FAILED

Three inside up/down

A harami confirmed by the third candle removes the false signal.

Measured in forex — EUR/USD and GBP/USD · daily bars built from 15m · 1 pip spread (~0.009% per round trip) · no survivorship bias

Net per trade

−0.02%

after fees

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

Died at

benchmark

loses to buy and hold (same horizon)

Worst drawdown

−0%

2,234 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 0% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 2,234 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 2020-01-01 to 2026-06-26. It found trades in 2 coins, 72 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 63 of the 72. 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

-0.01% per trade. Look at the sign: the average is already negative before any fee is taken out. The controls below still hold, but here they are not knocking down an edge — they are confirming there never was one.

Why it did not pass — it died here · against buying and holding

We compare it against simply buying and holding for the same stretch of time, with no rule at all. Sitting still paid more. The technique takes work, demands attention, and delivers less than doing nothing.

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 1.00× what it started with. At its worst the account was worth 0% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 2,234 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 0.65% 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 0.09% 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 2 spot currency pairs. 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 2020-01-01 to 2026-06-26. 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 a 1.0 pip spread, crossed once. 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 72 trades, but only 63 independent market episodes: trades that overlap in time are not independent observations, and counting them as if they were inflates any result. It is the smaller number that governs the arithmetic. With 63 episodes, what the data supports is a range from -0.46% to +0.44% 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	-0.08	2.00	63
placebo	inconclusive	-0.09	2.00	63
benchmark	failed	—	—	—
out of sample	inconclusive	—	—	—
multiple testing	inconclusive	—	—	—

invariance72 signals across 4055 barsconcentration: +32.13% of the profit sits in the top 5% of trades — with the dates shuffled, +29.57% (fails above +50.00%)
costsgross -0.009% · cost 0.008% · net -0.018% (t=-0.08) · the range reaches +0.432%
placeboactual -0.018% · placebo +0.004% · excess -0.021% ± 0.227% (t=-0.09 against a threshold of 2.00, 63 real groups, 3,600 sham dates, draw error ±0.027%) — the status flips inside the placebo's own Monte Carlo error
benchmarktechnique -0.02% · buy and hold (same horizon) +0.01% · excess -0.03%
out of sampleasset half A: -0.018% (t=-0.08, 33 episodes) · asset half B: -0.017% (t=-0.05, 36 episodes) · liquid half (>= US$ 0/day): -0.018% (t=-0.08, 63 episodes) · period 1/4 (2020-01-17 a 2021-10-01): +0.422% (t=0.66, 18 episodes) · period 2/4 (2021-10-28 a 2023-06-04): -0.481% (t=-1.10, 14 episodes) · period 3/4 (2023-06-08 a 2024-12-02): +0.142% (t=0.46, 16 episodes) · period 4/4 (2024-12-12 a 2026-04-29): -0.153% (t=-0.73, 15 episodes)
multiple testing1 variation(s) tested · t=-0.08 across 63 episodes (equivalent to t=-0.08) · p≈0.9391 · false positives expected by chance ≈ 0.94

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: ×1.00
worst drawdown from the peak: −0%
days below the previous peak: 2,234
signals refused for lack of capital: 0%
paths where the account halved (out of 12): 0

Reproducibility

period: 2020-01-01 to 2026-06-26
assets that traded: 2
variations tested before this one: 1
gross per trade: −0.01%
net per trade: −0.02%
exit rule: the auditor's fixed horizon (10 bars)
horizon bars: 10
spread pips: 1.0
episode days: 12
seed: 20260728
trend bars: 10

Twelve Data forex (15m aggregated to 1d) · collected on 2026-07-25 · 2 assets · 4,055 bars · 2020-01-01 to 2026-06-26

Hypothesis, filed before the result

Candlestick patterns are coincidences of four numbers inside a window of one to five bars, and they are far too frequent to carry information. Specific, falsifiable prediction: the PLACEBO will return approximately the same as the technique in almost all of them, and none will survive the family's multiple-testing correction. If any survives the Benjamini-Hochberg correction across the 24 patterns, my reading of the class is wrong. Measured in FOREX (EUR/USD and GBP/USD, daily bars built from 15m), not in crypto: only 2 pairs over 6.5 years against 540 pairs over 9 years, a round trip costs about 20× less (a 1 pip spread against 0.1% commission per leg), and there is no survivorship bias, because a currency pair does not get delisted. This is a REPLICATION of claims already tested in crypto — not a new discovery — and the multiple-testing count treats it as such.

filed on 2026-07-29, before the number existed

The original, as it was filed

Padrões de vela são coincidências de quatro números numa janela de uma a cinco velas, e são frequentes demais para carregar informação. Previsão específica e falsificável: o PLACEBO renderá aproximadamente o mesmo que a técnica em quase todos, e nenhum sobreviverá à correção de múltiplos testes da família. Se algum sobreviver ao Benjamini-Hochberg de 24 padrões, minha leitura da classe está errada. ⚠️ Medido em FOREX (EUR/USD e GBP/USD, diário agregado de 15m), e não em cripto: são apenas 2 pares em 6,5 anos contra 540 pares em 9 anos, o custo do giro é ~20× menor (spread de 1 pip contra comissão de 0,1% por lado) e não há viés de sobrevivência, porque par de moeda não é deslistado. Esta é uma REPLICAÇÃO das alegações já testadas em cripto — não uma descoberta nova —, e a conta de múltiplos testes a trata como tal.

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
2026-07-29FAILEDopen ↗