What This Is

Skia Paper explains how trading strategies and market mechanics work. It describes mechanisms: what a strategy does, the market conditions it depends on, what it costs to run, and where it breaks down. It also publishes a dated read of what twenty crypto pairs did in the last completed session.

It does not tell anyone what to trade, and it does not predict prices. That line is deliberate and it is the organising constraint of the whole site.

Why that line exists

Describing a mechanism and recommending an action are different acts. "This strategy rests a maker order below the mid-price so it earns the spread rather than paying it" is a description of machinery. "Buy here" is investment advice, and this site is not qualified to give it, does not know your circumstances, and has no interest in pretending otherwise.

The distinction is enforced mechanically rather than left to good intentions. Every article is checked before publication against pattern guards that reject second-person instruction, actionable trade calls, forward-looking statements, performance claims, case-specific framing, and any venue named as a choice. A percentage has to carry its period or its basis, so a figure cannot appear as a bare performance number.

Those guards have rejected drafts written for this site more than once, and the drafts were rewritten rather than the guards relaxed.

The strategies

The twenty strategies documented here were run by an autonomous paper-trading system on this domain from December 2025 until July 2026. Each was specified in advance: an entry condition, an exit condition, the regime it was built for, and a note on the fee floor it had to clear. Those specifications are the basis of the reference pages.

The system has been retired. Its historical record is not published here, and no figure on this site describes its results — the strategy pages explain how each mechanism works, not how it performed.

One theme runs through all twenty and is worth stating plainly, because most writing on this subject omits it. Every strategy has to clear the same round-trip cost, and there are only three ways to do it: take many small moves so the cost is small in aggregate, take few large ones so it is small in proportion, or hold long enough that a single fill amortises. A strategy that cannot say which of those it relies on has not been thought through.

The session reads

Each session read reports the last completed daily session, never one in progress. Daily candles roll at 00:00 UTC, so a post published in the morning describes yesterday's closed session — the figures are frozen at publication and are not updated afterwards.

The data comes from Coinbase Exchange daily candles, quoted in US dollars. The pairs are quoted in USD rather than USDT deliberately: on Coinbase every one of these assets has a USDT book between 25 and 105,000 times thinner than its USD equivalent, and reporting a daily move from a book that traded a handful of units would be presenting noise as signal.

If the data cannot be fetched, or a book reports no volume for the session, no session read is published that day. A market post carrying blank or stale figures is wrong in a way a reader cannot detect, which is worse than one that is simply absent.

Each read is labelled with a coarse regime — broad advance, broad decline, compressed, dispersed, mixed — and links to the strategy pages built for those conditions. That label describes what the session did. It is not a forecast, and the strategies linked are not suggestions to run.

What it is not

This is not financial, investment or trading advice. It is not a recommendation, a signal service, or a solicitation. It does not sell anything, run a fund, manage money, or accept referral arrangements with any exchange or broker.

Trading cryptoassets involves a genuine risk of losing money, including all of it. Past sessions say nothing about future ones. For guidance about your own circumstances the appropriate step is a licensed professional in your jurisdiction; for the risks of cryptoassets specifically, the SEC's investor education material and the CFTC's advisories are useful starting points.

Who publishes it

Skia Paper is an independent editorial project published under Ensomnia Media. It is not affiliated with Coinbase or any other exchange, broker, fund or trading service.

For corrections or editorial questions, see the Ensomnia Media contact page. Corrections are welcome — where a mechanism is described wrongly, the sources are cited so the error is checkable.