Independent Strategy Research

We tested 1,000+ strategies.
Fewer than 1 in 100 survive.

FoxAlgo is an independent research lab. We port the most popular TradingView strategies to Python and run them through a cost-aware backtest built to fail them. The #1 reason they fail is not fees — nearly half have no real edge at all before a cent of cost.

See the products ↓ How we test
1,000+
Strategies tested
~78%
Rejected outright
100%
Grid / DCA / martingale failed — zero survived
<1%
Genuinely deployable standalone

By the numbers

The data, at a glance

Rejection rate by strategy type
% of strategies rejected — lower = more survivors. Rates update monthly as the audit grows.
Grid / DCA
100%
Session-time
~87%
Reversal
~86%
Breakout
~83%
Mean-reversion
~81%
Trend-following
~79%
Momentum
~74%
ICT / SMC
~73%

Grid, DCA, and martingale: every single one failed. Zero survivors across all tested.

Why strategies fail
Share of all rejected strategies, by primary cause. Nearly half had no real edge — before a single cent of cost.
No real edge
~41%
Trend-beta
~16%
Tail-concentrated
~11%
Cost-fatal
~10%
Placebo / sparse
~8%
Lookahead
~4%
Overfit / luck
~2%

Costs alone (cost-fatal, ~10%) are not the main story. ~49% of rejects had no edge even gross — the bar most vendors don't show.

What's inside

20+ PDF reports. Every verdict documented.

Strategy names, authors, and TradingView links are the paid content — members only. Below is what the pages look like.

Survivor report
Strategy Audit
Strategy verdict
by  ·  TradingView
PASS Grade A
TypeTrend-following
MarketCME Futures
Timeframe
Symbol
Net return (13y)
Sharpe ratio
Max drawdown
Win rate
Return / DD
foxalgo.ioStrategy Audit Report · v2024
Failure detail
Strategy Audit
Strategy verdict
by  ·  TradingView
FAIL
Rejection cause NO REAL EDGE Pre-cost Sharpe below threshold · placebo permutation failed (p<0.95) · random baseline beats it
Gross Sharpe0.09
Placebo p950.31
Net PnL (13y)−$4,820
foxalgo.ioStrategy Audit Report · v2024
Failures index
Failure Index
Trend-following · 280+ strategies tested
Strategy nameCause of rejection
no edge
trend-beta
no edge
tail-conc.
cost-fatal
lookahead
no edge
overfit
no edge
trend-beta
~79% rejection rate · all causes documented
foxalgo.ioFailure Index · v2024
Validation gates
The Method
Validation gates — all must pass
01Cost-aware NET P&L✓
02Placebo permutation test✓
03Jackpot / tail-luck test✓
04Independent lookahead audit✓
056-year common window gate✓
0613-year CME futures full run✓
Grade A — all gates passed, no caveats.
Grade B — minor caveat; still deployable with note.
Grade C — conditional edge; context-dependent only.
The 13-year test demoted some of our own candidates — we publish the grade regardless.
foxalgo.ioThe Method · v2024

The full product contains 20+ individual report pages — one per strategy, named and linked, with the exact instrument, timeframe, after-cost metrics, equity curve, and the reason for every verdict.

Products

Two ways to stop funding junk. One more on the way.

Most popular

The No List

The complete audit — winners, failures, and the method. Named. Honest. Brutal.

$49
One-time · 30 days full access
  • → THE WINNERS — named survivors with the exact instrument and timeframe each actually works on, real after-cost numbers, stability profile, and deploy caveats
  • → THE FAILURES — grouped by cause of death: no real edge (#1 killer, nearly half of all rejects), trend-beta, tail-luck, cost-fatal, lookahead artifact, and more
  • → THE METHOD — every test detail so you can judge the verdicts yourself, not just trust them
  • → Reject rates by strategy type: grid/DCA 100% · session ~87% · reversal ~86% · trend-following ~79%
Get The No List →

The No List: Unlimited

Same audit. Lifetime access. Every future update included. No recurring billing, ever.

$499
One-time · Lifetime · No renewals
  • → Everything in The No List — no time limit, no 30-day window, no subscription
  • → Every future update at no extra cost — new strategies tested, existing verdicts re-checked when code changes, survivors re-validated as markets shift
  • → Pay once. No billing to think about again. No second paywall, ever
  • → Verdict flips (new evidence changes a result) reach you automatically — a static screenshot never will
Get Unlimited Access →
Coming soon

The Lab

FoxAlgo's own systematic futures strategies — built and validated by the same process that rejects 99% of the rest.

