Does the Moving Average Crossover strategy beat buy & hold on Tesla? (TSLA · backtested honestly)
A rule that compares a fast moving average of price with a slow one and reads an up-trend while the fast average sits above the slow.
Over this period, Moving Average Crossover on Tesla returned -34.9%, while simply buying and holding returned +8.9% — it lagged buy & hold by 43.8 points, with a worst drawdown of -57.7%. It traded 4 times and sat in cash about 60% of the time. It's a mechanism you test.
It lagged buy & hold over this window — that's a result, and a backtest you can kill for free just did its job. Re-tuning this same idea until it looks better only adds another shot at looking good by luck, so the honest next move is a fresh one: test a different strategy on Tesla, or build your own — free. Most ideas die cheaply right here, and that's exactly how the rare one that holds up gets found.
Or stop here — walking away from an idea that didn't beat simply holding is a result, not a failure.
Run it yourself
Change the parameters and the window, then re-run — no account needed.
Change the rules? Open the Moving Average Crossover rules on Tesla in the no-code builder — the same rules tested here — and make them your own.
Open in the builder →Two real trades from this backtest
Shown at the modeled fills — entries at the next open; a stop at its level, or at that day's open if the day opened past it; a target at its level; costs on. A single trade is never a signal and says nothing about the next one — not the best or worst, a middling winner and a middling loser among the completed trades.
4 trades total — 1 winners, 3 losers (25% won). Below is one of each, not a scoreboard.
- Entry. A long entry fired; filled at the next open on 2025-09-17 at $415.75 — never the signal bar's own close.
- Held. 141 daily bars.
- Exit. Exited on 2026-04-10 at $346.29 (the exit rule fired (filled at the next open)).
- Result. -16.81% after costs.
The worst single trade in this whole test reached -26.10%.
- Entry. A long entry fired; filled at the next open on 2024-07-30 at $232.25 — never the signal bar's own close.
- Held. 178 daily bars.
- Exit. Exited on 2025-04-15 at $249.91 (the exit rule fired (filled at the next open)).
- Result. +7.50% after costs.
Trading costs + slippage (0.10%) are already deducted from every figure above. One trade is never the edge — it's the whole distribution (the win rate, the losers, the reality-check) that matters; this just makes the mechanics concrete. It describes the past; it is not a prediction.
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/tesla-moving-average-crossover-backtest" width="360" height="340" style="border:0;border-radius:12px;max-width:100%" loading="lazy" title="Does the Moving Average Crossover strategy beat buy & hold on Tesla?"></iframe>See which strategies actually beat buy & hold — and which only look like they do.
Free, in seconds, no sign-up. Put any famous strategy to the proof the honest way — real costs, every loss shown, measured against simply holding — so a tip, a guru, or your own hope can't fool you.
- Prove any strategy — free
- See if it's an edge, or just luck
- Read today's names that cleared every check
Put it to the proof the honest way — real costs, every loss, measured against simply holding. Free, no sign-up.
Prove it →A quality read to test yourself — never a tip, never a buy. The scarcity is the point: most names never clear the bar.
Open today's reads →Paste their exact claim and watch the honest engine put it to the test — free, losses and all.
Test the claim →an honest backtest — real costs on, measured against simply buying & holding
- • The strategy line is Moving Average Crossover on Tesla; the dashed line is simply buying and holding TSLA. 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. We 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
See what actually beats buy & hold — most don't, here are the rare few that do →