INCONCLUSIVE

2-day RSI (14/10/90)

A very short-period oscillator captures the shortest-term excess: when price stretches to an extreme over two days, it snaps back. Entering on the close after the extreme and leaving one day later captures the give-back without staying exposed to whatever follows it — and the quick exit is the protection, because the indicator can sit at an extreme for a long time.

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

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

the fee eats more than half of the gross edge

Worst drawdown

−7%

1,015 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 7% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 1,015 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 409 coins, 1,423 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 268 of the 1,423. 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

+0.35% 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 1.02× what it started with. At its worst the account was worth 7% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 1,015 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 4.54% 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 0.69% 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 409 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 1,423 trades, but only 268 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 268 episodes, what the data supports is a range from -0.71% to +1.41% 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	0.29	1.97	268
placebo	inconclusive	0.78	1.97	268
benchmark	passed	—	—	—
out of sample	inconclusive	—	—	—
multiple testing	inconclusive	—	—	—

invariance1423 signals across 750934 barsconcentration: +31.75% of the profit sits in the top 5% of trades — with the dates shuffled, +36.34% (fails above +50.00%)
costsgross +0.354% · cost 0.200% · net +0.154% (t=0.29)
placeboactual +0.154% · placebo -0.272% · excess +0.426% ± 0.546% (t=0.78 against a threshold of 1.97, 268 real groups, 71,150 sham dates, draw error ±0.023%)
benchmarktechnique +0.15% · buy and hold (same horizon) -0.13% · excess +0.28%
out of sampleasset half A: -0.273% (t=-0.36, 206 episodes) · asset half B: +0.561% (t=0.94, 210 episodes) · liquid half (>= US$ 1,971,667/day): -0.004% (t=-0.01, 208 episodes) · illiquid half: +0.358% (t=0.43, 198 episodes) · period 1/4 (2017-11-26 a 2021-03-17): -0.041% (t=-0.05, 73 episodes) · period 2/4 (2021-03-18 a 2023-04-02): +0.040% (t=0.03, 67 episodes) · period 3/4 (2023-04-09 a 2024-03-07): +0.488% (t=0.31, 41 episodes) · period 4/4 (2024-03-08 a 2026-07-20): +0.130% (t=0.15, 89 episodes)
multiple testing1 variation(s) tested · t=0.29 across 268 episodes (equivalent to t=0.29) · p≈0.7754 · false positives expected by chance ≈ 0.78

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: ×1.02
worst drawdown from the peak: −7%
days below the previous peak: 1,015
signals refused for lack of capital: 0%
paths where the account halved (out of 12): 0

Reproducibility

period: 2017-08-17 to 2026-07-28
assets that traded: 409
variations tested before this one: 1
gross per trade: +0.35%
net per trade: +0.15%
exit rule: the technique itself (held until the opposite signal)
median duration bars: 1
mean duration bars: 1.0
max duration bars: 1
fee per leg: 0.001
episode days: 7
seed: 20260728
2-day RSI period: 14
2-day RSI lag: 2
oversold: 10.0
overbought: 90.0

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 with the 1-day change replaced by the 2-day one. Thresholds 10 and 90, enters at the next close, exits a day later. Completely specified, exit included — rare in this corpus. And it is the card I most want to see: the SOURCE ITSELF publishes that its profitability INVERTED in 1998 ('from 1970 to 1998 it was a good trend indicator; since 1998 it has been much better as mean reversion'). A technique whose sign flipped in the middle of the sample, published as a favourite. Prediction: control 5 will find the decay, and the scaling table the source publishes alongside is an adjustment made after the result — it will not be audited. Family prediction, filed before measuring: (1) the control that kills the most will be COST, and not invariance — unlike the `adaptativos` family, because these are discrete-signal oscillators, they turn over less and are not always in the market; (2) the DIVERGENCE techniques will come out mostly INCONCLUSIVE, because they require two aligned peaks and fire rarely; (3) none survives the family's Benjamini-Hochberg. I record that prediction (1) is the opposite of the one I made in `adaptativos` and that was confirmed there — if I get it wrong again in the same direction, that is a sign I am misreading the mechanism of cost, not the technique.

filed on 2026-07-31, before the number existed

The original, as it was filed

RSI trocando a variação de 1 dia pela de 2. Limiares 10 e 90, entra no fechamento seguinte, sai um dia depois. Completamente especificado, saída inclusive — raro neste corpus. ⚠️ E é o card que eu mais quero ver: a PRÓPRIA FONTE publica que a lucratividade dele INVERTEU em 1998 ('de 1970 a 1998 foi um bom indicador de tendência; depois de 1998 tem sido muito melhor como reversão à média'). Uma técnica cujo sinal trocou no meio da amostra, publicada como favorita. Previsão: o controle 5 vai encontrar o decaimento, e a tabela de escalonamento que a fonte publica junto é ajuste posterior ao resultado — não será auditada. Previsão da família, registrada antes de medir: (1) o controle que mais mata será o CUSTO, e não o invariante — diferente da família `adaptativos`, porque estes são osciladores de sinal discreto, giram menos e não são sempre-no-mercado; (2) as técnicas de DIVERGÊNCIA sairão majoritariamente INCONCLUSIVAS, porque exigem dois picos alinhados e disparam pouco; (3) nenhuma sobrevive ao Benjamini-Hochberg da família. ⚠️ Registro que a previsão (1) é o oposto da que fiz em `adaptativos` e que se confirmou lá — se eu errar de novo na mesma direção, é sinal de que estou lendo mal o mecanismo do custo, e não a técnica.

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.

2026-08-03INCONCLUSIVEopen ↗
this measurement →INCONCLUSIVE