I Ran the Narrow-Range Orca Strategy for 93 Days. It Lost to Doing Nothing.
On May 8, 2026 I published a strategy on this site for farming the 255% APY narrow band in the Orca SOL/USDC 0.04% pool: stack buckets at different widths, keep ~70% of capital in the tightest range, rebalance daily off Python price analysis, compound the fees.
I then ran it. Not with money — in simulation, against live SOL price feeds and live Orca pool state, for 93 days, across seven distinct strategy configurations and two complete architecture rewrites.
It lost. Not marginally, and not because of a bad regime. It lost in the regime it was designed for, and the reason turns out to be an arithmetic identity rather than a statistical result.
Total capital at risk across the entire project: $0. Every number below is paper. That is the only part of the original plan that worked out.
Here is the whole post-mortem, and the complete 31-page research paper behind it — every ledger, every trade, every defect, free to download.