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
- ✓invariance
- ?costs
- ?placebo
- ✓benchmark
- ?out of sample
- ?multiple testing
What was measured
How many of those trades actually count
What it paid, before any deductions
Where it stalled · the broker's fee
What this result does NOT say
- One market, one universe
- Measured on 106 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 23,251 trades, but only 324 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 324 episodes, what the data supports is a range from -0.56% to +1.05% 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 | 0.11 | 1.97 | 324 |
| placebo | inconclusive | 0.71 | 1.97 | 324 |
| benchmark | passed | — | — | — |
| out of sample | inconclusive | — | — | — |
| multiple testing | inconclusive | — | — | — |
- invariance23251 signals across 140496 bars
- costsgross +0.243% · cost 0.200% · net +0.043% (t=0.11)
- placeboactual +0.043% · placebo -0.249% · excess +0.292% ± 0.414% (t=0.71 against a threshold of 1.97, 324 real groups, 1,162,550 sham dates, draw error ±0.019%)
- benchmarktechnique +0.04% · buy and hold (same horizon) -0.13% · excess +0.17%
- out of sampleasset half A: +0.077% (t=0.21, 319 groups) · asset half B: +0.007% (t=0.01, 318 groups) · earlier period: +0.148% (t=0.27, 231 groups) · recent period: -0.062% (t=-0.17, 94 groups)
- multiple testing1 variation(s) tested · t=0.11 across 324 episodes (equivalent to t=0.10) · p≈0.9167 · false positives expected by chance ≈ 0.92
Reproducibility
- period
- 2017-08-17 to 2026-07-28
- assets that traded
- 106
- variations tested before this one
- 1
- gross per trade
- +0.24%
- net per trade
- +0.04%
- 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 2026-07-27 23:31 · 106 assets · 140,496 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.