FAILED

Hochheimer Directional Movement (DM14, immediate entry)

Comparing how much of each bar fell outside the previous one, upwards and downwards, identifies the market's direction well enough to trade on it alone — no trend, no oscillator, no filter. Entering as soon as the indicators cross captures the whole move: if the signal is reliable, waiting for confirmation only costs a worse price.

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

Net per trade

+1.24%

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

−88%

1,940 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 88% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 1,940 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, 52,822 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 455 of the 52,822. 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

+1.44% 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. To give the measure: 68% of the profit came from the top 5% of trades, and the same technique with its dates shuffled would concentrate 47%. 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 capital would have ended at 2.14× what it started with. At its worst the account was worth 88% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 1,940 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

66% 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 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 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 52,822 trades, but only 455 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 455 episodes, what the data supports is a range from -0.70% to +3.58% 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	inconclusive	1.13	1.97	455
placebo	inconclusive	1.20	1.97	455
benchmark	passed	—	—	—
out of sample	inconclusive	—	—	—
multiple testing	inconclusive	—	—	—

invariance68% of the gross profit comes from 2641 trades (5% of the total) — lotteryconcentration: +68.41% of the profit sits in the top 5% of trades — with the dates shuffled, +47.09% (fails above +50.00%)
costsgross +1.436% · cost 0.200% · net +1.236% (t=1.13) · the range runs from -0.905% to +3.376%
placeboactual +1.236% · placebo -0.073% · excess +1.308% ± 1.094% (t=1.20 against a threshold of 1.97, 455 real groups, 2,641,100 sham dates, draw error ±0.020%)
benchmarktechnique +1.24% · buy and hold (same horizon) +0.50% · excess +0.74%
out of sampleasset half A: +1.046% (t=1.10, 436 episodes) · asset half B: +1.435% (t=1.25, 446 episodes) · liquid half (>= US$ 2,066,613/day): +1.745% (t=1.63, 454 episodes) · illiquid half: +0.604% (t=0.51, 410 episodes) · period 1/4 (2017-08-31 a 2022-05-03): +6.854% (t=3.36, 234 episodes) · period 2/4 (2022-05-04 a 2023-12-20): -0.009% (t=-0.01, 86 episodes) · period 3/4 (2023-12-21 a 2025-04-28): +0.179% (t=0.20, 71 episodes) · period 4/4 (2025-04-29 a 2026-07-27): -2.067% (t=-4.50, 66 episodes)
multiple testing2 variation(s) tested · t=1.13 across 455 episodes (equivalent to t=1.13) · p≈0.2578 · false positives expected by chance ≈ 0.52

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: ×2.14
worst drawdown from the peak: −88%
days below the previous peak: 1,940
signals refused for lack of capital: 66%
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: 2
gross per trade: +1.44%
net per trade: +1.24%
exit rule: the technique itself (held until the opposite signal)
median duration bars: 6
mean duration bars: 13.9
max duration bars: 289
fee per leg: 0.001
episode days: 7
seed: 20260728
period: 14
variant: immediate
stop level: fixed

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

An always-in-the-market system on the 14-period directional indicators: long while the PDI is above the MDI, short while it is below. The source defines it in TWO ways and compares them — immediate entry at the crossover, and entry only when price goes on to take out the high (or low) of the crossover bar. Two variants of one technique, two cards, one claim. The sell rule of the immediate variant is printed with the BUY condition; we use the mirror, which is how the other variant prints it. The stop is intra-bar: the condition is evaluated causally, but entry goes off at the close, which makes it more expensive than in the source. We audit the published period of 14, not the best of the sweep the source itself runs over 20 periods × 5 markets — and about which it concludes that it does not meet the conditions of a robust system. Family-level prediction, recorded before measuring: (1) the gravedigger will be the INVARIANT in crypto and the BENCHMARK in forex — the two auditable techniques are always-in-the-market reversal systems, the same mechanics as `adaptativos`, where the invariant killed 7 of 10 in crypto and the benchmark 6 of 10 in forex; (2) Hochheimer's variant WITH CONFIRMATION will survive cost better than the immediate one, because it turns over half as much (485 reversals against 998 over 13,607 bars); (3) the MIRROR reading of the 2-day rules will do worse than the LITERAL one, because it stays in the market 100% of the time and on 32.8% of the bars it buys merely because the average directional index is rising — a condition blind to direction, followed by −0.332% over five bars; (4) none survives the family's Benjamini-Hochberg. And it is on record that a BH over 4 claims is weak by construction: the family is small because the section is small, not because anything was left out.

filed on 2026-08-03, before the number existed

The original, as it was filed

Sistema sempre no mercado sobre os indicadores direcionais de 14 períodos: comprado enquanto o PDI está acima do MDI, vendido enquanto está abaixo. A fonte o define de DUAS maneiras e as compara — entrada imediata no cruzamento, e entrada só quando o preço vai buscar a máxima (ou mínima) da vela do cruzamento. Duas variantes de uma técnica, dois cards, uma alegação. ⚠️ A regra da venda da variante imediata está impressa com a condição da COMPRA; usamos o espelho, que é como a outra variante a imprime. ⚠️ O stop é intra-vela: a condição é avaliada de forma causal, mas a entrada sai pelo fechamento, o que a encarece em relação à fonte. ⚠️ Auditamos o período 14 publicado, não o melhor da varredura que a própria fonte roda em 20 períodos × 5 mercados — e sobre a qual ela mesma conclui que não satisfaz as condições de um sistema robusto. Previsão da família, registrada antes de medir: (1) o coveiro será o INVARIANTE em cripto e o BENCHMARK em forex — as duas técnicas auditáveis são sistemas de reversão sempre no mercado, a mesma mecânica de `adaptativos`, onde o invariante matou 7 de 10 em cripto e o benchmark 6 de 10 em forex; (2) a variante de Hochheimer COM CONFIRMAÇÃO sobreviverá ao custo melhor que a imediata, porque gira metade (485 inversões contra 998 em 13.607 velas); (3) a leitura ESPELHO das regras de 2 dias irá pior que a LITERAL, porque fica no mercado 100% do tempo e em 32,8% das velas compra só porque o índice direcional médio está subindo — condição cega para direção, seguida de −0,332% em cinco velas; (4) nenhuma sobrevive ao Benjamini-Hochberg da família. ⚠️ E fica registrado que o BH sobre 4 alegações é fraco por construção: a família é pequena porque a seção é pequena, não porque alguma coisa foi deixada de fora.

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.

2026-08-03FAILEDopen ↗
this measurement →FAILED