SPECIMEN 004 / STRATEGY AUTOPSYCRYPTO · OUT-OF-SAMPLE TESTED
The MACD Crossover
The crossover on every chart and every tutorial. Eighty trades, a fortune in fees, and it still can't reliably beat holding.
Momentum
Spot · daily · MACD(12,26,9)
10 coins · out-of-sample
No edge · coin flip
The claimThe crossover that catches every big move.
The realityBeat holding on just 5 of 10 coins. A coin flip you pay fees to make.
Cause of death Whipsaw tax
01 The seduction
MACD line crosses above the signal line, you buy; crosses below, you sell. It's drawn on more charts than any other indicator on earth, and when you eyeball a trending market it looks like it catches every move.
The MACD Crossover · BTC
+601%
$1,000 → $7,007 vs $7,484 holding
Beat buy & hold
5 / 10
a coin flip
Out-of-sample
4 / 10
faded out-of-sample
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
No edge
The MACD Crossover vs. doing nothinglog scale
The strategyBuy & hold (doing nothing)
The MACD Crossover beat holding on 5 of 10 majors — and 4 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 | 89 | 48 | +601% | +648% | lost |
| ETH | 92 | 40 | +724% | +1295% | lost |
| BNB | 79 | 44 | +1320% | +5459% | lost |
| SOL | 74 | 43 | +2850% | +3917% | lost |
| XRP | 76 | 38 | +2191% | +281% | beat |
| LINK | 91 | 43 | +566% | +93% | beat |
| LTC | 84 | 40 | −32% | −48% | beat |
| DOGE | 73 | 41 | +815% | +1941% | lost |
| ADA | 80 | 36 | +1913% | +227% | beat |
| AVAX | 61 | 44 | +1388% | +76% | beat |
Beat holding on 5 of 10 coins — and on 4 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 | $7,007 | +601% | 77% | 5/10 | No edge · coin flip |
| Long / short 1x · illustrative | $1,661 | +66% | 92% | 2/10 | Failed out-of-sample |
Trading it both ways was worse on the headline test — median return +1067% → −43%, worst drawdown 77% → 92% and the verdict fell from no edge · coin flip 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 −83%. 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
High turnover, no reliable edge. It catches trends and then hands the gains back in the chop, one whipsaw crossover at a time. The fees alone tell the story.
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 honest other side
To be fair it does ride the big trends — the median return is huge. But it also flips constantly. Dozens of round trips per coin, each one paying the exchange, and half the time you'd have been better off never touching it.
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.
$1.99per strategy
full report + code
Coming soon
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