Honest guides to testing before you trade

Run a real backtest in your browser, then read the result without fooling yourself.

The four independent ways a good-looking backtest is just luck — and how to check each one.

A real minority of strategies beat buy & hold — and knowing the honest base rate is where finding one starts. See exactly how many did, across every famous asset, and what it means for your idea.

Lump sum usually beats dollar-cost averaging — but DCA still earns its place. The honest comparison, with the research and a free calculator.

Find out whether RSI beats buy & hold on the asset you care about — the classic strategy tested honestly across every famous asset, costs on, no look-ahead, every winner and loser shown. A real few beat; most lag.

A rough guide to Sharpe ratios — and why a very high backtest Sharpe (above ~3) is usually overfitting, not skill, while a 2-3 is merely suspicious. With a free calculator.

A 90%-win-rate strategy can bleed money and a 35% one can print — what decides it is expectancy, not how often you're right. With a free calculator.

The red flags in a backtest or track record someone's selling you — no costs, cherry-picked, no out-of-sample — and how to check a strategy for yourself, free.

Find out whether MACD — a trend rule, RSI's mirror image — beats buy & hold on your asset, tested honestly across every famous asset: costs on, no look-ahead, every winner and loser shown. A real few beat; most lag.

Heikin-Ashi makes the chart look calm — so we backtested it on the real price across every famous asset, costs on, no look-ahead, every winner and loser shown. A real few clear buy & hold; most trail it, and the smoothed candle hid the drawdown your account would have lived through.

Ichimoku looks like the most complete indicator there is — so we backtested its signature cloud rule on every famous asset, costs on, no look-ahead, every winner and loser shown. A real few clear buy & hold; most trail it, and the all-in-one system turns out to trade on a plain lagging trend signal.

There's no good max drawdown in the abstract — it's the price paid for a return. The honest, return-relative answer, with our live drawdown reality and a free recovery calculator.

Famous strategies drew down less than buy & hold at every reported percentile on US stocks in our frozen census — yet most still lagged on return. The honest trade: a shallower drawdown bought with a lower return is avoidance, not an edge (likely time out of the market — which this snapshot didn't decompose).

Survivorship bias is why a clean backtest can look better than it will ever perform — the names that went to zero get dropped. Our open census carries the same bias and says so, yet 721 of 839 judged backtests still lagged simply holding. What it is, which way it actually cuts, and how to spot it.

The same bands say buy weakness AND buy strength — opposite trades on one tool. See which (if either) actually beat buy & hold, backtested both ways honestly, every winner and loser shown.

Find out whether the fair value gap — the best-known Smart Money Concept, defined purely by closed-bar price rather than hindsight — beats buy & hold, backtested honestly across every famous asset. A real few beat; most lag, and we say why we decline the SMC that repaints.

A clear walkthrough of the TradingView Strategy Tester — plus the honest pitfalls every platform backtest shares, and a free way to re-score your trade list with costs on, vs buy & hold.

There's no single best — here's how to pick by the job you're doing, plus the five honesty checks that matter whatever you choose. We grade ourselves on the same checks, limits and all.

A real minority of strategies beat buy & hold — and you raise your chance of finding one the way good science does: test many distinct ideas, hold each to a bar fixed in advance, count them all, and take a bigger haircut the more you run. The honest search math, and the trap that fakes it.

A true few clear buy & hold; most trail it — and this page shows why the hand-drawn break won't hold still long enough to test. Break of structure, put to the test through its non-repainting cousin the Donchian breakout: fees and slippage on, no look-ahead, nothing cherry-picked.

An order block is a single candle said to mark where institutions filled — but the popular version is marked by eye after the move, so two traders circle two different candles and no backtest can settle which is right. The honest answer, the one mechanical version that could be tested, and the Smart Money Concept we do backtest across every famous asset.

A liquidity sweep rests on stop orders no chart shows and a label pinned on after the turn — so we tested the one half closed bars can: the failed breakdown that reclaims, across every famous asset, costs on, every winner and loser shown. A real few beat; most lag.

Supply and demand zone, order block, institutional zone — one hand-drawn rectangle under three names, and all three fail a backtest the same way because the rectangle's edges are set by eye. Here's why we decline the whole family, and the one Smart Money Concept defined by closed-bar price that we test honestly instead.

Technical analysis isn't one thing. We backtested the mechanical, closed-bar rules honestly across every famous asset — most lag simply holding, a real minority beat — and we're straight about the discretionary chart-reading no backtest can settle.

The “90% of day traders lose” line has no primary source. The honest answer, from the largest studies of real brokerage accounts: fewer than 1% of day traders earned a net profit reliably, year after year, and most who persisted lost money. A named, dated synthesis of the academic evidence — plus the one thing our own engine can and cannot test.

A squeeze looks like a coiled spring about to fire — so we backtested the TTM Squeeze on every famous asset, costs on, no look-ahead, every winner and loser shown. A few clear buy & hold; most trail it, because a squeeze only measures how quiet the range has been, never which way price breaks next.

Day trading versus swing trading, compared by what the evidence can actually show: the mechanical, daily-bar rules we backtested on real data — where most still lagged simply holding — and the day-trading research we can only cite, because our daily-bar engine can’t test intraday. The honest difference is testability, not a verdict on which pays, so you can weigh each side yourself.

There's no single “best” strategy anyone can honestly hand a beginner — even the famous named rules mostly lag simply holding. The honest first move is a method: start from buy & hold as the benchmark, then test a rule yourself.