20/50 moving average crossover, backtested

The golden cross uses the 50-day and 200-day averages, which is slow on purpose. This is the same rule on averages four times faster: hold while the 20-day is above the 50-day, step aside when it crosses back under. The comparison is the useful part, and it is a comparison anyone can run in two minutes here: a faster pair reacts sooner to a real turn and also reacts to a great many turns that were not real ones.

Over September 2021 to September 2026, this setup lost to simply buying and holding. €10,000 became €11,510 (+15.1%), against €18,305 (+83.0%) for buy & hold, over 12 trades, with a worst fall of 29.9%. Change the ticker below and the picture changes. This is one stock over one stretch of history.

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 on the day the 20-day simple moving average crosses above the 50-day.
Sell at the close on the day it crosses back below. No stop, no target.
0.1% commission and 0.05% slippage per side, which matters more here than on the 50/200 pair, because this one trades several times as often.

Screens for: $10B+ · 1M+ shares a day. 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

Faster is not better or worse in the abstract; it is a different trade-off, and the tool below is how you see which side of it you are on. Expect many more round trips than the golden cross, most of them small, and expect the fee line to be a visible fraction of the result rather than a rounding error. Run both on the same ticker before deciding: the pair that wins on a smooth index often loses on a choppy single stock, and the reverse.

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.
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.
One-year high: Buy a close above the highest close of the past year; exit on a 50-day closing low.
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.