Stochastic: what it's actually best at
Stochastic is an oscillator rule — it reads a bounded momentum gauge and takes exposure when it turns from an extreme. 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 Stochastic beat buy-and-hold
425 of 1,687 out-of-sample tests beat simply buying and holding the same asset — 25.2%. On the other 1,262 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: 1,687 of them, drawn from 887 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 887 × 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 37.4% (332/887 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 We do not publish the recipe — the settings, lengths and thresholds we tested.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 Stochastic is worth your attention is below; everything you'd need to clone it is not.
Assets where Stochastic won
Entries marked artifact are incoherent rather than merely risky — an annualised return above 200% (illiquidity compounding on a short history), or a drawdown at total loss, where no positive return is possible afterwards. They are shown rather than quietly dropped, because deleting your own bad rows is how the numbers on every other site got so good.
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