Strategy Lab

Popular trading strategies, tested in public.

We take the strategies people learn from YouTube, TikTok, Reddit and Trading View, etc.. , and test the exact rules on real data. Good result or bad, we publish it.

How every test works

1. Free, checkable data

We name the source (Yahoo Finance, Binance public data) so you can pull the same prices.

2. Real costs

Futures: $2.50 commission plus 1 tick of slippage per side. SPY: 1¢ per share per side. BTC: 0.10% fee plus 0.05% slippage per side.

3. Textbook settings

Default settings only. If we show variations, we show all of them, not just the winner.

4. Out-of-sample check

We check results on the last ~30% of the data, which the rules never saw.

5. A baseline

Every result is compared with buy-and-hold or random entries.

6. Sample-size warnings

Under 30 trades is flagged as a small sample. Intraday tests on short free data are labeled "preview".

Small samples lie.

In one public re-test, a strategy from a YouTube video with 400,000 views went from +40% over 100 trades to −23% over about 1,700 trades and 16 years (r/algotrading, Feb 2026). That is why we state the trade count, the dates and the costs on every test.

Get each test when it's done.

Every finished test, winner or loser, goes out in the newsletter with the rules and the trade data.

Backtests are hypothetical and don't include every real-world cost. Past results don't predict future returns. Education, not advice.