Every strategy here has a following, and most of what you can read about any of them rests on one chart someone picked. We ran all seven on the same five stocks with the same costs, in our own Backtest tab. Each result links to its backtest, so you can open it and check.
Just holding is a hard bar to beat on these five. They all went up a lot over these years, and Apple and Microsoft are on the list partly because they did so well.
How to read the table
"With the strategy" is what $10,000 became by following the rules, after commissions and slippage, on average across the five stocks. "Just holding all five", right before the table, is what it became if you bought each stock on the first day of the test and never sold.
Every test starts on Mar 26, 2024, the first day the golden cross could trade, so all seven face the same stretch of the market. The golden cross, RSI(2), MACD and Bollinger Band strategies work on daily prices and trade far less often than the three that trade at the open, so a handful of trades decides their result.
Just holding all five: $15,349 on average
| Strategy | With the strategy | Stocks it made money on | Trades per stock |
|---|---|---|---|
| Golden Cross | $11,951 | 4 | About 2 |
| RSI(2) pullback | $11,261 | 4 | About 24 |
| MACD crossover | $11,816 | 5 | About 26 |
| Bollinger Band breakout | $11,112 | 4 | About 12 |
| Opening range breakout | $10,203 | 3 | About 600 |
| First 5-minute candle breakout | $10,767 | 2 | About 626 |
| Gap fill fade | $11,128 | 4 | About 370 |
How we tested
Each strategy ran on SPY, QQQ, IWM, Apple and Microsoft from Mar 26, 2024 to Sep 30, 2026, using the rules as they were first published. Those rules are years older than our data, so nobody tuned them to these years.
Every test starts with $10,000 and puts the whole balance into each trade, with no borrowed money. Costs are the tester's defaults for stocks: half a cent a share in commission and a cent of slippage on every fill. Slippage is the gap between the price you wanted and the price you got.
We run every test again at the start of each month, and the date at the top says when this page was last updated.
Questions
Do any of these strategies beat buying and holding?
Only once in these tests. Over these dates the first 5-minute candle breakout on Microsoft ended ahead of holding Microsoft after costs, and every other strategy and stock ended behind.
Why do the results change so much from one stock to the next?
Some of these rules trade only a few times a year, so a few trades decide the whole result. Look at the trade count next to a result before you trust it.
Can I run these strategies myself?
Yes. A strategy's own page has a "Try it yourself" button that opens the Backtest tab with that strategy loaded. The daily strategies need more history than a free account can reach, so without a paid plan, open the backtest we ran instead.