FAILED

BOS/CHoCH cascade with fair value gap entry (at the gap edge)

The false breakout is where big money collects liquidity by taking out retail stops; the change of character confirms the turn; and the fair value gap is the price the market has to come back to. Entering there gives precision entries with a high reward-to-risk ratio.

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

Net per trade

+0.16%

after fees

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

Died at

invariance

the result is not physically plausible

Worst drawdown

−100%

1,800 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 100% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 1,800 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 2017-08-17 to 2026-07-28. It found trades in 536 coins, 13,342 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 421 of the 13,342. 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

+0.36% 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 · where the result came from

We look at where the result came from: whether it is spread across the trades or packed into a handful of them. It concentrated. That is the shape of a lottery: the typical trade loses, and a rare handful pays for everything. Anyone following the rule for real would face a long run of losses before any gain, and would almost certainly quit before it arrived.

What would have happened to the money

Risking 1.0% of capital per trade — the most widely taught rule — across the whole period: The account would have been wiped out. At its worst the account was worth 100% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 1,800 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

82% 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 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 536 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: stop or target, whichever comes first. 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 13,342 trades, but only 421 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 421 episodes, what the data supports is a range from -0.15% to +0.88% 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	failed	—	—	—
costs	inconclusive	0.62	1.97	421
placebo	failed	-4.36	1.97	421
benchmark	passed	—	—	—
out of sample	inconclusive	—	—	—
multiple testing	inconclusive	—	—	—

invariance52% of the gross profit comes from 667 trades (5% of the total) — lottery
costsgross +0.362% · cost 0.200% · net +0.162% (t=0.62)
placeboactual +0.162% · placebo +1.314% · excess -1.152% ± 0.264% (t=-4.36 against a threshold of 1.97, 421 real groups, 665,265 sham dates, draw error ±0.010%)
benchmarktechnique +0.16% · buy and hold (same horizon) -0.02% · excess +0.18%
out of sampleasset half A: +0.224% (t=0.72, 398 episodes) · asset half B: +0.104% (t=0.34, 410 episodes) · liquid half (>= US$ 2,063,294/day): +0.165% (t=0.67, 416 episodes) · illiquid half: +0.158% (t=0.39, 378 episodes) · period 1/4 (2017-10-26 a 2022-08-24): +0.287% (t=0.63, 216 episodes) · period 2/4 (2022-08-25 a 2024-02-18): -0.014% (t=-0.04, 78 episodes) · period 3/4 (2024-02-19 a 2025-04-20): +0.291% (t=0.62, 62 episodes) · period 4/4 (2025-04-21 a 2026-07-27): +0.086% (t=0.20, 67 episodes)
multiple testing1 variation(s) tested · t=0.62 across 421 episodes (equivalent to t=0.62) · p≈0.5380 · false positives expected by chance ≈ 0.54

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: ×0.00
worst drawdown from the peak: −100%
days below the previous peak: 1,800
signals refused for lack of capital: 82%
paths where the account halved (out of 12): 12

Reproducibility

period: 2017-08-17 to 2026-07-28
assets that traded: 536
variations tested before this one: 1
gross per trade: +0.36%
net per trade: +0.16%
exit rule: stop or target, whichever comes first
median duration bars: 1
max duration bars: 780
intrabar ambiguity: 5.3
fee per leg: 0.001
episode days: 7
liquidity grab bars: 5
CHoCH window: 30
FVG window: 30
entry at midpoint: 0
confirmation bars: 5

Binance spot klines (delisted pairs included) · collected from 2026-07-27 23:31 to 2026-07-28 14:29 · 540 assets · 750,934 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

Sixth transcript, first on smart money. A cascade of four conditions: liquidity grab in a zone, change of character, fair value gap, entry on the retest with a stop beyond the FVG and a target at the next level. All of it specifiable — the FVG is three-bar arithmetic. The only ambiguity is declared as the trader's choice (entering at the middle of the FVG or at its edge), and so it becomes TWO cards instead of blocking. Specific predictions, written before any number: (a) the two entry variants will be STATISTICALLY INDISTINGUISHABLE, because the difference between the middle and the edge of the FVG is small next to the dispersion of the result; (b) the four-condition cascade will cut the n to the point where the verdict comes out INCONCLUSIVE for sample size, not FAILED on merit; (c) the FVG will give a better entry price than the plain zone of transcript 1, so I expect a HIGHER realised reward-to-risk — but I expect that NOT to translate into an edge, because a better entry price at the same hit rate is redistribution, not edge.

filed on 2026-07-28, before the number existed

The original, as it was filed

Sexta transcrição, primeira de smart money. Cascata de quatro condições: liquidity grab em zona, mudança de caráter, fair value gap, entrada no reteste com stop além do FVG e alvo no nível seguinte. Tudo especificável — o FVG é aritmética de três velas. A única ambiguidade é declarada como escolha do operador (entrar no meio do FVG ou na borda), e por isso vira DOIS cards em vez de bloquear. Previsões específicas, escritas antes de qualquer número: (a) as duas variantes de entrada serão ESTATISTICAMENTE INDISTINGUÍVEIS, porque a diferença entre meio e borda do FVG é pequena perto da dispersão do resultado; (b) a cascata de quatro condições vai cortar o n a ponto de o veredito sair INCONCLUSIVO por amostra, não REPROVADO por mérito; (c) o FVG dará entrada em preço melhor que a zona simples da transcrição 1, então espero R:R realizado MAIOR — mas espero que isso NÃO se traduza em vantagem, porque melhor preço de entrada com mesma taxa de acerto é redistribuição, não vantagem.

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 held in all of them.

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