When a grid sits in cash during a market crash, that crash isn't the grid's fault — yet the old grading system charged the grid for it anyway. Active-period return fixes that by measuring only the windows when the grid was actually running.
A taxi driver who works the day shift and goes home at night. You wouldn't blame the taxi driver for an accident that happened at 2 a.m. while the cab was parked. You'd judge the driver only on the trips they actually took.
Here's how that maps back: the blended return is like charging the driver for the 2 a.m. accident. The active-period return charges only for what happened on the driver's actual shift.
CoinRoc's grid strategy uses the RXI™ regime-classification system to decide when it's safe to trade. When the market trends sharply in one direction, the RXI classifies that regime as unfavorable for grids and pauses new grid buy orders — existing inventory continues to be managed by the strategy, but no new capital is deployed into the grid until conditions improve.
That's intentional. Grids earn by buying low and selling high within a range — they're not designed to profit in a strong trend. Pausing new buys is the correct response.
The problem: the old blended return measured total portfolio value across the entire evaluation window — including the paused periods. So when the underlying asset dropped 45% during a trend, the portfolio value dropped too, even though the grid strategy was correctly sitting on the sidelines.
Note: the specific backtests referenced throughout this explainer used a fixed grid-engagement test setting across all symbols, not this live RXI gate — the SOL and BTC figures below come from a separate, retrospective classification pass over historical candles. See the methodology paper, §2.1, for the distinction between that test configuration and the RXI’s designed pause-and-resume behavior.
The blended return punished the grid strategy for a market move it was deliberately avoiding. That's measuring the wrong thing.
The portfolio tracks the asset price even during paused periods — so a market-level drop shows up as a strategy loss.
SOL is the clearest example of the blended-return distortion. In Year 2, SOL's blended return was -45.5% — which filtered it off the Discovery page entirely. A retrospective classifier found that roughly 23% of the window would have qualified as a pause-favorable regime under the RXI's design rules. (Note: the specific backtest measured here used a fixed grid-engagement setting for all symbols, so the strategy did not literally pause during that 23% — see the methodology paper for the distinction.)
When you measure only the active windows — the periods the grid actually ran — SOL's return was -9.8%. That's a grid mechanism performing within tolerance, not a failing strategy. Under active-period grading, SOL is correctly restored to Discovery.
The -25% threshold is the filter boundary. Blended at -45.5% falls well below it. Active-period at -9.8% clears it comfortably.
The grid wasn't failing — the market was falling while the grid wasn't even running. Active-period return sees the difference.
77.0%23.0%BTC's blended return in Year 2 was -31.8%. BTC's active and blended returns are identical because the retrospective classifier found no candles in the period it would exclude — not because BTC's simulation run itself avoided a pause state (this test's engagement setting was fixed, not live-gated; see the methodology paper, §2.1).
That means BTC's blended return and active-period return are identical. There's no cash-period distortion to correct for. The -40.2% active return is a genuine grid mechanism failure — the strategy ran, and it lost.
BTC stays hidden from Discovery under both the old and new metrics. This confirms the filter is doing the right thing: it restores wrongly penalized assets without rescuing assets that are genuinely underperforming.
BTC's case is the proof the system isn't giving free passes. It only restores assets that were penalized for paused periods — not assets where the grid mechanism genuinely failed.
Of the 37 assets hidden by the blended-return filter, the active-period analysis found:
| Symbol | Blended Return | Active Return | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| SOL | -45.5% | -9.8% | Restored |
| LINK | -39.6% | +2.1% | Restored |
| BCH | -27.9% | +3.9% | Restored |
| DOGE | -30.1% | -5.1% | Restored |
| HBAR | -35.5% | +0.8% | Restored |
| ALGO | -38.5% | -12.2% | Restored |
| BTC | -31.8% | -40.2% | Confirmed failure |
| ADA | -43.4% | -25.8% | Confirmed failure |
| SHIB | -25.7% | -28.8% | Confirmed failure |
Simulated backtest results, retail-binance-us fee tier, Year 2 blind forward test, specific grid configuration. Results differ at other fee tiers, capital sizes, or configurations.
Discovery assets moved from ~48 to ~75 of 97 after the fix. No failing assets were rescued — only wrongly penalized ones were restored.