FAILED

20-period channel breakout

A break of the high forces anyone short to cover, and that feeds the move: entering on the break of the level catches the trend from the start, without a moving average's lag.

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

Net per trade

+6.70%

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

−70%

918 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 70% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 918 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 537 coins, 13,083 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 83 of the 13,083. 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

+6.90% 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 capital would have ended at 4.26× what it started with. At its worst the account was worth 70% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 918 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

65% 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.

The effect sits at the start of the period, not the end

Cutting the period into four equal pieces: in the first, 2017-09-14 a 2022-04-10, the technique returned +26.03% per trade — a number this engine can assert. In the last, 2025-03-09 a 2026-07-13, it returned -3.49%, which cannot be told apart from zero. The average over the whole period mixes the two and hides the difference: it is what remains of an edge that no longer shows up in the most recent slice. What this does not say: that the edge is gone. The last slice holds 13 independent episodes, and with that much data it could not tell even a reasonable effect from zero. What can be asserted is narrower, and it is the part that matters to anyone trading today: the result of the whole comes from a period that has already passed, and the recent slice does not confirm it.

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 537 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 technique itself (held until the opposite signal). 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 13,083 trades, but only 83 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 83 episodes, what the data supports is a range from -2.72% to +16.53% 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	failed	—	—	—
costs	passed	1.39	1.99	83
placebo	inconclusive	1.33	1.99	83
benchmark	passed	—	—	—
out of sample	inconclusive	—	—	—
multiple testing	passed	—	—	—

invariance58% of the gross profit comes from 654 trades (5% of the total) — lottery
costsgross +6.902% · cost 0.200% · net +6.702% (t=1.39)
placeboactual +6.702% · placebo +0.181% · excess +6.522% ± 4.888% (t=1.33 against a threshold of 1.99, 83 real groups, 654,150 sham dates, draw error ±0.109%)
benchmarktechnique +6.70% · buy and hold (same horizon) +4.34% · excess +2.36%
out of sampleasset half A: +4.917% (t=1.14, 81 episodes) · asset half B: +8.465% (t=1.48, 82 episodes) · liquid half (>= US$ 2,069,553/day): +9.186% (t=1.80, 83 episodes) · illiquid half: +3.542% (t=0.69, 78 episodes) · period 1/4 (2017-09-14 a 2022-04-10): +26.030% (t=2.97, 43 episodes) · period 2/4 (2022-04-11 a 2023-11-03): +5.983% (t=1.08, 16 episodes) · period 3/4 (2023-11-04 a 2025-03-08): -1.027% (t=-0.25, 14 episodes) · period 4/4 (2025-03-09 a 2026-07-13): -3.486% (t=-1.39, 13 episodes)The edge decayed: +26.03% (t=2.97) in the first quarter of the period, −3.49% (t=-1.39) in the last. The partitions that replicate above are across assets, not across time.
multiple testing1 variation(s) tested · t=1.39 across 83 episodes (equivalent to t=1.36) · p≈0.1723 · false positives expected by chance ≈ 0.17

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: ×4.26
worst drawdown from the peak: −70%
days below the previous peak: 918
signals refused for lack of capital: 65%
paths where the account halved (out of 12): 0

Reproducibility

period: 2017-08-17 to 2026-07-28
assets that traded: 537
variations tested before this one: 1
gross per trade: +6.90%
net per trade: +6.70%
exit rule: the technique itself (held until the opposite signal)
median duration bars: 39
mean duration bars: 53.2
max duration bars: 587
fee per leg: 0.001
episode days: 39
channel period: 20

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

Short-term momentum is the most documented effect in the crypto literature, so this is the candidate with the best real chance of surviving the placebo — better than the RSI, whose caveat has already failed. Specific, falsifiable prediction: it PASSES the placebo and dies afterwards, at the benchmark or at multiple testing. The reason for the benchmark: a breakout only fires once the market has already moved, so it buys dear by construction. The reason for multiple testing: the 20 window is one choice among dozens equally defensible.

the filing date is not in this audit's record

The original, as it was filed

Momentum de curto prazo é o efeito mais documentado da literatura de cripto, então esta é a candidata com maior chance real de sobreviver ao placebo — mais que o RSI, cuja ressalva já falhou. Previsão específica e falsificável: PASSA no placebo e morre depois, no benchmark ou nos múltiplos testes. O motivo do benchmark: rompimento só dispara quando o mercado já se moveu, então ele compra caro por construção. O motivo dos múltiplos testes: a janela de 20 é uma escolha entre dezenas igualmente defensáveis.

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.

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