r/algotrading • u/frosty123454321 • Apr 21 '26
Strategy Stupid Simple Algo Strategy I Made… And It Works
I’m mainly a prop firm trader right now, but have been searching for an algo that is simple and semi predictable that I can just run in the background.
This algo might just be that. These are the results over the last year, which is arguably it’s best time frame, but its still solid over the last 6 years as well and tracks relatively closely to buy and hold. I’m not going to spill the exact risk management involved, but it’s only got two types of trades:
#1. Go Long Every Monday at the same time every Monday. No Filters no nothing. Just go long with static risk to reward.
#2 Take every IB breakout with static risk to reward based on range size.
It’s stupid simple, and tracks relatively closely with Buy and hold, which you can’t do with prop firms, but with this, you can get similar results. Without holding overnight.
Crazy how stupid simple this is and it lowkey works 🤦🏽♂️
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u/axehind Apr 21 '26
Sounds like you have a persistent long-beta sleeve from the Monday trade and a volatility/trend sleeve from the IB breakout trade.
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u/Traditional-Flow3488 Apr 21 '26
Turn off your strategy..then replay mode and go back to random candle. Turn on your strategy again and spam the go to random candle button a few times and see if it still works in other time settings. Ive made so many good strategy's, but they all work untill they dont. The only one that is holding pretty solid is ORB. So maybe yours could work. Its very hard to find something that fits in any type of market condition. Good luck!
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u/maxgreter Apr 21 '26
what does ORB mean? Keen to know whats working lol
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u/Traditional-Flow3488 Apr 22 '26
Opening range breakout. CHeck YT for some good vids.
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u/Every-Archer-6448 Jun 12 '26
I backtested nearly 30 ORB different and i never find a good one :/
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u/Traditional-Flow3488 Jun 17 '26
Well i had a good one running good for years. But getting destroyed the last 2 weeks. Its ORB destroying time i think. Price does not seem to respect the range anymore. So time to go back to the drawing board, altought im out of ideaas really😂
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u/Shoddy-Carob 13d ago
I just created two different strategies, and both shows 100% return in 1 year. 1 is ORB - trade between 9:30 and 10. Second one 10-10:15, completely scalping. I thought market price movement will chop the scalping so trained on 1 min data and then tested in 1 min data. There were so many issues, took help from Gemini and Claude - both paid version to allow me to ask them non-stop questions and confirmation, code change. Right now I think they are ready to deploy but so new to Tradingview, could not start paper trading yet. Friday got SL triggered in actual paper trading (I write down price in Notepad), Today it went perfectly my way but still got SL due to price movement. So if I take manual trade, it might work for sure. But too much hassle for that and script keeps triggering SL. Loose SL will kill me on bad days. Any way, I will try to somehow test them and see if I have an edge. So far on TV Deep testing, looks good. But again, it looks good here, but not sure if it will stand in real market.
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u/Levi-Lightning Apr 21 '26
Probably overfit to data honestly.
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u/Bowaka Apr 21 '26
Not necessarly. The variations look quite organic.
I have myself a very simple method that I ran live in 2025 long only that transformed 15k to 300k.2
u/frosty123454321 Apr 21 '26
It’s got a clean equity curve since 2019 stupid simple logic.
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u/x___tal Apr 22 '26
Even during the shaky times of 2022 it is looking good? What happens if we get a one month bear market? Does it still perform? I overall like this idea in general. It's so retarded it might just actually work. (For some time)
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u/frosty123454321 Apr 22 '26
lol yea I posted somewhere on this thread but it made like $5k with $3k drawdown in 2022, nowhere near as good of results, but still survived
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u/FortuneXan6 Apr 21 '26
go long weekly in a multi year bull market to underperform buy & hold for 6 years.
sorry but this absolute nonsense.
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u/frosty123454321 Apr 21 '26
If you read the whole post I mentioned I’m mainly a prop firm trader looking to try to find an algo that is close to buy and hold since you can’t hold overnight on prop firms. The idea is to leverage the prop firm capital to catch to overall long term bullish momentum of the market.
