How It Works
- Track the 252-bar high — the highest close of roughly the past year of bars, the market's high-water mark.
- Buy when the close comes within 5% of that high (at or above 95% of it): markets pressing against their yearly high tend to keep going, partly because investors hesitate to buy near a high and the move unfolds slowly.
- Sell only when the close falls more than 15% below the high-water mark — the wide gap between the 5% entry and the 15% exit leaves room for normal pullbacks without shaking the position out.
Worked example. The 252-bar high is 120, so the entry line sits at 0.95 · 120 = 114 and the exit line at 0.85 · 120 = 102. A close at 114.5 buys. Price pushes to a new high of 130, lifting the exit line to 110.5; a later slide to a 110 close crosses it and sells at roughly −4% — but had the rally continued, the trade would have stayed on indefinitely.
The Math Behind The Indicators
Everything runs on closing prices of the traded timeframe: P is a close, Pt today's close, and N counts bars — one bar is one candle of that timeframe, so 20 bars on a 1h chart is 20 hours.
- Rolling High (High-Water Mark)
- The highest close of the last N bars — the market's high-water mark over the window. How close price sits to it tells you whether the market is pressing into new highs or has fallen away from them.
- HighN = max(Pt, Pt−1, …, Pt−N+1)
- Example: If the highest close of the last 252 bars is 120 and price is now 115, price sits at 115 / 120 ≈ 96% of its high-water mark — within 5% of the high.
Example Chart
Example Chart
The Metrics
| Metric | Calculation | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Price Change % | change = Plast − P0P0 × 100 The traded market's own close against its first close over the same window, as a percentage. | What the market did while the rule was running — the benchmark every other row here is read against. A rule that made 40% in a market that made 120% lost to doing nothing. |
| Trades | N = count(closed positions) How many positions the rule opened and closed over the window. | The sample behind every other figure, and what the fees are charged on. Two rules with the same return are not the same rule if one took nine trades and the other took nine hundred. |
| Win Rate % | W%n = winsnn × 100 Of the first n trades, how many closed above the cash they opened with after fees. Plotted trade by trade, so the line is the rate so far rather than a final figure. | How often the rule is right, which is not how much it makes. A rule can win a third of its trades and still lead, if the third it wins pays for the two it loses. |
| Cumulative P&L % | PnL%n = n∑i=1(fi − 1) × 100 Each trade's percentage result added up, net of fees. A sum rather than a compounding, so a 10% gain and a 10% loss cancel. | What the rule returned per trade, with position size taken out of it. It answers whether the edge is in the trades themselves, where the equity curve answers what the account did with them. |
| Equity | En = E0 n∏i=1fi The account compounded through every trade — the whole balance goes into the next position. Drawn net of fees as a solid line and gross of them as a dotted one. | The account itself, which is the only figure a reader actually ends up with. The gap between the two lines is what the fees took, and it widens with every trade rather than staying a fixed share. |
| Cumulative Fees | Fn = n∑i=1(Ci φ + Xi φ) Fee charged on the way into each position and again on the way out, at rate phi, on the capital actually committed — so the bill grows with the account as well as with the trade count. | The cost of trading, in the account's own units. It is the one line here that only ever rises, and the one a rule cannot trade its way out of. |
| Rolling Sharpe | Sharpet = mean(rdaily)sd(rdaily) × √365 Mean daily return over its deviation, annualized on a 365-day year because crypto has no weekend. Taken on the account marked to market every bar — open positions included, not just closed ones — and read off at each trade's exit. | Return per unit of the swing it took to get it. It is the heaviest weight in the composite score, because an account that doubled calmly and one that doubled violently are not the same result. |