INCONCLUSIVE

Ascending scallop

The cup-and-handle in an uptrend is a pause, not a reversal.

Measured in forex — EUR/USD and GBP/USD · daily bars built from 15m · 1 pip spread (~0.009% per round trip) · no survivorship bias

Net per trade

+0.15%

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

−0%

1,682 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 0% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 1,682 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 BELOW the median: most trades win a little and the tail loses a lot. It is the lottery inverted, and no less dangerous — what decides the outcome is the rare loss.

What was measured

We coded the rule exactly as it is described and let it trade on its own from 2020-01-01 to 2026-06-26. It found trades in 2 coins, 85 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 53 of the 85. 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

+0.16% 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.

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 1.00× what it started with. At its worst the account was worth 0% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 1,682 days below that peak. In none of the 12 paths tested did it fall to less than half of what it started with.

What this result does NOT say

For an edge to be assertable here it would have to reach 0.65% 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 0.09% 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 2 spot currency pairs. 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 2020-01-01 to 2026-06-26. 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 a 1.0 pip spread, crossed once. 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 85 trades, but only 53 independent market episodes: trades that overlap in time are not independent observations, and counting them as if they were inflates any result. It is the smaller number that governs the arithmetic. With 53 episodes, what the data supports is a range from -0.22% to +0.53% 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	0.80	2.01	53
placebo	inconclusive	0.61	2.01	53
benchmark	passed	—	—	—
out of sample	inconclusive	—	—	—
multiple testing	inconclusive	—	—	—

invariance85 signals across 4055 barsconcentration: +26.44% of the profit sits in the top 5% of trades — with the dates shuffled, +29.57% (fails above +50.00%)
costsgross +0.156% · cost 0.008% · net +0.148% (t=0.80) · the range runs from -0.224% to +0.520%
placeboactual +0.148% · placebo +0.027% · excess +0.121% ± 0.198% (t=0.61 against a threshold of 2.01, 53 real groups, 4,250 sham dates, draw error ±0.026%)
benchmarktechnique +0.15% · buy and hold (same horizon) +0.01% · excess +0.14%
out of sampleasset half A: +0.061% (t=0.28, 30 episodes) · asset half B: +0.209% (t=0.94, 39 episodes) · liquid half (>= US$ 0/day): +0.148% (t=0.80, 53 episodes) · period 1/4 (2020-04-13 a 2021-02-09): -0.080% (t=-0.19, 16 episodes) · period 2/4 (2021-05-18 a 2023-07-10): -0.127% (t=-0.35, 12 episodes) · period 3/4 (2023-07-11 a 2025-02-25): +0.260% (t=0.70, 14 episodes) · period 4/4 (2025-03-04 a 2026-04-30): +0.523% (t=1.64, 13 episodes)
multiple testing1 variation(s) tested · t=0.80 across 53 episodes (equivalent to t=0.78) · p≈0.4363 · false positives expected by chance ≈ 0.44

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: ×1.00
worst drawdown from the peak: −0%
days below the previous peak: 1,682
signals refused for lack of capital: 0%
paths where the account halved (out of 12): 0

Reproducibility

period: 2020-01-01 to 2026-06-26
assets that traded: 2
variations tested before this one: 1
gross per trade: +0.16%
net per trade: +0.15%
exit rule: the auditor's fixed horizon (10 bars)
horizon bars: 10
spread pips: 1.0
episode days: 12
seed: 20260728
confirmation bars: 5
tolerance: 0.03
max window: 120

Twelve Data forex (15m aggregated to 1d) · collected on 2026-07-25 · 2 assets · 4,055 bars · 2020-01-01 to 2026-06-26

Hypothesis, filed before the result

Chart patterns are the best-known class in technical analysis and the one most damaged by the pivot error: almost every published backtest marks the signal on the pivot's own date, when on that date nobody knew it was one. Measured with a CAUSAL pivot — five bars of confirmation lag, which is what a real trader faces — I expect them to come out WORSE than the candlestick patterns, and for a legitimate reason: by the time the break is recognisable, the price has already moved. Specific, falsifiable prediction: none survives the Benjamini-Hochberg correction across the 52 patterns, and the control that kills the most will be the benchmark, not costs — unlike the candlesticks, because these trade far less often. Measured in FOREX (EUR/USD and GBP/USD, daily bars built from 15m), not in crypto: only 2 pairs over 6.5 years against 540 pairs over 9 years, a round trip costs about 20× less (a 1 pip spread against 0.1% commission per leg), and there is no survivorship bias, because a currency pair does not get delisted. This is a REPLICATION of claims already tested in crypto — not a new discovery — and the multiple-testing count treats it as such.

filed on 2026-07-29, before the number existed

The original, as it was filed

Padrões gráficos são a classe mais famosa da análise técnica e a que mais sofre com o erro de pivô: quase todo backtest publicado marca o sinal na data do pivô, quando naquela data ninguém sabia dele. Medidos com pivô CAUSAL — 5 velas de atraso de confirmação, que é o que o operador real enfrenta — espero que saiam PIORES que os de vela, e por um motivo legítimo: quando o rompimento é reconhecível, o preço já andou. Previsão específica e falsificável: nenhum sobrevive ao Benjamini-Hochberg de 52 padrões, e o controle que mais mata será o benchmark, não o custo — diferente dos de vela, porque estes operam bem menos vezes. ⚠️ Medido em FOREX (EUR/USD e GBP/USD, diário agregado de 15m), e não em cripto: são apenas 2 pares em 6,5 anos contra 540 pares em 9 anos, o custo do giro é ~20× menor (spread de 1 pip contra comissão de 0,1% por lado) e não há viés de sobrevivência, porque par de moeda não é deslistado. Esta é uma REPLICAÇÃO das alegações já testadas em cripto — não uma descoberta nova —, e a conta de múltiplos testes a trata como tal.

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

The same technique in the other market

The verdict is different there. The same technique, measured on independent data, came out the other way — and that says more about it than either card says alone. Read the cost and the detection floor before concluding: they are not the same in the two markets.

forexINCONCLUSIVE← this one
cryptoFAILEDopen that card

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.

this measurement →INCONCLUSIVE
2026-07-29INCONCLUSIVEopen ↗