Does the EMA Cross 12/26 work on ETH?

The EMA crossover is a trend-following signal. An EMA is computed at two speeds: a fast one over a short window and a slow one over a longer one. When the fast average crosses above the slow one, recent price is accelerating, read as an emerging uptrend, and the strategy enters long. When the fast crosses back below, it exits, and on the short side it bets the price falls.

Trend-followers share a personality, and it matters for reading these numbers. They win a minority of their trades (often 25 to 45 percent) and survive on a few big winners while cutting many small losers. They make money in sustained trends and bleed in chop, where every false breakout is a losing trade. So a low win rate is normal here, not a failure by itself. The question is whether the winners are big enough to pay for the losers.

Consider the long-side strategy. A win rate on its own lies to you. Flip a coin 10 times, get 7 heads, and a "70% win rate" is noise. To separate a real measurement from luck we compute a Wilson confidence interval: the range the true long-run win rate very likely falls inside, given how many trades we saw. Few trades make the range wide and useless. Many trades shrink it until the number means something. Here, 880 long trades pin the win rate to 25.0% to 30.9% with 95% confidence: a solid measurement.

A trustworthy win rate still is not an edge. To test the edge itself we run the Sharpe ratio through a t-test against zero. That is edge significance: is the profit edge distinguishable from luck? Here it is not — the edge is statistically zero. A measured win rate and a zero edge can sit side by side, which is exactly what the four questions above expose.

We test the parameters traders actually use, not arbitrary combinations tuned to look good in hindsight. The canonical fast/slow EMA pairs are the most-cited in retail technical analysis, which is why each earns a page. A result is only useful if it answers a question real people ask. Curve-fit soup like "EMA 37/142" is excluded on principle: it ranks for nothing, and it is exactly the overfitting this site exists to call out.

This is the no-stop baseline: the strategy exits only on the reverse cross, with no TP/SL (take-profit / stop-loss: preset exits that close a position at a target gain or a capped loss). That is deliberate. Take-profit is poison for a trend-follower: capping winners while leaving losers uncapped destroys the few big winners the whole approach depends on. The clean baseline tells you what the raw signal is worth before you start adding knobs. Want a stop on it? That is your variant to run.

Higher leverage does not find an edge that 2× missed. It just finds the liquidation (force-close when losses eat the margin) cliff faster. Read 2× for the signal. Read 50× as where the account dies.

This is the clean baseline. Curious whether a stop, a different symbol, or a different EMA pair changes the verdict? Run your own variant, free

Honesty about the gaps is part of the receipt. What we model, and what we do not.

Computed by a deterministic replay engine over the full candle history above. Edge significance runs the Sharpe ratio through a t-test against zero. That test assumes trades are independent; trend-following trades cluster within trends, so read significance as a floor, not a guarantee. Win-rate confidence uses the Wilson score interval at 95%. In-sample means the backtest ran on the same history the fleet was selected from — treat it as a ceiling, not a forecast. This is 1 of 26 EMA Cross variants tested on that same history; with that many, a few will look good by luck alone, which is why we rank by significance, not raw return.

How this page is assembled. The family overview, the significance method, and the simulator's known gaps are standardized across every page, so every result is judged the same way. The data, the verdict, and the reading are specific to this backtest.