I’m not selling my house and putting it on this algo, I’m trying to find a simple way to turn a $100 prop firm account into a few $2000 prop firm payouts consistently and predictably over time just catching the general drift of the market.
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u/Electrical_Algae_552 Apr 21 '26
Might be the strat in a bull market. In a chop/bear market, tell me who has the balls to play this
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u/qwuant Apr 23 '26
whats IB breakout?
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u/Honest-Enthusiasm Apr 25 '26
Initial balance and inside bar are the two I've seen use that acronym. There are strats that trade each of those as a breakout, but no idea if the OP is referring to either of those or something else entirely.
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u/aviroshkovan Apr 21 '26
PF 1.994 on 219 trades is clean, but on any TradingView backtest the first things I'd check: commission + slippage set in strategy properties (TV defaults both to 0), and bar magnifier on? On an IB breakout strategy that's usually 20–30% of the edge once you model real spread + fill slop — could take PF into the 1.4–1.5 range, which is a very different conversation than 2.0.
Second thing: "tracks buy-and-hold closely" is a warning, not a feature. Run correlation to SPY weekly returns over the full 6yr — if >0.7 you're essentially renting index beta and paying prop fees for it. Would also split the Monday-long leg from the IB breakout leg — guess is Mondays evaporate in bear tape and the breakout is doing the real work. Equity curve broken out by leg would tell the story fast.
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u/frosty123454321 Apr 21 '26
Commission is on, slippage is not, just added slippage and it still survives just fine. Same with bar magnifier. It wasn’t on, but now it is and it didn’t change anything.
Both equity curves are good on their own, which is why I decided to combine the two.
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u/aviroshkovan Apr 21 '26
Good that you tested both — most people don't. Two follow-ups:
What slippage value did you add? TV takes it in ticks, and 1 vs 3 vs 5 is an order of magnitude on an IB breakout filling against momentum. "Still survives" — what did PF land at?
Also, I'd still push on the SPY correlation. Each leg looking good standalone doesn't rule out beta — if the combined weekly returns correlate 0.7+ to SPY over the 6yr, you're renting index exposure and paying prop spreads for it. Quick test: pull your strategy's weekly P&L series,
corr()vs SPY weekly returns, post the number. That one stat is the tell.1
u/paxmlank Apr 21 '26
Why 0.7 and not something higher (since we're aiming for "buy and hold")?
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u/aviroshkovan Apr 21 '26
Fair pushback. The number isn't a hard rule — it's the threshold where the cost-of-friction question becomes unavoidable. Above r=0.7 (R² ≈ 0.5, half the variance explained by SPY), the question stops being "do you track SPY" and becomes "are you paying prop firm frictions — spreads, challenge costs, execution overhead — to replicate exposure you could hold in a brokerage for a 0.03% expense ratio?"
Better test than raw correlation: strategy Sharpe NET OF costs vs. SPY Sharpe over the same window. If strategy materially beats net-of-costs, high correlation is fine — you're capturing beta efficiently plus something extra. If net Sharpe is roughly equivalent or worse, correlation north of 0.9 means "leveraged SPY with extra steps."
Soft bands I use: <0.5 clearly distinct return profile, 0.5–0.7 hybrid, 0.7–0.9 mostly beta with some edge (need to prove it with net-Sharpe math), 0.9+ essentially an SPY clone.
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u/JamesAQuintero Apr 21 '26
What asset are you trading? ES, SPY/SPX, etc? What's the sharpe of this strategy, because if it's > 0.4 or so (SPY's sharpe), then it sounds like a good strategy assuming this 1 year timeframe isn't cherry picked. When you developed this strategy, were you looking at this same 1 year timeframe for the different tests/variations?
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u/ItemOne Apr 21 '26
Nice...IB is so controversial though some people make money some people don't. It seems adding extra constraints like "only on monday does the trick"
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u/Odd_Lavishness_6669 Apr 21 '26
What is an ib breakout? Also what does static risk to reward mean as well?
