PASSED
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
+3.80%
after feesThe fee is charged on both legs: every trade pays to open and pays to close.
Weakest point
placebo
survived all six controls (t=3.63 against a threshold of 2)
Worst drawdown
−29%
527 days underwaterHow 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 29% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 527 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 531 coins, 8,642 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 28 of the 8,642. 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
+4.00% 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 passed
It survived every mundane explanation we tested:
- 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 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 4.57× what it started with. At its worst the account was worth 29% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 527 days below that peak. In none of the 12 paths tested did it fall to less than half of what it started with.
The account would not fit every signal
30% 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
Clearing the six controls is not a promise of future profit, and it is not advice to trade. It means only this: over this period and in this universe, we did not find the mundane explanation that knocked the others down. An edge that existed may be running out — this archive holds a technique that passed and whose most recent slice of time is already negative. 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 531 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 same technique, measured by another exit
- This technique was also audited under a different exit rule — the technique itself (held until the opposite signal) — and there the verdict is <strong>FAILED</strong> (the most favourable result of 3 measurements on that exit). 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 8,642 trades, but only 28 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 28 episodes, what the data supports is a range from +1.79% to +6.22% 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 | 3.52 | 2.05 | 28 |
| placebo | passed | 3.63 | 2.05 | 28 |
| benchmark | passed | — | — | — |
| out of sample | passed | — | — | — |
| multiple testing | passed | — | — | — |
- invariance8642 signals across 750934 barsconcentration: +36.84% of the profit sits in the top 5% of trades — with the dates shuffled, +37.05% (fails above +50.00%)
- costsgross +4.004% · cost 0.200% · net +3.804% (t=3.52)
- placeboactual +3.804% · placebo -0.163% · excess +3.967% ± 1.093% (t=3.63 against a threshold of 2.05, 28 real groups, 432,100 sham dates, draw error ±0.049%)
- benchmarktechnique +3.80% · buy and hold (same horizon) +0.53% · excess +3.27%
- out of sampleasset half A: +3.648% (t=3.30, 28 episodes) · asset half B: +3.951% (t=3.39, 28 episodes) · liquid half (>= US$ 2,069,959/day): +4.179% (t=3.42, 28 episodes) · illiquid half: +3.395% (t=2.07, 25 episodes) · period 1/4 (2018-02-02 a 2022-05-17): +5.976% (t=4.45, 14 episodes) · period 2/4 (2022-05-18 a 2023-12-15): +1.236% (7 episodes — too small, does not count) · period 3/4 (2023-12-22 a 2025-05-12): +7.959% (5 episodes — too small, does not count) · period 4/4 (2025-05-13 a 2026-07-08): +0.112% (5 episodes — too small, does not count)
- multiple testing100 variation(s) tested · t=3.52 across 28 episodes (equivalent to t=3.37) · p≈0.0008 · false positives expected by chance ≈ 0.08
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
- ×4.57
- worst drawdown from the peak
- −29%
- days below the previous peak
- 527
- signals refused for lack of capital
- 30%
- paths where the account halved (out of 12)
- 0
Reproducibility
- period
- 2017-08-17 to 2026-07-28
- assets that traded
- 531
- variations tested before this one
- 100
- gross per trade
- +4.00%
- net per trade
- +3.80%
- exit rule
- the auditor's fixed horizon (20 bars)
- horizon bars
- 20
- fee per leg
- 0.001
- episode days
- 112
- seed
- 20260728
- fast average
- 20
- slow average
- 100
Binance spot klines (delisted pairs included) · collected from 2026-07-27 23:31 to 2026-08-03 10:49 · 540 assets · 750,934 bars · 2017-08-17 to 2026-07-28
Hypothesis, filed before the result
The 'crossover' family contains no combination with a real edge: the ones that look good are the tails of the grid itself. I expect the best `t` in the sweep 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 'cruzamento' 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.