Does the On-Balance Volume strategy beat buy & hold on Alphabet (Google)? (GOOGL · backtested honestly)
On-Balance Volume keeps a running total that adds the day's volume when the price closes up and subtracts it when the price closes down, so the line rises when volume is flowing in on up-days ('accumulation') and falls when it flows out on down-days. This rule goes long while a fast average of that line is above a slow average of it (the flow is turning up) and steps aside when it turns down - effectively a moving-average crossover of the volume-flow line, a cousin of the Moving Average Crossover already in this library. It is a trend/momentum rule that lags turns and whipsaws in sideways markets. The running total has no natural zero - its starting point is arbitrary - so only the crossing of its own averages is traded, never its absolute level, and we deliberately do not trade OBV-versus-price 'divergence', which is a subjective, non-mechanical read. Volume itself can be noisy or patchy: on a thin or volume-less feed the line carries little information.
Over this period, On-Balance Volume on Alphabet (Google) returned +38.4%, while simply buying and holding returned +144.2% — it lagged buy & hold by 106 points, with a worst drawdown of -34.9%. It traded 24 times and sat in cash about 45% of the time. It's a mechanism you test — not a recommendation.
That's the past — settled, free, and the weakest proof there is. The honest next move isn't to trust it — it's to try to break it: does the edge hold across nearby settings and time, or was it luck? Most strategies that look good here don't survive that, and most should stop there. The few that do still haven't met a future nobody has lived yet. Forward-test On-Balance Volume on Alphabet (Google) on paper — zero hindsight, losses and all — and get a mechanical alert the day it signals (you trade on your own broker). A hindsight-free track record can only be built by time passing, so the only way to have proof in three months is to start today.
Or stop here — a backtest you can kill for free has already done its job. And if it keeps surviving, that's the rare idea worth trusting with real money.
Run it yourself
Change the parameters and the window, then re-run — no account needed.
A live badge that re-runs itself and links back here. Free to embed on any blog, newsletter or forum — it shows the honest result, beat or lagged.
<iframe src="https://stratsemble.com/embed/alphabet-obv-backtest" width="360" height="252" style="border:0;border-radius:12px;max-width:100%" loading="lazy" title="Does the On-Balance Volume strategy beat buy & hold on Alphabet (Google)?"></iframe>- • The strategy line is On-Balance Volume on Alphabet (Google); the dashed line is simply buying and holding GOOGL. Beating the dashed line is the whole point — many strategies don't.
- • Max drawdown is the worst peak-to-trough fall you'd have sat through. A higher return with a much deeper drawdown is not obviously better.
- • Every fill assumes next-open execution with costs & slippage on — no acting on prices you couldn't have known.
- • A small number of trades means a small sample. Treat a great-looking result on a handful of trades with suspicion.
This is a hypothetical backtest of a well-known mechanism on past data. It is not advice, not a prediction, and not a claim that the strategy works. I hold no funds and place no orders. The value here is the ability to test an idea honestly — see where it would have helped, and where it would have hurt — before you ever risk real money on your own broker.
How this is computed → · who's behind it · where a backtest fits