KarapticIndependent · self-published · negative results included
Independent research on cryptocurrency markets, market structure, and systematic trading. Founded by Oleg Arefev — Chief Visionary Officer, Partner at Legal Kornet.
Flagship research log: Searching for Edge — testing published trading strategies (momentum, trend, carry, reversal, grid) against real Binance data. Each note follows the same pipeline: literature review → replication → gross → net-of-costs → verdict. Closed and negative results are published alongside positive ones.
01 / Published work
Published claims are reconstructed, replicated where possible, priced at realistic execution costs, and given a verdict.
Introduces the series and its method. An audit of roughly 200 pre-built trading strategies on a marketplace (a "CMC Skill Hub") found that most rest on the same public metrics anyone can compute for free. Klines, an event-driven Binance volume-spike detector built beforehand, showed that detecting an abnormal move is easier than knowing whether it continues.
Read note ↗Asks whether grid trading produces an independent trading edge, or whether its returns come from market exposure, execution economics, and market-making infrastructure. Chen, Chen & Jang derive analytically that, under a symmetric random walk, a classical grid's expected profit is zero before costs.
Read note ↗Tests whether a cross-sectional momentum spread survives on Binance USDⓈ-M perpetuals net of realistic costs, not just in an academic backtest. Liu, Tsyvinski & Wu document momentum as statistically significant across a broad crypto sample; Starkiller Capital's practitioner backtest beat the market in relative terms through the 2021–2022 bear market without an absolute profit, and named a 125-basis-point cost threshold that kills the effect.
Read note ↗02 / Labs
Klines is an event-detection system for Binance, built out of months of minute-by-minute replay and case-by-case review of volume spikes.
Detection, tiering, and a short monitoring window are automated. The decision to size into a specific trade remains manual. It currently runs in paper execution.
Enter Klines lab ↗03 / Field notes
A home for shorter essays, methodology updates, and observations that do not need to become a full research note.