What we tested
and killed

A technical entry on hourly candles (momentum, mean-reversion, or a regime-aware blend) can pick BTC turning points often enough to pay for itself after fees and slippage.

At the live risk geometry with crypto perp costs charged, every entry is net-negative on a trustworthy sample. Strip the cost and three of the five turn gross-positive, so the signals are not random. The roughly 0.4% round trip is simply larger than the edge. The single positive costed cell in the full 108-cell edge-map, classic momentum with wide 4R targets on H1, came to 0.03 to 0.05% per trade: real, and too thin to build on. Final verdict: single-asset OHLCV timing has no deployable edge after costs.

If a hidden-Markov model labels the market as trend, volatile, or range in real time, routing each entry only into the regime that suits it recovers an edge the blended signal buries.

The regime model is honest about itself: its states separate volatility, not direction, so there is no trend premium to route toward. On paper the gate fails. The one routed cell with an adequate sample, classic momentum in the trend regime, is negative on all three symbols. Every cell that prints positive is thin, under 30 trades, and the positives disagree across symbols. Not a trustworthy edge.

The one timing edge the literature says survives real cost is slow: hold the daily trend on a 28-day lookback and ride it to the opposite cross. Test it faithfully across ten majors.

The signal-flip config reads +24.92% on average, but two launch-era single-asset flukes carry it. Strip SOL and AVAX and the typical major loses 5.25%. Four of ten symbols are positive, below the six-of-ten bar, and fold stability is 38% with most fold cells too thin to trust. The geometry-exit variants are flatly negative. No configuration clears the deployable bar.

Stop timing price. Harvest the structural funding premium: short the perp, hold the spot, collect the funding, stay delta-neutral. This is the strongest raw crypto edge on record.

The edge is real and low-variance: always-on BTC returns +39.50% over 6.75 unlevered years, with a 0.73% max drawdown and all four folds positive. It fails on magnitude, not existence. Full-window yield is 5.84% per year against an 8% gate, and the recent 24 months pay 2.35% per year, below what a stablecoin returns. The premium has compressed year over year in our own registered data. Adding a timing overlay (A2) or a rotation (A3) makes it strictly worse, because turnover cost eats the harvest.

Rank the 30-major universe by trailing return each week and hold the top five. Rotation should beat passively holding the same basket, or it is only churn.

The full-window +1325% looks like a win over the basket at +759%, but the whole excess lives in one fold, the 2020 to 2021 launch run measured over today’s surviving 30. Fold stability fails, two of four. In the bias-mitigated subwindow the long-only book returns −46.99% against a basket at −50.29%, only one of four folds positive. The long-short book’s subwindow PASS is reported exactly as the frozen gate computed it, then set aside: a market-neutral book that loses 12% of capital is not deployable, and its real benchmark is cash, not a crashing basket.