FAILED

Short-MA pullback hunter (MA7/RSI6)

Fast, very short-term bounces validated by a confluence of price and oscillator crossovers (recent bullish strength) occur predominantly within a structural uptrend. The touch of a longer average (SMA25) marks the return to the move's natural resistance, and taking profit at a fixed reward-to-risk protects you when the SMA25 does not form in time — the technique captures the quick give-back without open-ended exposure.

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

Net per trade

−6.68%

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

−100%

3,161 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 100% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 3,161 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 2017-08-17 to 2026-07-28. It found trades in 530 coins, 26,420 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 29 of the 26,420. 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

-6.48% 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 · 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. To give the measure: 72% of the profit came from the top 5% of trades, and the same technique with its dates shuffled would concentrate 44%. The control fails above 50%.

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 3,161 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

12% 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 530 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: stop or target, whichever comes first. 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 26,420 trades, but only 29 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 29 episodes, what the data supports is a range from -7.13% to -5.83% 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	failed	-20.94	2.05	29
placebo	failed	-7.28	2.05	29
benchmark	failed	—	—	—
out of sample	failed	—	—	—
multiple testing	passed	—	—	—

invariance72% of the gross profit comes from 1321 trades (5% of the total) — lotteryconcentration: +71.57% of the profit sits in the top 5% of trades — with the dates shuffled, +43.71% (fails above +50.00%)
costsgross -6.478% · cost 0.200% · net -6.678% (t=-20.94)
placeboactual -6.678% · placebo -3.505% · excess -3.174% ± 0.436% (t=-7.28 against a threshold of 2.05, 29 real groups, 1,320,623 sham dates, draw error ±0.007%)
benchmarktechnique -6.68% · buy and hold (same horizon) -0.12% · excess -6.56%
out of sampleasset half A: -6.451% (t=-19.90, 29 episodes) · asset half B: -6.919% (t=-16.28, 28 episodes) · liquid half (>= US$ 2,072,457/day): -6.692% (t=-20.49, 29 episodes) · illiquid half: -6.663% (t=-16.83, 25 episodes) · period 1/4 (2017-12-01 a 2021-10-28): -7.981% (t=-15.17, 13 episodes) · period 2/4 (2021-10-29 a 2023-11-09): -6.709% (8 episodes — too small, does not count) · period 3/4 (2023-11-10 a 2024-11-15): -5.955% (4 episodes — too small, does not count) · period 4/4 (2024-11-16 a 2026-07-27): -6.073% (7 episodes — too small, does not count)
multiple testing1 variation(s) tested · t=-20.94 across 29 episodes (equivalent to t=-20.04) · p≈0.0000 · false positives expected by chance ≈ 0.00

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: 3,161
signals refused for lack of capital: 12%
paths where the account halved (out of 12): 12

Reproducibility

period: 2017-08-17 to 2026-07-28
assets that traded: 530
variations tested before this one: 1
gross per trade: −6.48%
net per trade: −6.68%
exit rule: stop or target, whichever comes first
median duration bars: 1
max duration bars: 28
intrabar ambiguity: 16.8
target: TRAILING — recomputed on every bar
pricing error: filled at the LEVEL, not at the close — and the error of any pricing approximation scales with the INVERSE of the duration above (measured on 2026-08-04: −0.640 p.p. on a 3-bar technique, +0.006 p.p. on an 85-bar one)
fee per leg: 0.001
episode days: 112
seed: 20260728
SMA short: 7
SMA medium: 25
SMA long: 99
RSI period: 6
target multiple: 1.5

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

Fast very-short-term pullbacks validated by the confluence of a price crossover and an oscillator (recent bullish strength) occur predominantly within a bullish structural trend. The touch of a longer average (SMA25) marks the return to the move's natural resistance, and taking profit at a fixed risk-reward protects the trade when the SMA25 does not form in time.

filed on 2026-08-08, before the number existed

The original, as it was filed

Repiques rápidos de curtíssimo prazo validados por confluência de cruzamento de preço e oscilador (força de alta recente) ocorrem predominantemente em tendência estrutural de alta. O toque em uma média mais longa (SMA25) marca o retorno à resistência natural do movimento, e a realização em risco-retorno fixo protege quando a SMA25 não se forma a tempo.

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 held in the other market too, on independent data.

cryptoFAILED← this one
cryptoFAILEDopen that card

This claim has been audited once — there is no history to compare against.