Hammer: what it's actually best at
Hammer is a market-structure rule in our pattern family — it reacts to swing structure and prior levels rather than to a smoothed 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
How often Hammer beat buy-and-hold
323 of 1,702 out-of-sample tests beat simply buying and holding the same asset — 19.0%. On the other 1,379 it did not. That is indistinguishable from 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) — the difference is inside the margin this many tests can resolve, so read it as ordinary, not better or worse.
Each test is one asset on one timeframe: 1,702 of them, drawn from 894 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 894 × 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 27.5% (246/894 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
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 We do not publish the recipe — the settings, lengths and thresholds we tested.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 Hammer is worth your attention is below; everything you'd need to clone it is not.
Bootstrap a candlestick pattern — play with the mechanism
The cleanest negative result in the indicator literature, as a test you run yourself. Detect a real pattern on synthetic bars, measure the forward return, then compare it against the same number of randomly chosen entry dates. The control that makes it honest: inject a real edge and the same test lights up.
Self-contained simulation on randomly generated synthetic data — not market data, not a live signal, and not a record of trading. It runs entirely in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere. Educational information only — not investment advice. Hypothetical backtested results; past performance does not guarantee future results. Trading involves risk of loss. Full-page version, with the findings and citations
Assets where Hammer won
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