Golden Cross (SMA 50/200)

The claim

When the 50-period moving average crosses above the 200, the trend has turned up — stay long. When it crosses below (the 'death cross'), stay short. The signal every financial news outlet reports when it happens to an index.

Where it comes from

Moving-average crossovers date to the earliest days of technical analysis; the 50/200 daily pair became THE canonical setting via decades of equity-market folklore and media coverage.

The exact rule we graded

Long while SMA(50) > SMA(200), short while SMA(50) < SMA(200), on 1-hour candles. Exits: 3-ATR trailing stop, 200-bar time exit (re-enters while the cross holds).

• ✓OOS net expectancy > 0
• ✕Clears the cost hurdle
• ✓Robust, not lucky
• ✕Survivable drawdown
• ✕Not overfit

The backtest above is history. Since publication, this exact spec also runs in our nightly forward-test harness (the same one behind /forward-tests): only trades entered after publication count, open positions are never force-closed, and the record publishes either way.

No closed forward trades recorded yet — the record accrues nightly as trades complete their full exit windows.

Honest port notes

• The folklore version is daily bars. We grade on 1-hour candles for identical terms with every other library entry — same geometry, faster clock. We also graded the literal daily 50/200 (BTC/ETH/SOL) as context, and it was brutal: +697bp/trade in the training window, −213bp/trade out-of-sample across 137 trades. The daily golden cross earned its fame riding one historic bull run, and the out-of-sample window took it back. Public verify id: 22ecd5f6-9e75-49c3-8c5b-2c97da1c521b.
• Uniquely in this library, the 1-hour version passes the positive-expectancy AND cross-asset-robustness gates (6 of 8 assets positive) — no other classic passes both. It still fails three: +4.7bp gross doesn't clear the 6bp fee bar, the 63.6% max drawdown at 1% sizing fails the survivability gate, and the edge halved from train (+9.8bp) to test (+4.7bp). Direction confirmed, edge too thin and too fragile to trade. That's an F with an asterisk worth reading.

{
  "name": "Golden Cross (SMA 50/200)",
  "universe": [
    "BTC/USDT:USDT",
    "ETH/USDT:USDT",
    "SOL/USDT:USDT",
    "BNB/USDT:USDT",
    "XRP/USDT:USDT",
    "DOGE/USDT:USDT",
    "LINK/USDT:USDT",
    "AVAX/USDT:USDT"
  ],
  "risk": {
    "risk_per_trade_pct": 1,
    "leverage_cap": 3,
    "max_daily_loss_pct": 5,
    "max_dd_halt_pct": 25
  },
  "sleeves": [
    {
      "name": "main",
      "timeframe": "1h",
      "entry": {
        "type": "rule",
        "logic": "all",
        "long": [
          {
            "indicator": "sma",
            "period": 50,
            "op": ">",
            "vs_indicator": "sma",
            "vs_period": 200
          }
        ],
        "short": [
          {
            "indicator": "sma",
            "period": 50,
            "op": "<",
            "vs_indicator": "sma",
            "vs_period": 200
          }
        ]
      },
      "exit": {
        "trail_atr": 3,
        "time_exit_bars": 200
      }
    }
  ]
}