FAILED
RSI oversold/overbought (21/25/80)
What has fallen too far tends to come back and what has risen too far tends to correct: entering as price leaves each extreme captures the reversal from the start. It works above all in a sideways market, where price spends most of its time.
Measured in crypto — Binance spot · 540 pairs, delisted ones included · 0.2% per round trip
Net per trade
+67.63%
after feesThe fee is charged on both legs: every trade pays to open and pays to close.
Died at
benchmark
loses to buy and hold (same horizon)
Worst drawdown
−100%
2,000 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 100% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 2,000 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 283 coins, 451 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 7 of the 451. 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
+67.83% 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 · against buying and holding
We compare it against simply buying and holding for the same stretch of time, with no rule at all. Sitting still paid more. The technique takes work, demands attention, and delivers less than doing nothing.
What would have happened to the money
Risking 1.0% of capital per trade — the most widely taught rule — across the whole period: The account would have been wiped out. At its worst the account was worth 100% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 2,000 days below that peak. In 12 of the 12 paths tested, the account fell to less than half of what it started with.
The account would not fit every signal
63% 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
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 283 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 same technique, measured by another exit
- This technique was also audited under a different exit rule — the auditor's fixed horizon (10 bars) — and there the verdict is <strong>FAILED</strong>. 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 451 trades, but only 7 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 7 episodes, what the data supports is a range from +26.13% to +109.53% 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 | passed | 3.97 | 2.45 | 7 |
| placebo | inconclusive | 1.96 | 2.45 | 7 |
| benchmark | failed | — | — | — |
| out of sample | inconclusive | — | — | — |
| multiple testing | passed | — | — | — |
- invariance451 signals across 750934 barsconcentration: +41.69% of the profit sits in the top 5% of trades — with the dates shuffled, +63.78% (fails above +50.00%)
- costsgross +67.831% · cost 0.200% · net +67.631% (t=3.97)
- placeboactual +67.631% · placebo -22.879% · excess +90.510% ± 46.197% (t=1.96 against a threshold of 2.45, 7 real groups, 22,550 sham dates, draw error ±4.227%)
- benchmarktechnique +67.63% · buy and hold (same horizon) +84.29% · excess -16.66%
- out of sampleasset half A: +42.714% (7 episodes — too small, does not count) · asset half B: +94.981% (7 episodes — too small, does not count) · liquid half (>= US$ 1,756,055/day): +65.779% (7 episodes — too small, does not count) · illiquid half: +69.426% (7 episodes — too small, does not count) · period 1/4 (2017-09-15 a 2020-11-05): +66.710% (3 episodes — too small, does not count) · period 2/4 (2020-11-06 a 2021-12-11): +101.072% (2 episodes — too small, does not count) · period 3/4 (2021-12-18 a 2023-06-06): +34.304% (2 episodes — too small, does not count) · period 4/4 (2023-06-09 a 2026-06-11): +68.733% (3 episodes — too small, does not count)
- multiple testing108 variation(s) tested · t=3.97 across 7 episodes (equivalent to t=3.18) · p≈0.0015 · false positives expected by chance ≈ 0.16
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
- ×0.00
- worst drawdown from the peak
- −100%
- days below the previous peak
- 2,000
- signals refused for lack of capital
- 63%
- paths where the account halved (out of 12)
- 12
Reproducibility
- period
- 2017-08-17 to 2026-07-28
- assets that traded
- 283
- variations tested before this one
- 108
- gross per trade
- +67.83%
- net per trade
- +67.63%
- exit rule
- the technique itself (held until the opposite signal)
- median duration bars
- 489
- mean duration bars
- 578.8
- max duration bars
- 2496
- fee per leg
- 0.001
- episode days
- 489
- seed
- 20260728
- RSI period
- 21
- oversold
- 25.0
- overbought
- 80.0
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 'rsi' family contains no combination with a real edge: the ones that look good are the tails of the grid itself. I expect the sweep's best `t` 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 'rsi' 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.