Does the Awesome Oscillator strategy beat buy & hold on Broadcom? (AVGO · backtested honestly)
The Awesome Oscillator is the gap between a fast (5-bar) and a slow (34-bar) average of each bar's midpoint (the high-low average) - a momentum gauge that is positive when the fast average leads the slow one. This rule goes long while the oscillator is above its zero line and steps aside when it drops below, which is effectively a 5-vs-34 moving-average crossover on the midpoint price - a close cousin of the Moving Average Crossover and MACD already in this library. It is a trend/momentum rule: it lags turns and whipsaws in sideways markets. We deliberately trade only the plain zero-line cross and do not trade the 'saucer' or 'twin-peaks' chart patterns some versions add - those are subjective, non-mechanical shapes that invite curve-fitting rather than an honest, testable rule.
Over this period, Awesome Oscillator on Broadcom returned +177.3%, while simply buying and holding returned +642.9% — it lagged buy & hold by 466 points, with a worst drawdown of -38.4%. It traded 26 times and sat in cash about 39% 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 Awesome Oscillator on Broadcom 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/broadcom-awesome-oscillator-backtest" width="360" height="252" style="border:0;border-radius:12px;max-width:100%" loading="lazy" title="Does the Awesome Oscillator strategy beat buy & hold on Broadcom?"></iframe>- • The strategy line is Awesome Oscillator on Broadcom; the dashed line is simply buying and holding AVGO. 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