SPECIMEN 011 / STRATEGY AUTOPSYCRYPTO · OUT-OF-SAMPLE TESTED
The Ichimoku Cloud
The cloud gets mocked as chart-astrology. But “long only above the cloud” actually held up — one of the few that did.
Momentum
Spot · daily · Ichimoku(9/26/52)
10 coins · out-of-sample
Survived
The claimAbove the cloud you're long. Trend confirmed.
The realityActually beat holding on 7 of 10 coins, and stayed ahead out-of-sample. Rare, and real.
Verdict Survived the honest test
01 The seduction
Ichimoku layers five lines and a shaded “cloud” onto the chart. The simplest read: when price is above the cloud, the trend is up and you're long; below it, you're out. It looks impossibly complicated, which is half its appeal and half its mockery.
The Ichimoku Cloud · BTC
+1099%
$1,000 → $11,990 vs $8,735 holding
Beat buy & hold
7 / 10
a real majority
Out-of-sample
9 / 10
held up in recent years
Simulated on real historical prices, fees included, and past results are not the future. See how we grade →
02 The one line that ends it
Survived
The Ichimoku Cloud vs. doing nothinglog scale
The strategyBuy & hold (doing nothing)
The Ichimoku Cloud beat holding on 7 of 10 majors — and 9 of 10 out-of-sample. Same money, same window, fees included — measured against simply buying Bitcoin once and never touching it.
03 The evidence
| Coin | Trades | Win % | Strategy | Buy & hold | Verdict |
|---|
| BTC | 51 | 49 | +1099% | +774% | beat |
| ETH | 48 | 40 | +334% | +521% | lost |
| BNB | 54 | 41 | +4636% | +3184% | beat |
| SOL | 45 | 40 | +6216% | +3489% | beat |
| XRP | 64 | 33 | +257% | +564% | lost |
| LINK | 66 | 39 | +505% | +251% | beat |
| LTC | 65 | 35 | −42% | +12% | lost |
| DOGE | 49 | 31 | +4327% | +2581% | beat |
| ADA | 39 | 41 | +5117% | +349% | beat |
| AVAX | 46 | 28 | +2063% | +105% | beat |
Beat holding on 7 of 10 coins — and on 9 of 10 in the recent out-of-sample period (the honest test that separates a real edge from a bull-market coincidence).
04 The other direction — what if you also shorted?
The headline test sits in cash when it is not long. The fair question is whether trading both ways helps — so we ran the identical rule with the flat side flipped to a 1x short (still no leverage), same fees, same ten coins.
| View | BTC $1k→ | Median return | Median maxDD | Beat hold | Verdict |
|---|
| Long / flat · headline | $11,990 | +1099% | 69% | 7/10 | Survived |
| Long / short 1x · illustrative | $3,555 | +256% | 88% | 3/10 | Failed out-of-sample |
Trading it both ways was worse on the headline test — median return +1581% → +228%, worst drawdown 69% → 88% and the verdict fell from survived to failed out-of-sample. And that is before funding: a short is not spot, it needs a derivative that pays borrow/funding (~10–30%/yr) this omits — add a realistic 20%/yr and the median return drops to +15%. Shorting a market that mostly went up is a wrecking ball, not a rescue.
Why the short side is illustrative
You cannot short on spot — it needs a derivative (a perpetual or margin), which is why the headline test is long/flat. These short figures are shown at 1x with no funding or borrow cost, so the real-world version is worse than what you see here, not better. The window is also net-bullish; the short side only pays in a sustained bear, and betting on that is a different strategy entirely.
05 Verdict
One of only two survivors in the set — beat holding on 7 of 10 coins and stayed ahead out-of-sample, not just in the bull. The mysticism is silly; the price-above-cloud filter is not. Measured, caveated, and past results still aren't the future — but it didn't die the way the famous ones did.
Method — the headline test is long/flat spot, no leverage (the long/short view above is a 1x illustration, funding excluded) · a signal read at the daily close is filled at the NEXT close (a full bar of lag — no look-ahead) · 0.06% fee each side, buy-and-hold charged one entry fee too · each coin over its available Binance daily history with warm-up · out-of-sample = held-back most-recent ~45% of each coin's data (a recency holdout, not rolling walk-forward). Honest limits: the ten coins are today's majors (survivorship bias) and are correlated, so “beat on N of 10” is not N independent tests. Reproducible.
The catch
The catch is the same as every trend-follower that works here: a low win rate and plenty of whipsaw, plus a fat 78-day warm-up that makes it slow to turn. And it's still only ten correlated majors over one window — two of which were roaring bulls. It cleared the out-of-sample test the golden cross failed; that is the entire claim, and nothing more.
06 Your turn
That was the textbook version.
We tested it exactly as it's usually described. Yours is probably a little different — a tweak to the settings, an added filter, a different exit. You don't need to code any of it: just describe your version to Vera, our assistant, in plain English, and she builds it and runs it through this same honest test. Most don't survive. A few do — we've proven that. Worth knowing which yours is.
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full report + code
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