for any decisions you make.