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.
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
- Golden Cross — Hold while the 50-day average is above the 200-day; step aside 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.
- 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.