FAILED

Bollinger Bands (20/2σ)

Price spends 95% of the time inside the bands, so touching them means being statistically cheap or dear. The band adjusts itself to volatility — widening in an agitated market and narrowing in a calm one — which avoids the false signal a fixed threshold gives when volatility changes.

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

−0.02%

after fees

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

Died at

costs

the 0.01% fee eats the whole edge

Worst drawdown

−0%

2,329 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 2,329 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 2020-01-01 to 2026-06-26. It found trades in 2 coins, 254 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 134 of the 254. 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

-0.01% per trade. Look at the sign: the average is already negative before any fee is taken out. The controls below still hold, but here they are not knocking down an edge — they are confirming there never was one.

Why it did not pass — it died here · the broker's fee

We subtract the fee the broker charges to open and to close each trade — every trade pays on both legs. The edge existed on paper and vanished at that subtraction. A result that only survives without the fee does not survive in the real world.

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 2,329 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 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 0.09% 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 254 trades, but only 134 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 134 episodes, what the data supports is a range from -0.19% to +0.17% 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	failed	-0.22	1.98	134
placebo	inconclusive	-0.05	1.98	134
benchmark	failed	—	—	—
out of sample	inconclusive	—	—	—
multiple testing	inconclusive	—	—	—

invariance254 signals across 4055 bars
costsgross -0.011% · cost 0.008% · net -0.019% (t=-0.22)
placeboactual -0.019% · placebo -0.015% · excess -0.004% ± 0.091% (t=-0.05 against a threshold of 1.98, 134 real groups, 12,700 sham dates, draw error ±0.014%) — the status flips inside the placebo's own Monte Carlo error
benchmarktechnique -0.02% · buy and hold (same horizon) +0.01% · excess -0.03%
out of sampleasset half A: +0.019% (t=0.16, 104 episodes) · asset half B: -0.064% (t=-0.46, 99 episodes) · liquid half (>= US$ 0/day): -0.019% (t=-0.22, 134 episodes) · period 1/4 (2020-01-24 a 2021-09-17): -0.127% (t=-0.70, 35 episodes) · period 2/4 (2021-09-20 a 2023-04-13): -0.019% (t=-0.08, 33 episodes) · period 3/4 (2023-04-28 a 2024-11-08): -0.193% (t=-1.48, 31 episodes) · period 4/4 (2024-11-11 a 2026-06-05): +0.258% (t=1.61, 36 episodes)
multiple testing1 variation(s) tested · t=-0.22 across 134 episodes (equivalent to t=-0.22) · p≈0.8288 · false positives expected by chance ≈ 0.83

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: 2,329
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: −0.01%
net per trade: −0.02%
exit rule: the auditor's fixed horizon (10 bars)
horizon bars: 10
spread pips: 1.0
episode days: 12
seed: 20260728
band period: 20
deviations: 2.0

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

A specific prediction: the bands are the RSI with a moving threshold, and in crypto both died in the same place. In forex I expect the same fate as the RSI here — INCONCLUSIVE from a small effect. An additional and riskier prediction: gross return in forex will be POSITIVE where in crypto it was negative, because major currency pairs mean-revert more than crypto. If the gross comes out negative here too, my reading of the mechanism is wrong. Context that informs this prediction, declared so that it can be assessed: (a) the corpus has 101 claims in crypto, 4 of them passed — all from the moving average crossover family; (b) the available forex universe is only 2 pairs (EUR/USD, GBP/USD) over 6.5 years, against 540 pairs and 9 years in crypto, which gives ~88 trades against ~8,600; (c) the cost of turnover in forex is ~20× lower (1 pip ≈ 0.009% against 0.2% commission), so control 2 stops being the main killer; (d) I ran ONE smoke test on the 20/50 crossover and saw the result — see the disclosure in its own hypothesis.

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

The original, as it was filed

Previsão específica: as bandas são o RSI com limiar móvel, e em cripto as duas morreram no mesmo lugar. Em forex espero o mesmo destino do RSI aqui — INCONCLUSIVO por efeito pequeno. Previsão adicional e mais arriscada: o retorno bruto em forex será POSITIVO onde em cripto era negativo, porque câmbio de majors reverte à média mais que cripto. Se o bruto vier negativo também aqui, minha leitura do mecanismo está errada. Contexto que informa esta previsão, declarado para que ela seja avaliável: (a) o corpus tem 101 alegações em cripto, das quais 4 aprovadas — todas da família do cruzamento de médias; (b) o universo de forex disponível é de apenas 2 pares (EUR/USD, GBP/USD) em 6,5 anos, contra 540 pares e 9 anos em cripto, o que dá ~88 operações contra ~8.600; (c) o custo do giro em forex é ~20× menor (1 pip ≈ 0,009% contra 0,2% de comissão), então o controle 2 deixa de ser o principal matador; (d) ⚠️ rodei UM ensaio de fumaça no cruzamento 20/50 e vi o resultado — ver a divulgação na hipótese dele.

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