52-week high breakout, backtested
Buying something that has just made a new 52-week high feels wrong, which is most of why the rule is interesting: the instinct is to buy what has fallen, and the evidence on price momentum has for decades pointed the other way. This is the plainest possible version of that, one entry rule and one exit rule, with no stop and no target in the way. A trading year is about 250 sessions, so that is the window the tool uses.
Over September 2021 to September 2026, this setup lost to simply buying and holding. €10,000 became €13,458 (+34.6%), against €18,051 (+80.5%) for buy & hold, over 6 trades, with a worst fall of 8.9%. That is a small enough number of trades that the result is an anecdote rather than evidence, however it reads.
The rules, exactly
This is what the run above loads. Every number in it stays editable: change the ticker, widen the stop, and run it again.
- Buy at the close when it closes above the highest close of the previous 250 trading days.
- Sell at the close when it closes below the lowest close of the previous 50 trading days: a trailing exit, not a fixed one.
- Highs and lows are measured on closes, not intraday extremes, so a spike that closed back inside the range is not a breakout here.
- 0.1% commission and 0.05% slippage per side.
Screens for: $2B+ · 1M+ shares a day · 10%+ revenue growth. That filter does nothing on the single-stock run above. It is the pool this strategy is really meant to trade, and it comes into play when step 1 is switched from one ticker to the whole US stock market. The momentum screener is a free way to see a ranked pool like it today.
What to watch for
A one-year channel needs a year of history before it can signal anything, so the first stretch of any window is warm-up and the strategy is simply flat through it, which understates it against a buy & hold line that was invested the whole time. The wide exit is the other half of the trade-off: a 50-day low gives back a lot of a top, and that is the price of not being shaken out of a trend early. On an index this fires rarely; the setup is built for a pool of individual names, which is what the screen attached to it describes.
Before you trust any backtest
A backtest is a measurement of the past under assumptions you chose, and the assumptions are where results go wrong. Three that matter here: the run covers five years of daily closes, so it has seen one bull market and one bad year rather than a full cycle; fees and slippage are included but your broker’s may differ; and a strategy that fired only a handful of times has told you almost nothing, however good the numbers look. The tool reports the trade count for that reason. Read it first.
Want to change the rules rather than the numbers? The full backtester builds a setup out of plain-English conditions, and this template arrives in it already loaded and editable.
The other prebuilt strategies
- Buy the dip: Buy any day that falls 2% or more, and sell ten trading days later. No filter, no stop.
- Golden Cross: Hold while the 50-day average is above the 200-day; step aside when it crosses back under.
- 20/50 cross: The same crossover idea as the golden cross, on faster averages: 20-day over 50-day.
- RSI 30/70: The textbook RSI trade: buy when the 14-day RSI drops under 30, sell when it clears 70.
- MACD crossover: Hold while the MACD line is above its signal line; go flat when it crosses back under.
- RSI-2 reversion: Buy an uptrending market when the 2-day RSI washes out below 10; sell the bounce above 70.
- Trend pullback: In a long uptrend, buy the dip that reclaims the 50-day average, a bounce off the trend.
- Impulse pullback: A fresh 6/18 EMA cross marks a brand-new trend; buy its first small dip as it resumes.
- Donchian breakout: Buy a 20-day high the way the Turtles did; exit on a 10-day low or the 2R target.
- Bollinger reversion: Buy a close under the lower 20-day band; sell the snap back to the middle band.