INCONCLUSIVE

2-period RSI below 25 with exit at the high of the last 2 candles

A very short-term RSI falling to an extreme marks the exhaustion of selling, and the bounce that follows returns price to its recent high — short trades, with a target that comes closer on its own while price fails to react.

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

Net per trade

−0.26%

after fees

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

Stalled at

costs

could not show the edge survives the cost

Worst drawdown

−85%

1,729 days underwater

How far the account fell below its own best previous moment.

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

Equity curve

Risking 1.0% per trade, marked to market every day — not only when a trade closes. The line at 1.0 is the capital it started with.

At its worst the account was worth 85% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 1,729 days below that peak.

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 2018-04-17 to 2026-07-28. It found trades in 48 coins, 19,235 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 27 of the 19,235. 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

-0.06% per trade. Look at the sign: the average is already negative before any fee is taken out. The controls below still hold, but here they are not knocking down an edge — they are confirming there never was one.

Where it stalled · the broker's fee

We subtract the fee the broker charges to open and to close each trade — every trade pays on both legs. What is left after the fee is too small to be told apart from zero.

What would have happened to the money

Risking 1.0% of capital per trade — the most widely taught rule — across the whole period: The capital would have ended at 0.37× what it started with. At its worst the account was worth 85% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 1,729 days below that peak. In 12 of the 12 paths tested, the account fell to less than half of what it started with.

The account would not fit every signal

31% of the trades had to be turned down: by the time they appeared, the money was already tied up in other positions. That matters because the average return per trade the technique claims is computed over trades that nobody could have taken all of.

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 INCONCLUSIVE 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 48 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 2018-04-17 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 (10 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 same technique, measured by another exit: This technique was also audited under a different exit rule — stop or target, whichever comes first — and there the verdict is <strong>FAILED</strong>. They are different questions about the same technique, and both are published: the claim that passes on a fixed horizon and the claim that passes on the exit the technique itself teaches <strong>are not the same claim</strong>.
The number of trades is not the sample size: There are 19,235 trades, but only 27 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 27 episodes, what the data supports is a range from -2.14% to +2.03% 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	inconclusive	-0.25	2.06	27
placebo	inconclusive	0.15	2.06	27
benchmark	passed	—	—	—
out of sample	inconclusive	—	—	—
multiple testing	inconclusive	—	—	—

invariance19235 signals across 64178 barsconcentration: +41.77% of the profit sits in the top 5% of trades — with the dates shuffled, +43.45% (fails above +50.00%)
costsgross -0.055% · cost 0.200% · net -0.255% (t=-0.25) · the range runs from -2.342% to +1.831%
placeboactual -0.255% · placebo -0.513% · excess +0.258% ± 1.721% (t=0.15 against a threshold of 2.06, 27 real groups, 961,750 sham dates, draw error ±0.019%)
benchmarktechnique -0.26% · buy and hold (same horizon) -0.37% · excess +0.11%
out of sampleasset half A: -0.239% (t=-0.16, 24 episodes) · asset half B: -0.272% (t=-0.28, 27 episodes) · liquid half (>= US$ 2,414,358/day): -0.225% (t=-0.19, 27 episodes) · illiquid half: -0.288% (t=-0.33, 22 episodes) · period 1/4 (2018-04-26 a 2022-10-30): +0.432% (t=0.25, 15 episodes) · period 2/4 (2022-10-31 a 2024-06-06): +0.675% (6 episodes — too small, does not count) · period 3/4 (2024-06-07 a 2025-07-05): +0.335% (5 episodes — too small, does not count) · period 4/4 (2025-07-06 a 2026-07-18): -2.461% (4 episodes — too small, does not count)
multiple testing1 variation(s) tested · t=-0.25 across 27 episodes (equivalent to t=-0.24) · p≈0.8104 · false positives expected by chance ≈ 0.81

Equity — outside the six controls, and here is why

The t of the trade series is invariant to bet size: 0.5%, 1% and 3% agree to the sixth decimal. Nothing here moves the verdict — it moves what the account would have lived through.

risking 1.0% per trade: ×0.37
worst drawdown from the peak: −85%
days below the previous peak: 1,729
signals refused for lack of capital: 31%
paths where the account halved (out of 12): 12

Reproducibility

period: 2018-04-17 to 2026-07-28
assets that traded: 48
variations tested before this one: 1
gross per trade: −0.06%
net per trade: −0.26%
exit rule: the auditor's fixed horizon (10 bars)
horizon bars: 10
fee per leg: 0.001
episode days: 112
seed: 20260728
RSI period: 2
RSI threshold: 25.0
target candles: 2

Binance spot klines (delisted pairs included) · collected from 2026-07-27 23:31 to 2026-08-03 10:49 · 48 assets · 64,178 bars · 2018-04-17 to 2026-07-28

Hypothesis, filed before the result

FAILED — clears the gate, but the engine rejects it for lack of a thrust.

filed on 2026-08-06, before the number existed

The original, as it was filed

REPROVADO — passa portão, mas motor rejeita por falta de arremesso.

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

This claim has been audited once — there is no history to compare against.