Buy a large-cap when its 2-day RSI collapses while it's still above its 200-day average. It's one of the most widely published retail setups of the last twenty years, and it is almost always sold on one number: the win rate. This page is the rule, frozen, before we have collected a single trade.
Signals are logged automatically each session and graded five sessions later. First verdict expected around September 2026, once at least 30 post-registration trades have accumulated. It will be published whether it passes or fails.
Experiment 01 taught us something we'd rather have learned cheaply: on our own data, a rule that took profits at +5% produced a 67% win rate and an expectancy of −4.4% per trade. High win rate, money-losing strategy, no contradiction. That's the trap this strategy is most exposed to, because the win rate is the number on the box.
There's a second reason. Experiment 01's screen operated in low-float microcaps where the raw daily drift was under 1% and a realistic round-trip cost was around 2%. Nothing could have worked there — the friction was bigger than any available signal, in either direction. Liquid large caps invert that: a round trip costs about a tenth of a percent, so a real effect would actually be detectable. If this fails, it fails on its merits.
Frozen at registration, so it cannot be softened later:
1. At least 30 post-registration graded trades.
2. The mean and the median day-matched excess return positive, net of costs. Not either — both. Experiment 01 taught us that means on financial data can be one lucky trade.
3. A 95% confidence interval on that excess that excludes zero, computed treating each company as the unit of evidence rather than each trade.
4. The direction holding across at least three consecutive weekly snapshots.
The win rate is reported but is explicitly not a pass criterion. That is frozen here, in advance, precisely so it cannot be quietly substituted for the result if the expectancy disappoints.
Stating a prediction before the data is part of the method, and it's uncomfortable on purpose.
Short-horizon mean reversion in liquid equities is a real, documented effect — we are not expecting nonsense. But this specific formulation has been publicly known and heavily traded since roughly 2008–09, and effects that get published tend to get arbitraged. So our registered prediction is: the high win rate replicates (probably somewhere around 65–75%), and the day-matched excess return is small or zero after costs. We'd put the chance it clears the full bar at roughly one in three.
A high win rate with no excess return would be the most useful outcome we could get — because that is exactly what the strategy is sold on.
Every signal is written to rsi2_signals.csv before its entry session, and every graded outcome to rsi2_outcomes.csv, both public and append-only. The complete frozen rule — universe, thresholds, costs, pass bar and this prior — is in HYPOTHESES.md, dated. The verdict, whichever way it goes, will be recorded in the audit log and written up here.
If we later change any constant in that rule, the test is void and we'll say so. That's the deal.
It is not a recommendation to trade this or anything else, and nothing here is advice. It is not a claim about any particular author or service — we are testing a published technique, not grading a person. And whichever way it lands, it will describe this rule, on these 40 names, over this window. It will not be evidence about mean reversion in general.
A verdict lands every few weeks. We'll email you each one, free, the day it publishes — and nothing else. No signals, no picks, no offers. Verdicts stay free and public for everyone either way; this just means you don't have to remember to check back.
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Educational and informational only — not investment advice, not a recommendation, and not a broker-dealer. ThePickLog is operated by AMD Ventures, LLC (Florida).
← Experiment 01: our own screener, and why it failed
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