Golden cross strategy, backtested
The golden cross is the best-known signal in technical analysis: the 50-day moving average rising through the 200-day. The death cross is the same crossover in reverse. It is popular partly because it is easy to see on a chart and partly because financial media report every occurrence — neither of which says whether trading it would have left you better off than doing nothing. This page runs it so you can look.
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 50-day simple moving average crosses above the 200-day.
- Sell at the close on the day it crosses back below (the death cross). No stop, no target — the crossover is the whole system.
- Trading costs are on: 0.1% commission and 0.05% slippage per side, so the result is not a frictionless one.
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
A crossover of two slow averages is slow by construction: the 50/200 pair reacts weeks after a turn, so it gives back a large part of a top and re-enters well after a bottom. In our tests its appeal was never higher returns — it was a smaller worst drawdown than holding through a bear market, paid for with lower returns the rest of the time. Change the ticker below before drawing any conclusion: the crossover behaves very differently on a broad index than on a single volatile stock.
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
- 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.