Crypto market regime filter to put in front of any entry

A crypto market regime filter to put in front of any entry. Most crypto strategies work in one regime and quietly fail in the other. Rather than tuning the entry until it survives both, refuse to trade in the one it was not built for.

1. The rule

# BUY — regime first, your conditions second if Volatility(1800) > 0.4 and Volatility(1800) < 3.0: if DayAmount > 30000000: if Price > 0: # replace this line with your entry condition Buy()# SELL if ProfitPct >= 2.0 or ProfitPct <= -1.5 or HoldTime >= 2400: Sell()

2. A floor and a ceiling, for different reasons

Volatility(n) is the coefficient of variation of price over the window, in percent. Both extremes produce results that look like strategy failure and are actually weather. That distinction matters, because the response to a broken strategy is to fix it and the response to bad weather is to wait.

3. Why a filter beats a fix

Adding conditions until an entry survives every regime is the most reliable way to overfit. Each condition you add to make the calm days work costs you something on the volatile days, and after enough of them you have a rule that describes your sample rather than the market — see eleven conditions, four trades a month. Refusing to trade is cheaper and honest. It also leaves the entry legible, which matters when you come back to it in three months.

4. What the round trip asks of it

The 2.0% / 1.5% structure moves from a 43% break-even to 46% at a measured round trip of about 0.10% (the real cost of crypto trading). The filter's real contribution is not visible in that number, though, and it is worth saying plainly: a regime gate does not raise your win rate on the trades you take. It removes the trades where you would have paid the round trip for nothing. On a strategy that clears its cost by three points, avoided trades are worth more than won ones.

5. What to change first

Measure your own bounds rather than adopting these. Run your entry with no regime filter, record Volatility(1800) at each entry, then split the results by that value. The floor and ceiling will be obvious from the split, and they will be specific to your entry rather than to ours. How to backtest a crypto trading strategy covers the recording side.