Volatility indicator

Bollinger Mean-Reversion: what it's actually best at

Bollinger Mean-Reversion is a mean-reversion rule in our volatility family — it fades stretched moves and exits as price reverts toward its average. We publish where it holds up and where it fails, with the out-of-sample numbers; the exact settings we tested stay in the engine.

Tested and published by IndicatorEdge · backtest grid generated 2026-06-25 · base rates recomputed 2026-07-31 · how we test

8 of 890

assets where it was the #1 edge

on the other 882, a different indicator did better

0.24

average Sharpe across all tests

median across all 382 indicators is 0.25 — this one ranks above 156 of them

Volatility

indicator family

Base rate

How often Bollinger Mean-Reversion beat buy-and-hold

395 of 1,645 out-of-sample tests beat simply buying and holding the same asset — 24.0%. On the other 1,250 it did not. That is above the 20.1% rate across all 382 indicators we test (one pooled rate over all 660,005 tests we have run, not a mean of the per-indicator rates).

Each test is one asset on one timeframe: 1,645 of them, drawn from 890 assets across up to 4 timeframes. Not every asset has usable history on every timeframe, so that total is the grid we could actually run — it is not 890 × 4, and we do not pad it with tests we did not do. "Beat" means a higher return than holding that same asset over that same window. Measured out-of-sample — on data the setup was not chosen on.

Picking the single best timeframe for each asset after the fact raises it to 34.6% (308/890 assets). That number is the one worth distrusting: choosing the timeframe once you already know the answer is how backtests flatter themselves. Every indicator, ranked by this number

What's on this page — and what isn't

We publish the verdict: the indicator's name, the assets and timeframes it holds up on, and the honest numbers for both its wins and its failures. We do not publish the recipe — the settings, lengths and thresholds we tested. That is the part worth paying for, and republishing it would just add one more free indicator to a market that already has thousands. Everything you need to judge whether Bollinger Mean-Reversion is worth your attention is below; everything you'd need to clone it is not.

Best fits

Assets where Bollinger Mean-Reversion won

dogwifhat +47.1%-34% drawdown · 16 trades · 3.7y Biotech (IBB) -1.6%-31% drawdown · 22 trades · 25.4y Diageo +0.5%-37% drawdown · 151 trades · 35.3y GameStop +3.0%-44% drawdown · 23 trades · 24.5y Kimberly-Clark (KMB) -6.7%-26% drawdown · 32 trades · 46.4y MetLife (MET) +1.7%-51% drawdown · 123 trades · 26.1y Peloton +36.7%-57% drawdown · 26 trades · 6.7y Zoetis (ZTS) +2.0%-13% drawdown · 15 trades · 13.4y

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Bollinger Mean-Reversion: what it's actually best at

How often Bollinger Mean-Reversion beat buy-and-hold

Assets where Bollinger Mean-Reversion won

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