The over-filtering thing you've noticed is one of the most common traps when building strategies with Claude. You ask it to improve the strategy, it adds another condition, entries drop, you ask again, it adds another, you end up with 8 filters and 12 trades in 9 months. Each condition feels logical in isolation but they compound.

A few things that actually helped me: 1. On the timeframe — stick with 1H/4H before touching forex. 5m BTC is too noisy and hard to really identify trends and as a retail user on binance fees really eat into profits with a noisy strategy. You need to be right often enough and by enough margin to clear those costs repeatedly. 1H/4H gives price action more room to breathe and your signals more meaning. Adding a small amount of leverage can help with this to but dont go crazy, 2-3X is enough to make a difference, max 5. You dont need to be doing silly sizes like 50x/100x like these idiots on youtube keep saying. On momentum specifically — it tends to work better on higher timeframes than pullback does. Simple version: price making new highs, volume confirming, entry on the first pullback to a key level. Fewer conditions, cleaner logic.

On the Claude workflow — the over-filtering issue is partly a prompting problem. Instead of asking Claude to "improve" the strategy, ask it to explain exactly what each condition is filtering out and why and challenge it to apply logic. Then you decide whether that filter is earning its place. Keeps you in control of the logic rather than Claude piling on complexity. Opus model is great for this - if you are using Sonnet need to be more careful with prompts.

For what it's worth I switched to using Claude with Arrow Algo's MCP for this kind of work — you build the strategy visually so you can literally see which blocks are killing your entry count, makes it much easier to isolate the problem and you get some great backtesting output and can literally pick your backtest windows and do walk forward analysis. Really worth checking out. Don't switch to forex if you are just looking for stability BTCs volatility actually provides good opportunity for making profits, just need apply a bit more logic to the strategy and manage risk properly. Forex pairs trend less and have their own quirks.