Moving average crossover (20/50)
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
- ✓invariance
- ✓costs
- ✓placebo
- ✓benchmark
- ✓out of sample
- ✓multiple testing
What was measured
How many of those trades actually count
What it paid, before any deductions
Why it passed
- the profit spread across the trades instead of coming from a handful
- the edge survived the broker's fee
- it paid more than entering on randomly drawn dates
- it paid more than buying and holding for the same stretch
- the result came back in the separated pieces of the data
- it survived the discount for having tested many versions
What this result does NOT say
- One market, one universe
- Measured on 106 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 (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 number of trades is not the sample size
- There are 2,754 trades, but only 362 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 362 episodes, what the data supports is a range from +0.13% to +3.41% 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 | 1.88 | 1.97 | 362 |
| placebo | passed | 2.18 | 1.97 | 362 |
| benchmark | passed | — | — | — |
| out of sample | passed | — | — | — |
| multiple testing | passed | — | — | — |
- invariance2754 signals across 140496 bars
- costsgross +1.769% · cost 0.200% · net +1.569% (t=1.88)
- placeboactual +1.569% · placebo -0.277% · excess +1.846% ± 0.845% (t=2.18, 362 real groups, 137,700 sham dates)
- benchmarktechnique +1.57% · buy and hold (same horizon) -0.13% · excess +1.70%
- out of sampleasset half A: +2.157% (t=2.18, 303 groups) · asset half B: +0.984% (t=1.05, 318 groups) · earlier period: +1.104% (t=0.93, 234 groups) · recent period: +2.034% (t=2.23, 129 groups)
- multiple testing1 variation(s) tested · t=1.88 · p≈0.0604 · false positives expected by chance ≈ 0.06
Reproducibility
- period
- 2017-08-17 to 2026-07-28
- assets that traded
- 106
- variations tested before this one
- 1
- gross per trade
- +1.77%
- net per trade
- +1.57%
- exit rule
- the auditor's fixed horizon (10 bars)
- horizon bars
- 10
- fee per leg
- 0.001
- fast average
- 20
- slow average
- 50
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 is a transformation of past price. I expect: gross edge close to zero, and whatever little there is being eaten by the fee — the pattern measured across four independent arenas on 2026-07-27.
the filing date is not in this audit's record
The original, as it was filed
O cruzamento de médias é uma transformação do preço passado. Espero: vantagem bruta próxima de zero, e o pouco que houver sendo consumido pela taxa — o padrão medido em quatro arenas independentes em 2026-07-27.
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.