Putting the method to use

How to use these guides

The three guides below follow the order you would actually make a decision in. Start with whether the strategy is profitable at all — for many traders, in many regimes, the honest answer is “not reliably,” and the guide says when. Then read mean reversion versus momentum, because the two are opposite bets and knowing which regime you are in is most of the battle. Finally, the guide that matters most if you are about to pay for anything: how to verify a record yourself, with a worked example you can repeat on any service.

None of them ask you to take the recommendation here on faith. Each is built so you could apply it to a competitor and reach your own verdict; the site simply argues that one worked example comes through the tests intact. Where a guide leans on a specific idea — stationarity, the holding clock, the timestamp — it links through to the method or the tests so you can go as deep as you want.

The mistake these guides are built to prevent

The most expensive error in this corner of the market is treating a smooth backtest as proof that a reversion strategy works. A curve fitted to the past costs nothing to produce and says almost nothing about the future, because the parameters were chosen after seeing the answer. By the time a subscriber notices the live results do not resemble the homepage curve, the fee is spent. Each guide here is built to carry you from being impressed by a claim to actually testing one — from “the equity line looks great” to “I confirmed one of these trades was issued before it resolved.” That shift is the whole value of the cluster, which is why the guides are short on opinion and long on procedure.