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Backtest Q&A, investing basics, trend strategies and ten master investors' strategies in one place, with each strategy's principles and scoring rules.
Last reviewed: 2026-09-30
Common investing questions, answered with numbers calculated from actual prices. Recomputed every month.
Each article reads at three depths: In one line, the article, and the operator's assessment. Exact indicator definitions are in the glossary.
The first thing to beat is not the market but your own emotions. Writing the plan down is the easiest defense.
Loss aversion, confirmation bias, herd behavior. Where the mistakes individual investors keep repeating come from, and the habits that cut them down. Read →
How much you put in changes the result more than what you buy. Cash is not idle money. It is money for the next opportunity.
What to decide before picking stocks: what a cash reserve does, how to set weights, and rebalancing. Read →
Technical analysis is not a tool for predicting the future. It reads where market participants agree right now.
The three facts a chart shows: where price is, how much trading is behind it, and whether it has a direction. Read →
Support and resistance are prices where many people traded in the past. A breakout is the moment that agreement changes, and volume is what shows it.
Where price stops and the moment it breaks through. Why these levels form, how to confirm them, and how to filter out false breakouts. Read →
An indicator is a summary, not a prophecy. Once you know what it summarizes, you also know when it is wrong.
What each of four common indicators summarizes, and how far you can trust each one. Read →
Decide your reason to sell before you buy. Decide it afterward and your emotions decide it for you.
Write down four things before buying: why you buy, what breaks the case, what price you buy at, and where you get out. Read →
A rule where the target amount of one slot, not a person, decides when and how much to sell. The rule is simple, and in exchange you take the full drawdown of a 3× leveraged ETF.
Split a leveraged ETF into 240 virtual slots of one share each, fill slots up to a target amount every month, then open one slot a month and realize only the excess. A community-shared accumulation and withdrawal rule, summarized by structure and risk. Read →
"Buy TQQQ on the drop and switch to QLD on the way up" and "sell QLD on the way up and add TQQQ on the drop" describe the same strategy in a different order. The rule needs a judgment about where the market is, so it is used with only a portion of capital, not all of it.
Buy TQQQ in steps on a big drop, step down to QLD when QQQ breaks its prior high, and trim QLD back into QQQ when RSI overheats. A community-shared cycle, summarized by structure and risk. Read →
A grid's stock share fills only as far as the price has fallen from its high. So on QQQ it led buy and hold only in periods that fell or barely rose, and fell far behind in rising markets. Over the last 10 years of QQQ it returned 2.8% a year against 20.9%.
A rule that draws price lines a fixed ratio apart, buys one slot at each line the price falls through, and sells it one line higher. This covers the exact rule, how it differs from exchange grid bots, and QQQ and TQQQ backtest results. Read →
A rule that follows the move once the day's rise passes a set fraction of the previous day's range. On QQQ since 2000 it returned 13.2% a year before costs, above buy and hold (8.6% a year), but with a 0.15% cost per trade, $10,000 ended at $63 after 2,800 trades.
Larry Williams' short-term breakout rule that buys when the price rises above today's open plus k times yesterday's range. This covers the rule and its variants, a QQQ backtest since 2000 with an exit at the next open, and the cost arithmetic that changes the result. Read →
Moving-average rules cut drawdowns more than they raised returns. Since 2000 every rule we ran on QQQ and SPY had a smaller max drawdown than buy and hold, but apart from the 50/200 cross on QQQ (11.2% vs. 8.6% a year), annual returns were close to or below holding.
Price against the 200-day and 120-day lines, the 10-month rule, and the 50/200 and 20/60 crosses, defined as exact rules and run on QQQ and SPY since 2000 under the same conditions. Where each rule won and where it lost, in numbers. Read →
SCHD is a rule that picks 100 US companies with at least 10 years of dividends, higher yields and solid finances. Over 10 years of monthly investing, its yearly dividend income was 2.7 times SPY's and its annual return was 3.4 percentage points lower.
The selection rules of the Dow Jones U.S. Dividend 100 Index that SCHD tracks, how it differs from the dividend ETFs it is often compared with, and the result of investing in SCHD, SPY and QQQ monthly on the same days for 10 years. Read →
A covered call sells future upside for cash now. Since 2014, QYLD captured only 45% of QQQ's gains in up years, and with distributions spent, the holding ended 27% below where it started.
The payoff of covered call ETFs that turn sold call options into distributions, the rule differences between QYLD and JEPQ, a backtest against QQQ on the same dates, and taxes for Korean investors. Read →
These are not the ten best-performing strategies. They were chosen by school so that they disagree with each other. Asking all ten about the same stock shows you where they overlap and where they split — which is the whole point of this tool.
Schools differ in what they look at first. The indicators below are not illustrative — they are what this tool actually checks when scoring each strategy.
| School | What it looks at first | Indicators used in scoring | Strategies |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trend · Momentum | Is the price already strong? | Moving-average stacking · distance from the 52-week high · breakout on volume · relative strength | Jesse Livermore · William O'Neil · Mark Minervini |
| Contrarian · Bargain | Has the market abandoned it too far? | Drawdown from the high · RSI oversold · low P/E and P/B · profitability and debt survival filters | John Templeton · David Dreman |
| Value · Margin of Safety | Is it cheaper than intrinsic value? | Graham number (P/E × P/B) · ROE and operating margin · current ratio · debt ratio | Benjamin Graham · Warren Buffett · Seth Klarman |
| Growth | Is the growth cheap for what it is? | PEG · earnings growth · revenue growing with it · operating leverage | Peter Lynch |
| Quant · Factor | Are the rules met? | Earnings yield (EBIT/EV) · return on capital (ROIC proxy) | Joel Greenblatt |
The ten strategies ask different questions. Trend following asks “is it already strong?”; value asks “is it cheap?”. It is natural for those two answers to diverge on the same stock. This tool does not decide which one is right — it lays all ten verdicts side by side. Stretches where many strategies read favourably at once are rare, and being rare is itself the information. A strategy without enough data abstains rather than being filled in by estimation, and is excluded from the average. Every verdict is on the daily candle, regardless of the timeframe shown on screen.
One more thing — the ten strategy verdicts and the confluence score are separate layers. The confluence score is a timing score built only from pure technical indicators (moving averages, MACD, RSI, volume); the market and stock regime verdicts are deliberately kept out of it. Mixing them would produce states like “55 points in a downtrend”, where each piece of information hides the other.
All three enter only after the price has already moved. What differs is how strictly they confirm it — Livermore uses trend direction and volume, O'Neil adds earnings growth, and Minervini pins it down to eight explicit conditions.
Article only, not scored in the analysis screen: Turtle trading (Richard Dennis)
Both treat declines as opportunity, but neither passes a stock on “cheap” alone. Templeton measures how deep the pessimism runs; Dreman checks valuation ratios alongside balance-sheet strength, filtering out the cases that are cheap for a reason.
All three look at the gap between intrinsic value and price, but weight it differently. Graham draws a quantitative floor, Buffett adds business quality, and Klarman starts from how much could be lost.
The subject is not growth itself but the price tag on growth. PEG alone separates “growing fast but expensive” from “growing steadily and cheap”.
Human judgement is minimised. Ranking comes from two numbers only — earnings yield and return on capital — applied without exception. That is the whole point of the approach.
This is not a ranking. It is a reading order based on what you want to understand.
Every explanation ends with a “How this tool scores it” section. That is where you can see how the principle was turned into an actual score — and what is not checked.
See all ten scored at once in the app →
