FAILED

Validated structure with zone (R:R 2.5)

A three-step formula, tested thousands of times and profitable over the long run in every month tested, with no indicators and no patterns — price action only. Trading only with the trend greatly raises the probability of winning, and the reward-to-risk filter greatly raises profitability.

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

Net per trade

+1.16%

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

−20%

1,704 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 20% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 1,704 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 399 coins, 1,410 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 279 of the 1,410. 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

+1.36% 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 · 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.

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 1.17× what it started with. At its worst the account was worth 20% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 1,704 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 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 399 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 1,410 trades, but only 279 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 279 episodes, what the data supports is a range from -1.84% to +4.56% 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	passed	0.71	1.97	279
placebo	inconclusive	0.05	1.97	279
benchmark	passed	—	—	—
out of sample	inconclusive	—	—	—
multiple testing	inconclusive	—	—	—

invariance71% of the gross profit comes from 70 trades (5% of the total) — lottery
costsgross +1.360% · cost 0.200% · net +1.160% (t=0.71)
placeboactual +1.160% · placebo +1.071% · excess +0.089% ± 1.726% (t=0.05 against a threshold of 1.97, 279 real groups, 70,057 sham dates, draw error ±0.153%) — the status flips inside the placebo's own Monte Carlo error
benchmarktechnique +1.16% · buy and hold (same horizon) +0.53% · excess +0.63%
out of sampleasset half A: +0.404% (t=0.79, 221 episodes) · asset half B: +1.861% (t=0.90, 233 episodes) · liquid half (>= US$ 1,931,830/day): +1.670% (t=0.82, 221 episodes) · illiquid half: +0.704% (t=1.07, 217 episodes) · period 1/4 (2017-10-18 a 2022-12-29): +0.283% (t=0.08, 116 episodes) · period 2/4 (2022-12-31 a 2023-10-15): +0.947% (t=0.55, 38 episodes) · period 3/4 (2023-10-16 a 2025-06-12): -0.453% (t=-0.37, 74 episodes) · period 4/4 (2025-06-13 a 2026-07-27): +3.869% (t=3.33, 54 episodes)
multiple testing1 variation(s) tested · t=0.71 across 279 episodes (equivalent to t=0.71) · p≈0.4775 · false positives expected by chance ≈ 0.48

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: ×1.17
worst drawdown from the peak: −20%
days below the previous peak: 1,704
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: 399
variations tested before this one: 1
gross per trade: +1.36%
net per trade: +1.16%
exit rule: stop or target, whichever comes first
median duration bars: 2
max duration bars: 853
intrabar ambiguity: 0.1
fee per leg: 0.001
episode days: 7
min reward-to-risk: 2.5
min impulse: 0.05
max consolidation: 0.03
zone window: 40

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

First technique in the archive to come from a real transcript, and the first with a stop and a target. The claim is of consistent profitability 'in every month tested'. Specific, falsifiable prediction, written before any number: (a) the technique will produce FEW trades, because it demands validated structure + zone + reward-to-risk >= 2.5 simultaneously, and few trades mean the engine will probably not be able to tell the effect from noise — I expect INCONCLUSIVE, not FAILED; (b) the reward-to-risk >= 2.5 filter will not improve the result, because discarding trades by reward-to-risk cuts winners as much as losers — the same pattern as the volume filter, which cut 73% of the n and worsened the error bar; (c) intrabar ambiguity will be frequent, above 10% of trades, because a target at 2.5× the stop fits inside a crypto bar with ease.

filed on 2026-07-28, before the number existed

The original, as it was filed

Primeira técnica do corpus vinda de transcrição real, e a primeira com stop e alvo. A alegação é de lucratividade consistente 'em todos os meses testados'. Previsão específica e falsificável, escrita antes de qualquer número: (a) a técnica vai gerar POUCAS operações, porque exige estrutura validada + zona + R:R>=2,5 simultaneamente, e poucas operações significam que o motor provavelmente não conseguirá distinguir o efeito do ruído — espero INCONCLUSIVO, não REPROVADO; (b) o filtro de R:R>=2,5 não vai melhorar o resultado, porque descartar operações por razão risco-retorno corta tanto vencedoras quanto perdedoras — mesmo padrão do filtro de volume, que cortou 73% do n e piorou a barra de erro; (c) a ambiguidade intra-vela vai ser frequente, acima de 10% das operações, porque alvo a 2,5x o stop cabe numa vela de cripto com facilidade.

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.

2026-08-07FAILEDopen ↗
2026-08-03FAILEDopen ↗
2026-08-03FAILEDopen ↗
this measurement →FAILED
2026-07-28FAILEDopen ↗
2026-07-28FAILEDopen ↗