How to Build Your First Crypto Strategy in Prismetric (Step by Step)

Building your first crypto strategy in Prismetric takes minutes, and every step is a decision you can reason about rather than a black box. This is a step-by-step guide to going from a theme you believe in to a live-marked, backtested paper book — the disciplined version of "I think these coins will do well."

Step 1 — Start from a theme

Open the Strategy Lab and pick a theme: a curated universe of names that belong together — DeFi blue chips, high-beta momentum, an AI-and-compute basket. The theme defines what you can hold. You are not picking individual coins yet; you are choosing the pond you want to fish, and letting the score decide which fish.

Step 2 — Choose the signal that drives it

Every name in the theme carries a live score with sub-signals underneath it. The signal you select is the engine of the strategy:

• Composite score — a balanced, quality-tilted read across adoption, momentum and sentiment.
• Momentum — faster and higher-turnover; leans into what is accelerating now.
• Adoption or attention — captures demand building before it shows up in price.

The same universe becomes a very different book depending on which signal you weight — that choice is the strategy's personality.

Step 3 — Pick a weighting scheme

The scheme decides how a score becomes a position size:

• Score-weighted — capital scales with conviction above the exit floor. The default diversified, signal-tilted book.
• Top-N — hold only the N highest-scoring names, equally weighted; concentrated and momentum-like.
• Threshold / equal-weight — equal-weight everything above an entry bar; the simplest expression of "own what scores well."

Step 4 — Set entry and exit thresholds

Thresholds are the strategy's triggers: buy when a name's score crosses the entry level, trim or sell when it falls below the exit level. Keep a gap between the two — that hysteresis stops a name hovering at the line from churning in and out every day and bleeding the book on costs. Wider gap, calmer book; tighter gap, faster reactions.

Step 5 — Backtest before you commit

Now prove it. The Lab runs your exact configuration over real historical prices and reports the metrics that matter: return, Sharpe and Sortino (return per unit of risk), max drawdown (the worst peak-to-trough you would have sat through), and volatility. Compare against the equal-weight benchmark — if your signal cannot beat owning the whole theme equally, the signal is not adding anything. This is the step that separates a real edge from a good story.

Step 6 — Start a paper book

Happy with the backtest? Start the strategy as a paper book: it is marked to live fair value from that moment, accrues a real since-inception return curve, and lands on the theme's leaderboard next to everyone else's take on the same universe — all with zero capital at risk. Watch it handle live conditions, including a rebalance and a drawdown, not just a lucky week.

Step 7 — Track, compare, iterate

Your dashboard collects every book you run, with a combined return chart and per-book risk metrics, so you can see which configurations are actually working. Iterate deliberately: change one thing — the signal, the scheme, a threshold — and let the leaderboard tell you whether it helped.

When you are ready for real capital

A paper book you have grown to trust can be taken live on Hyperliquid, following the same rules with real capital. But paper first, always — the whole point is to trade a rule you tested. Ready? Open the Strategy Lab and build your first book.