INCONCLUSIVE

Bullish/Bearish engulfing

The engulfing shows one side taking control of the fight in a single stroke, and it is the most reliable reversal pattern in price action — with no indicator at all, only price.

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

Net per trade

+0.20%

after fees

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

Stalled at

placebo

the excess over the placebo cannot be told apart from noise

Worst drawdown

−59%

1,892 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 59% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 1,892 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 540 coins, 123,682 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 325 of the 123,682. 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

+0.40% 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 · against randomly drawn dates

We ran the whole thing again entering on randomly drawn dates and changing nothing else: same number of trades, same holding time, same assets. The gap between the technique and chance came out too small to assert anything. It is not that the signal is useless — it is that, with this much data, it cannot be told apart from drawing dates at random.

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 0.96× what it started with. But that number is not trustworthy: draw the order in which the signals arrive and it ranges from 0.70× to 1.45×. That is the draw talking, not the technique. At its worst the account was worth 59% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 1,892 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

80% 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 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 540 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 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 123,682 trades, but only 325 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 325 episodes, what the data supports is a range from -0.20% to +1.01% 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	0.66	1.97	325
placebo	inconclusive	1.30	1.97	325
benchmark	passed	—	—	—
out of sample	inconclusive	—	—	—
multiple testing	inconclusive	—	—	—

invariance123682 signals across 750934 bars
costsgross +0.404% · cost 0.200% · net +0.204% (t=0.66)
placeboactual +0.204% · placebo -0.204% · excess +0.408% ± 0.313% (t=1.30 against a threshold of 1.97, 325 real groups, 6,184,100 sham dates, draw error ±0.009%)
benchmarktechnique +0.20% · buy and hold (same horizon) +0.03% · excess +0.18%
out of sampleasset half A: +0.301% (t=1.07, 325 episodes) · asset half B: +0.104% (t=0.16, 314 episodes) · liquid half (>= US$ 2,066,613/day): +0.309% (t=0.95, 325 episodes) · illiquid half: +0.084% (t=0.27, 301 episodes) · period 1/4 (2017-08-18 a 2022-05-31): +0.918% (t=1.72, 174 episodes) · period 2/4 (2022-06-01 a 2023-12-02): -0.380% (t=-1.16, 56 episodes) · period 3/4 (2023-12-03 a 2025-04-05): +0.327% (t=0.63, 50 episodes) · period 4/4 (2025-04-06 a 2026-07-18): -0.048% (t=-0.12, 48 episodes)
multiple testing1 variation(s) tested · t=0.66 across 325 episodes (equivalent to t=0.66) · p≈0.5109 · false positives expected by chance ≈ 0.51

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: ×0.96(×0.70–×1.45 depending on the drawn ordering)
worst drawdown from the peak: −59%
days below the previous peak: 1,892
signals refused for lack of capital: 80%
paths where the account halved (out of 12): 0

Reproducibility

period: 2017-08-17 to 2026-07-28
assets that traded: 540
variations tested before this one: 1
gross per trade: +0.40%
net per trade: +0.20%
exit rule: the auditor's fixed horizon (10 bars)
horizon bars: 10
fee per leg: 0.001
episode days: 10

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

A candlestick pattern is the most fragile claim in the battery: an engulfing is a coincidence of four numbers, and it is far too frequent to carry information. A specific, falsifiable prediction: the PLACEBO will yield almost the same as the technique, because there is nothing special about the dates on which the pattern appears. I expect a gross edge indistinguishable from zero.

the filing date is not in this audit's record

The original, as it was filed

Padrão de vela é a alegação mais frágil da bateria: um engolfo é uma coincidência de quatro números, e é frequente demais para carregar informação. Previsão específica e falsificável: o PLACEBO vai render quase o mesmo que a técnica, porque não há nada de especial nas datas em que o padrão aparece. Espero vantagem bruta indistinguível de zero.

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 ↗
2026-08-03INCONCLUSIVEopen ↗
this measurement →INCONCLUSIVE
2026-07-28INCONCLUSIVEopen ↗
2026-07-28INCONCLUSIVEopen ↗
2026-07-28INCONCLUSIVEopen ↗