What is range?

What it means

Ranges are the market's default state — instruments spend far more time going sideways than trending. That asymmetry is why strategies tested only on trending samples look so much better in a backtest than in a live account that has to survive the other 70% of the time.

Why it matters

Inside a range the edges work and the middle does not. Mean-reversion approaches sell the top and buy the bottom, while trend approaches are repeatedly stopped out by a market that keeps reversing just after confirming. Nothing is wrong with either strategy; they are simply matched or mismatched to the condition.

What this changes in practice

This is the entire argument for regime detection. Our engine classifies conditions as trending, choppy or mixed and enables a different set of strategies for each. In testing, the choppy classification performed badly enough that it ships disabled by default — the honest conclusion being that we do not currently have a strategy set that earns money in a range, and pretending otherwise would cost users money.