TBA
Monthly subscription
  • → Strategies built in-house — not sourced from TradingView, not crowd-sourced
  • → Validated tick-by-tick on CME futures — same 13-year bar as the audit
  • → Ready-to-run files for TradingView, MT5 + AMP Futures, and NinjaTrader
  • → Monthly updates — new strategies added, existing ones re-checked as markets shift
Notify me when live →

The Lab is a separate product — not included in The No List.

Methodology

How we actually test

Every verdict starts with real data, real costs, and a bias-hunter looking for reasons to say no. Here is exactly what we run — nothing hidden, nothing simplified.

Data we use

CME Futures
Full 13-year history. Continuous front-month contracts, tick-level resolution. E-mini equity, FX futures, metals (Gold, Silver), energy (Crude, NatGas).
13 years Tick-level Continuous contracts
FX / CFD
Real bid/ask tick data — actual spread, not a fixed assumption. Only timeframes ≥30 min tested; sub-15 min FX is cost-fatal by design and excluded.
Real bid/ask ≥ 30 min only Variable spread
US Stocks
Liquidity-aware fill simulation. Position sizing capped at a % of average daily volume — if you can't realistically trade it, the backtest says so.
Liquidity-aware Volume-capped fills
Crypto
Spot and perpetual futures. Funding rates included in cost model for perps. Exchange-specific fee tiers applied — maker vs. taker matters here.
Spot + Perps Funding rates Fee tiers

What we found that most testers miss

+42–84%
Bar-by-bar trailing overstatement
TradingView's strategy tester runs on OHLC bars. For trailing-stop systems, the simulated stop fires at the bar's close — not when price actually touches it intraday. We re-run every trailing strategy tick-by-tick. The difference averages 42–84% return inflation.
~49%
No edge at all — before a cent of cost
Nearly half of everything we reject fails the very first gate: gross pre-cost Sharpe below threshold. Costs didn't kill it — there was nothing there to begin with. Most vendors never show you this number.
≈1 in 3
"Published for X" works on a different instrument
A strategy marketed for EUR/USD actually shows edge on USD/JPY only. We test every strategy on the instrument the author claims — and flag when the real signal lives somewhere else.
32+
Lookahead artifacts caught
Future-price leakage in Pine Script is subtle — a single misplaced security() call or a bar-index condition can feed tomorrow's data into today's signal. Independent code audit catches what a visual backtest never will.
Code dedup
Re-published Pine Script detected
The same strategy is often published dozens of times with different names and parameter tweaks. We hash the core logic and deduplicate — one verdict covers the whole clone family, not just the author's version.
100%
Grid / DCA / Martingale failure rate
76 strategies tested across all grid, DCA, and martingale variants. Every single one failed. The compounding position sizing hides drawdown risk that only shows up in a full-length, unfavorable market regime.

The 6 gates — in order

01

Cost-aware NET P&L

Commissions and slippage modelled per asset class using real exchange fee schedules. For CME futures: round-turn commission + half-tick slippage per side. For FX: real bid/ask spread from tick data, no fixed spread assumption. If it doesn't survive costs, it doesn't exist.

Eliminates ~80 strategies (cost-fatal)
02

Placebo permutation test

~200 random-entry permutations at identical trade frequency. The strategy must beat the 95th percentile of pure chance. If random entries can match the equity curve, the "edge" is statistical noise — not alpha.

Eliminates ~61 placebo / sparse strategies
03

Jackpot / tail-concentration test

Remove the top 10% of trading days by P&L. A real, repeatable edge survives this. A lucky-outlier strategy collapses. We also flag strategies where >50% of total return comes from ≤3 trades — that is tail concentration, not an edge.

Eliminates ~86 tail-concentrated strategies
04

Independent lookahead audit

Every survivor is code-reviewed by a second independent model — adversarially, looking for reasons to fail it. Common artifacts: security() calls referencing future bars, request.security() on the wrong resolution, bar_index logic that inadvertently leaks next-bar data.

