FAILED

Moving average crossover (20/100)

The moving-average crossover identifies the trend's turn in time to get into it: buying the upward cross and selling the downward one captures the main move and keeps you off the wrong side of the market. You hold until the opposite cross.

Measured in crypto — Binance spot · 540 pairs, delisted ones included · 0.2% per round trip

Net per trade

+3.07%

after fees

The fee is charged on both legs: every trade pays to open and pays to close.

Died at

multiple testing

chance alone would already produce a result like this

Worst drawdown

not measured

Equity was not measured for this claim.

Timeframe

1 day

The time grid this was measured on. The same technique on a coarser or finer grid is a different measurement, and can earn a different verdict.

invariance
costs
placebo
benchmark
out of sample
multiple testing

The technique against chance

Same number of trades, same holding time, same assets — only the dates were drawn at random.

The average trade and the typical one

The mean sits above the median: the lottery signature — the typical trade loses and a rare handful pays for everything.

What was measured

We coded the rule exactly as it is described and let it trade on its own from 2017-08-17 to 2026-07-28. It found trades in 103 coins, 1,623 in total. Each one enters and exits at the price that existed on that day — the program never sees what comes next, which is the most common mistake people make testing strategies at home. Wherever the description was ambiguous we took the reading least favourable to the technique; whatever was left open is stated in the hypothesis, at the foot of this page.

How many of those trades actually count

Only 316 of the 1,623. Cryptocurrencies rise and fall almost in unison, so the same rule fires on dozens of coins on the same day — and that is one bet repeated, not dozens of different bets. Counting them all separately is the trick that makes a bad test look impressive.

What it paid, before any deductions

+3.27% per trade. This is the number the technique claims, and the only one on this page that has not yet been through a single control.

Why it did not pass — it died here · how many versions were tested

We counted how many versions of the same idea were tested before this one was published. There were many. Publishing only the best of many versions is the same as flipping a coin repeatedly and reporting only the heads — and the result was not good enough to survive that discount.

What this result does NOT say

For an edge to be assertable here it would have to reach 4.54% per trade — that is the size that survives this archive's multiple-testing correction, and it rises as the archive grows. So FAILED means “we found nothing above that size”, and never “it cannot possibly work”. The instrument is far more sensitive than that: on synthetic data, with a clean effect, it separates from 0.69% upwards. The distance between the two numbers is the price of a real market and the price of publishing many claims. The difference matters, and it is the rule of this house: the card confronts the claim, never the person who made it.

What this card does not measure

Every verdict holds for the conditions it was measured under. These are this card's — and outside them the result does not apply.

One market, one universe: Measured on 103 spot cryptocurrency pairs, delisted ones included. It says nothing about futures, equities or indices, nor about how the same technique behaves in another market.
One window of time, not every window: The measured period runs from 2017-08-17 to 2026-07-28. A market moves through regimes, and a technique can work in one and fail in another — the card measures the regimes that fit inside this window, not the ones still to come.
One cost structure: The cost charged is 0.10% per leg, in and out. Anyone paying more than that gets a worse result, and anyone paying less gets a better one — the verdict holds for this fee.
One exit rule: The trade was closed by: the auditor's fixed horizon (20 bars). The same entry measured with a different exit is a different strategy, and can earn a different verdict — it happens in this archive.
The number of trades is not the sample size: There are 1,623 trades, but only 316 independent market episodes: a single move fires the technique across dozens of assets at once, and counting those as separate observations inflates any result. It is the smaller number that governs the arithmetic. With 316 episodes, what the data supports is a range from +0.69% to +5.85% per trade — the published average is the centre of it, not the exact measurement.
Daily bars: Measured at the daily close. Nothing here measures what happens inside the day, and an intraday technique is not auditable with this data.

Numbers and reproducibility

The six controls

control	status	t	threshold	episodes
invariance	passed	—	—	—
costs	passed	2.34	1.97	316
placebo	passed	2.27	1.97	316
benchmark	passed	—	—	—
out of sample	passed	—	—	—
multiple testing	failed	—	—	—

invariance1623 signals across 140496 bars
costsgross +3.273% · cost 0.200% · net +3.073% (t=2.34)
placeboactual +3.073% · placebo +0.003% · excess +3.070% ± 1.351% (t=2.27, 316 real groups, 81,150 sham dates)
benchmarktechnique +3.07% · buy and hold (same horizon) +0.18% · excess +2.90%
out of sampleasset half A: +2.496% (t=2.11, 248 groups) · asset half B: +3.649% (t=2.01, 253 groups) · earlier period: +2.073% (t=1.12, 196 groups) · recent period: +4.074% (t=2.44, 121 groups)
multiple testing100 variation(s) tested · t=2.34 · p≈0.0191 · false positives expected by chance ≈ 1.91

Reproducibility

period: 2017-08-17 to 2026-07-28
assets that traded: 103
variations tested before this one: 100
gross per trade: +3.27%
net per trade: +3.07%
exit rule: the auditor's fixed horizon (20 bars)
horizon bars: 20
fee per leg: 0.001
fast average: 20
slow average: 100

Binance spot klines (delisted pairs included) · collected from 2026-07-27 23:31 to 2026-07-27 23:31 · 106 assets · 140,496 bars · 2017-08-17 to 2026-07-28

Seed not recorded: audits before 2026-07-29 used 20260728 by convention in the code, and the value is not in the record.

Hypothesis, filed before the result

The moving average crossover family contains no combination with a real edge: the ones that look good are the tails of the grid itself. I expect the sweep's best `t` not to survive the multiple-testing control.

the filing date is not in this audit's record

The original, as it was filed

A família do cruzamento de médias não contém uma combinação com vantagem real: as que parecem boas são as caudas da própria grade. Espero que o melhor `t` da varredura não sobreviva ao controle de múltiplos testes.

Pre-registration exists to keep prediction apart from rationalisation: written after the number, every hypothesis is right.

Earlier audits of the same technique

Each variation an author teaches enters as its own test, so that whatever might work in the strategy gets covered. The verdict changed along the way — a fix in the engine changes the number, and that is a fact that has to stay visible. No earlier record was deleted.

2026-08-03PASSEDopen ↗
2026-07-28PASSEDopen ↗
2026-07-28FAILEDopen ↗
this measurement →FAILED