PMax: what it's actually best at
PMax is a trend-following rule — it holds while a smoothed trend reference is pointing up and goes flat when it turns. 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 PMax beat buy-and-hold
231 of 1,385 out-of-sample tests beat simply buying and holding the same asset — 16.7%. On the other 1,154 it did not. That is below 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: 1,385 of them, drawn from 853 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 853 × 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 23.7% (202/853 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 PMax is — and how it's built
PMax ('Profit Maximizer') is a trailing-stop trend indicator published by Kıvanç Özbilgiç in 2020. It is an explicit hybrid of two earlier tools: Anıl Özekşi's MOST (Moving Stop Loss), which trails a stop around a moving average, and the ATR-based SuperTrend. Construction: take a moving average of price (the MA type is selectable — EMA, SMA, and variants), then offset it by a multiple of the Average True Range to form a trailing line; the line ratchets in the trade's favour and flips sides when the moving average crosses it.
How it's read. The moving average above the PMax line reads long; crossing below it reads exit (or short, in symmetric use). Because the stop trails a SMOOTHED series rather than raw price, it holds through single-bar spikes that flip SuperTrend.
Where it struggles by design. The same smoothing that filters spikes gives back ground at real reversals, and in choppy ranges the MA and its trailing line braid — the false-flip problem it was designed to reduce is reduced, not removed.
Origin: Kıvanç Özbilgiç, 2020 (open-source TradingView script), combining Anıl Özekşi's MOST with SuperTrend's ATR logic.
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 PMax is worth your attention is below; everything you'd need to clone it is not.
In our standard-settings test, PMax wasn’t the single best indicator for any asset — it was outperformed by others on every one. That’s useful to know too: no indicator wins everywhere.
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