What is a market regime and why does it matter?

A regime is the market's prevailing personality — trending up, trending down, or ranging, with high or low volatility. Strategies are regime-dependent almost by definition: trend-followers earn in trends and bleed in chop, mean-reverters do the opposite. Most 'my strategy stopped working' stories are regime changes, not broken strategies.

Two practical consequences: backtest windows must span multiple regimes or the result is a regime bet in disguise, and knowing the current regime tells you which of your validated strategies to lean on. We publish an automated weekly regime read across major coins for exactly that purpose.