Read this before you act on anything published here. It is short, and it is written plainly on purpose.
Tried & Traded publishes research. We do not know you, your finances, your tax position, your time horizon, or your tolerance for loss, and nothing on this site is tailored to any of them. Nothing published here is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security, and nothing here should be read as a suggestion that a particular strategy is suitable for you.
We are not licensed financial advisers. If you want advice about your own situation, get it from someone licensed to give it in your country.
A backtest is a record of what a set of rules would have produced against historical prices. It is evidence. It is not proof, and it is not the same thing as having traded the strategy with real money.
Where a test has a limit that would change how you read it, we publish that limit inside the test itself, before anyone asks.
This is the oldest warning in finance because it is the one people most reliably ignore. A strategy that held up across decades of history can stop working the day after we publish it, and nothing in our method can tell you whether it will.
Options trading carries substantial risk and is not suitable for everyone. Some strategies discussed on this site have losses that are larger — in some cases far larger — than the credit received or the premium paid. A defined maximum loss is still a loss, and an undefined one can exceed your account.
Understand the maximum loss of any position before you open it, and never risk money you cannot afford to lose.
When we mark a strategy Holds we are saying its claim stood up in our test. We are not saying you should trade it. When we mark one Fails we are saying the claim did not stand up on our data and our assumptions — not that nobody has ever made money with it.
We take no payment from anyone whose strategy we test, and we do not accept payment to change, delay, or withhold a result. Parameters are fixed before a run and every published figure comes out of that run. You are entitled to hold us to that.
We will get things wrong. When we do, we correct the test in place, say what changed, and leave the correction visible rather than quietly editing the numbers. If you think a result is wrong, tell us — a reader who runs a test and gets a different answer is the most useful thing that can happen to a site like this.
Using this site does not create an adviser–client, fiduciary, or professional relationship of any kind between you and Tried & Traded. You are responsible for your own trading decisions and their consequences.
We test strategies and publish what we found. You decide what to do about it, and you carry the risk of that decision. If that is not the deal you want, this is not the right site for you — and we would rather say so on this page than in the small print.