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 l
No edgeRead →Supply and demand trading marks the areas from which price previously moved sharply, on the theory that unfilled orders remain the
Significant loserRead →Candlestick patterns are named shapes formed by one to three candles: the engulfing candle, the pin bar or hammer, the doji, the i
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 ul
No edgeRead →Support and resistance are levels where price has previously turned, drawn by hand or found mechanically from recent highs and low
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 Ne
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
No edgeRead →Calendar strategies trade patterns tied to the clock: a currency's tendency to rise in a particular month, a stock index's behavio
No edgeRead →A currency strength meter ranks the major currencies by their recent performance across all their pairs, and the strategy buys the
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
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 cho
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 equi
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 g
ExplainerRead →Price action trading uses no indicators, reading instead the bars themselves, the swings, the levels and the candle shapes, and is
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.