Ma crossover 20/50 has a deeper drawdown than any other strategy here
Ma crossover 20/50 draws down further on average than any other strategy Tenachine has studied, deeper even than Williams percent R reversal. It also returns less and wins less often. A bigger drawdown did not buy a better trade here.
Ma crossover 20/50's average win rate and its average maximum drawdown are the same number: 34.78 percent, matching to the decimal. That is a coincidence, not a computation error. The study itself publishes both figures separately, one counted from closed trades, the other measured from equity curves, and they landed on the same value by chance across the 212 tickers that completed a run.
The drawdown figure is the more consequential number. Negative 34.78 percent is the deepest average maximum drawdown Tenachine has published for any strategy study, deeper than Williams %R reversal's negative 31.88 percent, the strategy Tenachine's guide on drawdown named as the deepest among the seven it compared. That guide was explicit about only covering seven of the site's studies, so nothing there was wrong. It is simply out of date now that a deeper one has been measured.
Ma crossover 20/50's median return, 11.34 percent, sits well below its 24.64 percent average, a gap Tenachine's guide on reading a return distribution would flag immediately: a handful of large winners are carrying the aggregate. The full distribution is unusually split. Of the 212 completed tickers, 27.4 percent lost more than 10 percent and 50.0 percent gained more than 10 percent, with almost nothing left in between, the flat bucket between negative 1 and positive 1 percent holds exactly zero tickers. The best single ticker returned 300.38 percent. The worst lost 55.12 percent. This is not a strategy with a typical outcome. It is a strategy with two outcomes.
- Average return: Williams %R 27.21 percent, ma crossover 20/50 24.64 percent
- Average maximum drawdown: Williams %R negative 31.88 percent, ma crossover 20/50 negative 34.78 percent
- Average win rate: Williams %R 69.13 percent, ma crossover 20/50 34.78 percent
- Aggregate risk to reward: Williams %R 1.3531, ma crossover 20/50 1.3143
- Trades per completed ticker: Williams %R about 39.7, ma crossover 20/50 about 24.0
Set side by side, ma crossover 20/50 loses on every line. Its return is lower, its drawdown is deeper, its win rate is roughly half, and its risk to reward ratio is slightly worse. The only place it comes close is the drawdown itself, and there it comes close by being worse, not better. A trader picking between the two on the strength of headline return and drawdown alone would have no reason to prefer ma crossover 20/50 over Williams %R reversal on this data. The two strategies share a shape, a large average return paired with a large average drawdown, but the shape is not shared evenly. One version of that trade paid more per unit of pain than the other did.
This is not investment advice, and neither strategy's past decade predicts its next one. Eight of 220 tickers failed to produce a usable ma crossover 20/50 backtest, a 3.6 percent failure rate, low enough that coverage is not the explanation for anything above. What the numbers do say is narrower and worth keeping in mind whenever a strategy's drawdown looks large: a big drawdown on its own is not evidence of a big payoff. Check the return next to it, the same way a small drawdown needs checking next to its own return before either one gets read as good news, and check the win rate too, because this pair shows it can move independently of both.