Impulse pullback, backtested
Where the trend pullback waits for an established uptrend, this one deliberately goes early. A fast 6/18 EMA cross is the moment a trend becomes visible rather than the moment it is confirmed, and the setup buys the first shallow dip after it, before the move is obvious enough to be crowded. That is the trade-off in one sentence: earlier entries, and more of them that turn out to be false starts.
Over September 2021 to September 2026, this setup lost to simply buying and holding. €10,000 became €11,238 (+12.4%), against €55,072 (+450.7%) for buy & hold, over 17 trades, with a worst fall of 3.4%. 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.
- A 6-period EMA must have crossed above the 18-period EMA recently, a new trend, not an old one.
- Buy the first pullback that resumes in the crossover's direction.
- Stop 1.5 ATR below the entry, which sets the size at 1% of capital risked.
- 2R target, stop to breakeven at 1R. Fees and slippage on.
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
This is a universe system wearing a single ticker for the demo. Its real form is applied to a pool of candidates. You take the handful currently setting up, not whichever one stock you happened to load, so a single-ticker result tells you how the rules behaved on that stock, not how the system behaves. The screen attached to this template ($2B+, liquid, growing revenue) is that pool; the momentum screener is where to find candidates today.
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.
- 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.
- 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.