Caught 32+ lookahead artifacts
05

6-year common window gate

All strategies — regardless of asset class — are evaluated on the same 6-year in-sample window. Same starting line, same finish line. This eliminates the "cherry-picked era" bias where a strategy looks great only because the author chose a favorable regime.

Fair comparison across 1,000+ strategies
06

13-year CME full confirmation

Futures survivors only. The full 13-year tick history — 2013 through 2025 — covering 2015 CNY devaluation, 2018 vol spike, 2020 COVID crash, 2022 inflation shock. A strategy that passed Gate 05 but fails here is graded B or C, not A. This test demoted some of our own candidates — we publish the grade regardless.

Only ~0.7% of strategies reach Grade A

FAQ

Common questions

The No List

No. Research and education only — no signals, no buy/sell calls, no return promises. The No List delivers honest, cost-aware verdicts on which popular strategies survive rigorous testing and which fail, and why. Nothing here tells you what to trade.
No. The top killer is no real edge at all — nearly half of what we reject was no better than random before a single cent of cost. Cost-fatal is real, but it is only the 4th most common cause of failure. This is the finding most vendors would rather not advertise.
The free tester reports gross results on bar (OHLC) data. We report cost-aware NET on real tick data, re-validate every trailing-stop strategy tick-by-tick (bar-by-bar overstates them by 42–84%), and add an independent lookahead audit, a placebo permutation test, a jackpot test, and an out-of-sample split. A strategy has to survive all of that before it earns the survivor label.
The "no" is the value. Nearly 4 in 5 strategies are rejected outright and fewer than 1 in 100 are genuinely deployable. Knowing what not to fund saves real money and months of wasted backtesting. You only have to avoid funding one dead strategy for the $49 to pay for itself many times over.

The No List: Unlimited

$49 one-time — 30 days of full access to the live audit. The wallet-opener.

$499 one-time (Unlimited) — lifetime, no-time-limit access. Every future update included at no extra cost. No recurring billing, ever. Same audit content across both tiers — you pay for duration, not more material.
New strategies are added as the harvest grows. Existing verdicts are re-checked when the original author pushes a code update — a silent script change can flip a result. Survivors are re-validated periodically as market conditions shift. Unlimited members receive all of this automatically, with no second payment, ever.

The Lab — Systematic Futures Strategies

The Lab strategies run on three platforms. For live auto-execution on both TradingView and MT5 we recommend QuantLynk — see the next question.
TradingView Visual overview and live monitoring. Alerts fire via webhook to QuantLynk for automated execution. Not recommended for backtesting trailing strategies — bar-by-bar overstates results by 42–84%.
MT5 + AMP Futures Recommended for backtesting — tick data, continuous contracts, accurate cost modelling. Live execution also via webhook → QuantLynk. Harder to connect to prop/funded accounts vs. NinjaTrader. Backtesting
NinjaTrader Best backtest fidelity. Easiest integration with funded and prop trading accounts. License is time-limited — factor that into your setup plan. Best backtest
TradingView's strategy tester runs on bar (OHLC) data. For trailing-stop systems, this significantly overstates results — bar-by-bar resolution inflates performance by 42–84% compared to tick-by-tick validation. TradingView is useful for monitoring live positions and visual overview, but the backtest numbers it shows for trailing strategies are not reliable. All Lab performance figures are validated tick-by-tick / 1-second, which is why they look more conservative than what TradingView would show.
The recommended live execution path is webhook → QuantLynk — works with both TradingView and MT5+AMP. Your strategy fires an alert, QuantLynk receives it and automatically copies the trade to your brokerage accounts. Fast, hands-off, nothing to keep running 24/7.
We use and recommend QuantLynk — plug it into TradingView alerts or an MT5 EA and it handles the rest. Use code foxalgo30 at checkout for 30% off.
For backtesting: MT5 via AMP Futures for tick data and continuous contracts; NinjaTrader for the best backtest fidelity and easiest prop/funded account integration. Full setup guides are included with your subscription.
No. Strategies are delivered monthly as protected, ready-to-run files — the code is hidden by design. No Pine Script, MQL5, or NinjaScript knowledge required. You receive the working strategy, not the source, along with a setup guide included in your subscription.
No. The Lab provides systematic trading strategies and research access for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing here is personalized investment, financial, legal, or tax advice. Trading leveraged futures involves substantial risk of loss — you are solely responsible for your own trading decisions and risk management.