The popular strategies, put through the same test, across 17 years of data with real trading costs. For each one: what it is, how it is used, what it claims, and our verdict in plain terms. Most showed no edge, and a few lost money outright. The verdict sits beside every title. Nothing here touches how Otto itself trades.
A verdict of “no edge” means the strategy performed no better than entering at random on the same markets over the same period, and lost after costs. Where a strategy lost with statistical significance, or could not be tested honestly, the verdict says so.
Smart money concepts, often called ICT after the trader who popularised them, is a way of reading a chart built on the idea that large institutions leave footprints: order blocks where they accumulated positions, liquidity pools above old highs and below old lows that price is drawn to sweep, and breaks of structure that confirm a change of direction.
No edgeRead →Supply and demand trading marks the areas from which price previously moved sharply, on the theory that unfilled orders remain there and will move price again when it returns.
Significant loserRead →Candlestick patterns are named shapes formed by one to three candles: the engulfing candle, the pin bar or hammer, the doji, the inside bar, the morning and evening star, and around twenty others.
No edgeRead →A moving average crossover buys when a faster moving average crosses above a slower one and sells when it crosses below.
No edgeRead →The relative strength index reads from 0 to 100, comparing recent gains to recent losses.
No edgeRead →MACD is the difference between two exponential moving averages, plotted with a signal line and a histogram.
No edgeRead →The stochastic oscillator compares the close with the recent range; the CCI measures distance from an average; Williams %R, the ultimate oscillator and a dozen others do close variants.
No edgeRead →Support and resistance are levels where price has previously turned, drawn by hand or found mechanically from recent highs and lows.
No edgeRead →Session breakout strategies mark the range of a quiet period, usually the Asian session, and trade a break of it when London or New York opens.
No edgeRead →The Asian range strategy trades the quiet hours themselves, buying at the bottom of the overnight range and selling at the top, on the theory that the market stays inside it until London opens.
No edgeRead →Calendar strategies trade patterns tied to the clock: a currency's tendency to rise in a particular month, a stock index's behaviour on Mondays or around the turn of the month, the end-of-quarter flows.
No edgeRead →A currency strength meter ranks the major currencies by their recent performance across all their pairs, and the strategy buys the strongest against the weakest, on the theory that the pair combining them has the clearest trend.
No edgeRead →The Commitments of Traders report publishes futures positioning by category of trader each week.
No lasting edgeRead →Pairs trading takes two instruments that usually move together, waits for them to diverge, and buys the laggard while selling the leader, expecting the gap to close.
No edgeRead →Scalping trades for a few pips, dozens or hundreds of times a day, on one to fifteen minute charts.
Cost-deadRead →Gap trading acts on the jump between one session's close and the next open, usually on stock indices.
Could not testRead →News trading enters around scheduled releases, either before, to catch the spike, or after, to follow the direction the market chose.
Could not testRead →AI EAs claim to use machine learning, neural networks or similar to predict price or to filter trades.
No edgeRead →Intermarket analysis trades one market from the behaviour of another: the Australian dollar from copper or gold, the yen from equities, a currency from the dollar index, oil from the Canadian dollar.
No edgeRead →In retail EA marketing, hedging means opening a position opposite to a losing one rather than closing it, so that the loss stops growing while the trader waits to unwind both sides at a profit.
ExplainerRead →Price action trading uses no indicators, reading instead the bars themselves, the swings, the levels and the candle shapes, and is often presented as the purest form of technical trading.
No edgeRead →Most strategies do not survive an honest test. Otto is built on the few that did, and every trade is recorded live on Karnek.