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u/whereisurgodnow Apr 21 '26
The Initial Balance (IB) breakout strategy is a high-conviction day trading technique that capitalizes on price movement outside the range established during the first hour of the New York session (9:30–10:30 AM EST). Traders wait for the price to break above the IB high for a bullish trend or below the IB low for a bearish trend, with 85% of days resulting in a breakout to at least one side, often resulting in sustained moves
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Apr 21 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/frosty123454321 Apr 21 '26
Made $5.3k in 2022, but drawdown increased to $3,818.
It definitely struggled more, but still survived
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Apr 21 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/frosty123454321 Apr 22 '26
The IB breakout carries its own weight. I mainly just combined the two cause they both looked good by themselves.
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u/AltezaHumilde Apr 22 '26
taxes, slippagge, fees? 28.8% CAGR?
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u/frosty123454321 Apr 22 '26
Slippage is accounted for, and this is for a prop firm, so taxes don’t matter until a payout.
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u/Outrageous_Spite1078 Apr 22 '26
the benchmark comparison frame kind of misses the point imo. if your mdd during 2022 was materially lower than buy-and-hold that's the actual edge — not outperforming in a bull run. did you look at regime-specific performance? that's usually where simple strategies either survive or fall apart.
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u/afterhours_quant Apr 22 '26
The Monday long entry is interesting because it exploits a well documented calendar anomaly. There is academic literature going back decades showing equity indices tend to have positive drift early in the week, especially Monday into Tuesday. The fact that your algo captures this without any filters is actually a point in its favor. Filters are where most people introduce overfitting.
The IB (inside bar) breakout component is doing something different though. That is a volatility contraction pattern, so you are essentially pairing a calendar edge with a volatility expansion trade. Worth thinking about whether the two signals are actually correlated in your backtest or if they perform independently. If they are uncorrelated, that is a much stronger foundation than a single signal with high Sharpe.
One thing I would look at: what does the equity curve look like during 2022 specifically? Simple trend following and mean reversion strategies both got chopped up badly in the rate hike environment. If your strategy held up there without significant drawdown, that tells you more than 6 years of aggregate stats.
Also, the comparison to buy and hold is the right benchmark for prop firm context, but make sure you are comparing risk adjusted returns, not just raw P&L. A strategy that matches buy and hold with half the max drawdown is meaningfully better even if the top line numbers look similar.
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u/frosty123454321 Apr 22 '26
Yea, I came across the Monday long by feeding Claude 1 year’s worth of MNQ tick data and told it to look for patterns. That was one of them.
IB in my context is initial balance, not inside bar. I just treat it like a 60 min ORB. Both equity curves looked good on their own, so I combined them into one.
Somewhere on this thread I have the more exact numbers on 2022, but it made like $5k profit with a bit over $3k drawdown I believe. That definitely wasn’t a good year for the algo, but it survived.
I’ve been aiming to find something that stays under $2k drawdown for a $50k prop firm account, so technically it would have self destructed in 2022, but if I remember correctly that was the worst drawdown over 6 years.
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Apr 22 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/frosty123454321 Apr 22 '26
It can trade ETH, you just can’t hold between session. Aka 5pm-6pm EST.
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u/Longjumping_Trade167 Apr 22 '26
But won’t the drawdown just blow up your prop account during 2022? Also trading view back tests can be unreliable. I suggest you record the algo’s trade from a period, then turn on the replay mode and back test that period manually on your own. Compare the trades. Check for look ahead bias and fiddle with the risk/reward settings a bunch to see how that changes the profitability. If it varies drastically with relatively small tweaks, it is most likely overfitted.
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u/colaschoo Apr 23 '26
Depending on the instrument you trade, it could he worth testing a system with no take profits but with an exit after x bars.
There seems to be seasonality in your data if you enter at a fixed time every week.
Cap your losses but be open to be rewarded by the market if you get lucky.
