Crypto

Day trading crypto

Checked October 2026

Crypto trades around the clock, so a crypto day trade is one you open and close inside the same UTC day, the day the exchanges' daily candles use. Backtoast ran four published crypto day-trading rules in 2026, and all four failed, from the bitcoin Monday effect at 8.2% a year to a one-minute moving-average rule that lost 90%.

Backtoast

You pay $99 for two full tests of your own strategy, and a pass is an offer of 30% of the profit Backtoast makes trading it with its own money. Crypto is one of the five markets.

What ran

The Monday effect is the only one held for a whole day, buying at 00:00 UTC on Monday and selling at the end of it. The overreaction rule shorts the morning after a very big day, the half-hour rule trades 4:30 to 5:00 p.m. Eastern when the morning and the late afternoon disagree, and the one-minute rule flips whenever price is 1% away from its 50-minute average.

Shorting

Three of the four sell short. The tests short bitcoin on spot prices with no borrow cost, and doing it for real takes a margin or futures account. Crypto rules that hold for a week or more, like bitcoin momentum at 13.5% a year, are on crypto trading strategies tested in 2026.

The runs are Backtoast's, from 29 October 2026, after costs. The day-trading rules on every market are on day trading for beginners.