FAILED
Tweezer top/bottom
Two extremes at the same price mark support or resistance tested and honoured.
Measured in crypto — Binance spot · 540 pairs, delisted ones included · 0.2% per round trip
Net per trade
−0.66%
after feesThe fee is charged on both legs: every trade pays to open and pays to close.
Died at
placebo
random dates pay the same or more
Worst drawdown
−73%
2,798 days underwaterHow 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 73% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 2,798 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 2017-08-17 to 2026-07-28. It found trades in 540 coins, 16,978 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 308 of the 16,978. 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
-0.46% 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 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. Chance did as well or better. That means the signal was not picking the moment: any moment would have done the same.
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 0.30× what it started with. At its worst the account was worth 73% less than its own best previous moment, and it spent 2,798 days below that peak. In 12 of the 12 paths tested, the account fell to less than half of what it started with.
The account would not fit every signal
11% 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 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 16,978 trades, but only 308 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 308 episodes, what the data supports is a range from -1.15% to +0.22% 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 | -1.92 | 1.97 | 308 |
| placebo | failed | -1.08 | 1.97 | 308 |
| benchmark | failed | — | — | — |
| out of sample | failed | — | — | — |
| multiple testing | passed | — | — | — |
- invariance16978 signals across 750934 barsconcentration: +44.49% of the profit sits in the top 5% of trades — with the dates shuffled, +44.10% (fails above +50.00%)
- costsgross -0.464% · cost 0.200% · net -0.664% (t=-1.92) · the range reaches +0.017%
- placeboactual -0.664% · placebo -0.281% · excess -0.383% ± 0.353% (t=-1.08 against a threshold of 1.97, 308 real groups, 848,900 sham dates, draw error ±0.018%)
- benchmarktechnique -0.66% · buy and hold (same horizon) +0.03% · excess -0.69%
- out of sampleasset half A: -0.788% (t=-2.08, 299 episodes) · asset half B: -0.547% (t=-1.53, 304 episodes) · liquid half (>= US$ 2,066,613/day): -0.551% (t=-1.67, 308 episodes) · illiquid half: -0.812% (t=-1.59, 281 episodes) · period 1/4 (2017-09-02 a 2022-04-08): -0.664% (t=-1.13, 151 episodes) · period 2/4 (2022-04-09 a 2023-11-09): -1.532% (t=-2.69, 58 episodes) · period 3/4 (2023-11-10 a 2025-05-30): -0.297% (t=-0.41, 57 episodes) · period 4/4 (2025-05-31 a 2026-07-18): -0.161% (t=-0.26, 43 episodes)
- multiple testing1 variation(s) tested · t=-1.92 across 308 episodes (equivalent to t=-1.91) · p≈0.0561 · false positives expected by chance ≈ 0.06
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
- ×0.30
- worst drawdown from the peak
- −73%
- days below the previous peak
- 2,798
- signals refused for lack of capital
- 11%
- paths where the account halved (out of 12)
- 12
Reproducibility
- period
- 2017-08-17 to 2026-07-28
- assets that traded
- 540
- variations tested before this one
- 1
- gross per trade
- −0.46%
- net per trade
- −0.66%
- exit rule
- the auditor's fixed horizon (10 bars)
- horizon bars
- 10
- fee per leg
- 0.001
- episode days
- 10
- seed
- 20260728
- trend bars
- 10
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
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.
filed on 2026-07-28, 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.
Pre-registration exists to keep prediction apart from rationalisation: written after the number, every hypothesis is right.