Does the On-Balance Volume strategy beat buy & hold on UnitedHealth Group? (UNH · backtested honestly)
On-Balance Volume is a running total that adds volume on up-days and subtracts it on down-days, so the line rises when up-day volume dominates.
Over this period, On-Balance Volume on UnitedHealth Group returned -28.3%, while simply buying and holding returned +1.8% — it lagged buy & hold by 30.1 points, with a worst drawdown of -48.9%. It traded 25 times and sat in cash about 55% of the time. It's a mechanism you test — not a recommendation.
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 UnitedHealth Group, 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.
Have your own idea for UnitedHealth Group? Build and honestly test your own strategy — no code, costs on, measured against buy & hold.
Build your own on UnitedHealth Group →Two real trades from this backtest
Shown at the modeled fills — entries at the next open, protective stops and targets at their 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.
25 trades total — 11 winners, 14 losers (44% won). Below is one of each, not a scoreboard.
- Entry. A long entry fired; filled at the next open on 2024-09-03 at $592.52 — never the signal bar's own close.
- Held. 15 daily bars.
- Exit. Exited on 2024-09-24 at $570.82 (the exit rule fired (filled at the next open)).
- Result. -3.76% after costs.
The worst single trade in this whole test reached -19.37%.
- Entry. A long entry fired; filled at the next open on 2023-03-29 at $475.11 — never the signal bar's own close.
- Held. 32 daily bars.
- Exit. Exited on 2023-05-15 at $491.40 (the exit rule fired (filled at the next open)).
- Result. +3.33% 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/unitedhealth-obv-backtest" width="360" height="340" style="border:0;border-radius:12px;max-width:100%" loading="lazy" title="Does the On-Balance Volume strategy beat buy & hold on UnitedHealth Group?"></iframe>- • The strategy line is On-Balance Volume on UnitedHealth Group; the dashed line is simply buying and holding UNH. 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
See what actually beats buy & hold — most don't, here are the rare few that do →