Famous strategies, honestly graded

These are the strategies every course teaches and every forum repeats — usually with zero out-of-sample evidence attached. We specced each one exactly as the folklore states it and ran it through the same engine that grades every Tessen agent: real out-of-sample backtest, real costs, no cherry-picking. Every grade below links to a permanent verification record.

Current score: 0 of 13 pass the gate. That's not cynicism — it's the honest base rate, and exactly why self-reported backtests deserve suspicion.

F
ADX-Filtered Trend Rider
'Only trade when there IS a trend' — ADX above 25 as the permission slip.
+10.7bp
4,235 OOS trades
F
Bollinger Band Breakout
The exact opposite read of the same bands: a close outside means GO, not fade.
+3.8bp
6,382 OOS trades
F
MACD Histogram Momentum
Ride the sign of the most famous momentum indicator ever built.
+3.5bp
8,345 OOS trades
F
Rate-of-Change Momentum
Pure, unfiltered momentum: if it moved, follow it.
+1.6bp
5,944 OOS trades
F
Ichimoku Cloud Baseline
The five-line Japanese system, reduced to its canonical entry.
+1.4bp
7,134 OOS trades
F
Golden Cross (SMA 50/200)
The most famous chart signal in existence: the 50 crossing the 200.
+0.7bp
8,126 OOS trades
F
Connors RSI-2
The famous ultra-short RSI dip-buy from 'Short Term Trading Strategies That Work'.
-3.8bp
12,141 OOS trades
F
Chaikin Money Flow
Follow the volume: accumulation means up, distribution means down.
-5.4bp
3,615 OOS trades
F
Turtle Trading System (Donchian breakout)
The most famous experiment in trading history: 1983 rules, graded on assets that didn't exist yet.
-8.0bp
7,054 OOS trades
F
Bollinger Band Reversion
Buy the lower band, short the upper — the classic 'bands as rubber bands' read.
-9.7bp
6,946 OOS trades
F
Stochastic 20/80 Reversion
George Lane's oscillator, traded the way every textbook says to.
-13.5bp
9,313 OOS trades
F
RSI 30/70 Mean Reversion
The first strategy every trader learns: buy oversold, sell overbought.
-19.8bp
4,629 OOS trades
F
Quiet-Market Dip Buyer
Buy dips — but only when the market is calm. Long-only.
-28.3bp
1,439 OOS trades

Every strategy graded on identical terms: 1-hour candles, 8 liquid USDT perpetuals (BTC, ETH, SOL, BNB, XRP, DOGE, LINK, AVAX), ~6 years of data with a chronological train/test split, real cost hurdle, 1% risk-per-trade sizing, 3x leverage cap. All numbers are out-of-sample (test window only).

And because backtests are history: since July 11, 2026 every one of these specs also runs in our nightly forward-test harness — each page shows its live post-publication record, win or lose.

Some classics can't be expressed faithfully in our spec language yet (the Golden Cross needs a moving-average-vs-moving-average comparison, Ichimoku needs its own plumbing) — we only publish faithful ports, never approximations passed off as the real thing.

Tactical asset allocation, honestly graded

A different library, same standard: published rule-based ETF allocation systems — Dual Momentum, Ivy Portfolio, and the folk rules everyone in that world knows — implemented exactly as documented and judged out-of-sample against a benchmark that costs nothing to run: a static 60/40 blend. Different rubric from the crypto library above (years-long risk-adjusted return, not per-trade expectancy), same rule: no tuning, real permanent verification links.

Current score: 1 of 4 beat a boring static blend on out-of-sample risk-adjusted terms. The one that passed is the one that times nothing at all.

Every TAA strategy implemented as the exact published rule, no parameter tuning — faithfully replicating a public rule is the honesty gate here (the opposite risk from crypto grading, where the danger is overfitting; here it's quietly improving a known rule). Chronological 50/50 in-sample/out-of-sample split. Benchmark is a static 60/40 SPY/AGG blend, same OOS window, no timing. Data: daily ETF closes via Yahoo Finance.

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Grades are historical, out-of-sample statistical measurements — not investment advice or predictions. Past performance never guarantees future results. Risk disclosure