Trading Strategies

This section explains how common trading approaches work, what conditions they need, and where each one fails. It starts from an uncomfortable fact: most active traders underperform simply holding, and the ones who do well are usually distinguished by risk control rather than by better predictions.

We cover trend following, mean reversion, range trading, dollar-cost averaging and rebalancing — each described with the market conditions it depends on. A trend-following approach loses steadily in a choppy market; mean reversion works until it meets a genuine regime change and then loses more than it made. Any strategy presented without its failure conditions is being sold to you.

Dollar-cost averaging gets particular attention because it is the most widely recommended and the most often oversold. Our DCA calculator backtests it against a lump sum on real daily prices, and the honest conclusion is that the window dominates the result: in a steadily rising market the lump sum usually wins because it was exposed sooner. What averaging genuinely offers is a smaller worst case and a decision you can keep making without needing to time anything — a behavioural benefit, which is a different claim from higher returns.

Fees and slippage deserve modelling before any strategy looks attractive; frequent trading loses to costs quietly. Use the profit calculator and read risk management.

We do not publish signals or recommend strategies. Nothing in this section is financial advice.

One more consideration that decides more outcomes than strategy selection: whether you can actually follow the approach you chose. A method that is statistically sound but requires you to keep buying through a 60% decline will be abandoned by most people at precisely the wrong moment. Choosing something you can execute consistently generally beats choosing something optimal on paper.