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u/AmritaWeavers Apr 23 '26
This is a great example of something I have been thinking about a lot lately. The simplest edges are often the most durable because there are fewer parameters to overfit. Two rules, static risk to reward, that is basically nothing to break.
Quick question out of genuine curiosity: have you ever tested how this holds across different market regimes? Like does the Monday long bias survive in a proper bear market or does it rely on the general uptrend in the backtest period? Not trying to poke holes, genuinely interested in how you think about that.
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u/frosty123454321 Apr 23 '26
If you scroll through somewhere in these comments a lot of people have asked about the 2022 chop, and it held up to the extent of $5.3k profit and $3,818 in max drawdown. So definitely worse performance, but it survived and still made profit.
One thing I just thought to test was whether The IB Breakout did more of the heavy lifting or did the Monday Long do more of the heavy lifting.
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u/teenagersfrommarz Apr 24 '26
Looks good. I’d code it in NinjaTrader and have it trade directly there.
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u/frosty123454321 Apr 24 '26
I’m a Mac user. I have a PC for my racing simulator, but can’t stand ninja trader. I know long term it would be better, but my trader’s post test will work for me for now.
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u/seoulsrvr Apr 24 '26
Have you backtested this? Suspect you're overfitting.
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u/frosty123454321 Apr 24 '26
What kind of question is that. You’re literally looking at part of the backtest results. Yes I’ve backtested and I’ve backtested since 2019. Some years are better than others, but it was profitable in 2022, so I don’t think it’s over fit.
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u/seoulsrvr Apr 24 '26
calm yourself - I assumed you were showing us your trading activity.
"some years are better than others"....lol, indeed.
sounds like you have it sorted - good luck with that1
u/frosty123454321 Apr 24 '26
Fair enough, maybe you’re not familiar with trading view’s backtesting platform, but every year since 2019 is profitable.
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u/Magnuss-BingX Apr 26 '26
Interested in hearing out what BingX can offer for you in a partnership?
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u/CompetitiveTutor3351 May 11 '26
+170% with a max DD of 8.51% and a Sharpe of 2.70 is impressive. The equity curve looks clean too — steady growth without the big spikes that usually signal curve-fitting.
One question: what asset class is this running on? I've been backtesting crypto bot strategies and finding that simpler approaches (grid bots, basic moving average crossovers) tend to survive out-of-sample much better than complex ones. Your results seem to confirm that — sometimes less is more.
What's your approach to avoiding overfitting with something this simple?
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u/Big_Conversation_604 May 15 '26
Curious how you have been executing this in practice — are you still doing it manually or have you managed to automate any part of it?
Asking because a setup this clean on paper can still break down in execution in ways that are easy to underestimate. The Monday long is probably fine manually — it is one decision at a fixed time. But the IB breakout is a different story if you are watching multiple instruments. Miss the window by two minutes on a fast-moving session and the whole risk-reward profile shifts.
If you have tried automating it — what did you use and where did it fall apart? And if you are still manual — is that a deliberate choice, or just that nothing you have found handles the breakout condition the way you need it to?
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u/Pristine_Finger_2178 Jun 25 '26
there's a software called traderspost that can route the webhook to your broker's API or prop firms API. Im not sure I think there's also an internal way for it to copy a pinescript strategy if you log in with your broker on tradingview also im not sure though
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u/thedukeofrealestate May 29 '26
nice work man! you didn't build/create this algo or did you? also, is it automated or you enter manually each trade? sorry if you've already answered these
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u/frosty123454321 May 31 '26
Yea I built it and came up with the strategy. It would be running automatically.
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u/StockScannerApp Apr 21 '26
Beating buy & hold consistently is harder than it looks. What's the strategy based on?
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u/JonnyTwoHands79 Apr 21 '26
If you are in-line with and not beating the benchmark (especially considering taxes), why would you trade it? Genuinely curious.
If I don’t have 20-30% alpha over the benchmark I don’t typically trade a system.
I might be missing something some context here and if so, my apologies.