This page exists so nobody has to take the pattern on faith. The exact parameters, the sample it was tested on, and — just as important — the ideas that didn't survive contact with real data.
No discretion, no story about the company. A stock either matches every condition below or it doesn't.
The rule fires roughly 60 times a year across the whole US small-cap universe. Most days, nothing matches — that's expected, not a malfunction.
933 filled trades, sourced from Alpaca's end-of-day data, spanning 2023 through 2026. Every trade sized at a fixed dollar risk, exited per the 25%-stop / breakeven-at-double rule described in the Academy.
An honest limitation: the backtest dataset only includes companies that are still listed today. Stocks that went to zero or were delisted during the window aren't in the sample. This almost certainly overstates the real historical result to some degree — we don't yet know by how much, and we're not going to guess a number to make this page sound more rigorous than it is.
This is the finding that shapes the whole business, not just the rule. The edge is real, but it lives almost entirely in thin, illiquid names — and it doesn't survive being scaled up.
In plain terms: the setups that work are too small for serious capital to trade without becoming the volume that moves the price against itself. That's not a problem you fix by trading harder — it's a hard capacity ceiling on the strategy itself, and it's the reason this is built as a tool for individual traders sizing their own small positions, not a fund.
The current rule is the survivor of several ideas that looked reasonable and didn't hold up. Publishing the ones that failed is the point — anyone can show you a rule that worked in hindsight.