PMax: The TradingView Favorite Indicator, Put Through an Honest Backtest
PMax has thousands of TradingView saves and no shortage of YouTube promoters — here is what cost-adjusted, out-of-sample testing across 660,005 backtests says about trend indicators like it.
What PMax Actually Is
PMax (Price Maximum) is a trend-following indicator built in Pine Script and freely shared on TradingView. It combines an ATR-based trailing stop mechanism — conceptually close to Supertrend — with a smoothed moving average to generate directional signals. When price holds above the signal line the indicator reads long; below it, short. The output is color-coded and visually unambiguous, which explains a large part of its popularity.
That same visual clarity is where the problem starts. Clean charts are easy to cherry-pick. A single equity curve on a single asset during a favorable trending period looks convincing in a screenshot. What almost no PMax tutorial includes is a cost-adjusted, out-of-sample test run across a wide, unselected universe of assets and timeframes.
The Hype Machine and Why It Misleads
TradingView script pages, YouTube walk-throughs, and Telegram groups promoting PMax share a common structure: they show the indicator working. What they rarely show is how it performs on assets that did not trend cooperatively, what it costs when signals fail, or how it stacks up against simply holding the asset. This pattern is not unique to PMax — most indicator promotion follows it. Pick a market that happened to trend, tune the settings on that history, screenshot the result. None of that constitutes evidence of a repeatable, generalizable edge.
The relevant question is harder to answer and almost never asked in promotional content: across a large, unselected universe of assets and timeframes, with realistic transaction costs baked in, how often does this type of indicator actually beat doing nothing?
What 660,005 Backtests Actually Show
Across 382 indicators, 903 assets, and four timeframes — 1-Hour, 4-Hour, Daily, and Weekly — only 26% of all indicator/asset combinations beat a simple buy-and-hold. Even when you cherry-pick the single best indicator for each individual asset, only 63% of assets had any indicator that outperformed at all. The median Sharpe ratio for those best-per-asset results was 0.62.
Trend-following signals that alternate between long and short carry a specific burden on the short side. Across the full test, short-side signals showed meaningful edge in only 17.4% of asset tests. In any market with a structural upward bias — equity indices, many large-cap stocks — a signal that regularly fades the trend tends to be a performance drag. Trend reversers need both sides to pull their weight. In most markets, they do not.
What Actually Tops the Leaderboard by Asset Class
The data does not produce one universal winner. It produces different winners by asset class. In Forex — where a large share of PMax users focus — Fisher Transform led the leaderboard, finishing first across 17 assets. In Stocks, Fibonacci Pivots topped the field with 22 asset wins, followed by Projection Bands (16), Intraday Momentum Index (16), and Camarilla Pivots (16). In Crypto, MA Envelope (5 wins) and Fibonacci Pivots (4 wins) led. In Commodities, Keltner Mean-Reversion (3) came out ahead. See the indicator leaderboard and per-asset pages for the full picture.
None of those leaders are the clean, color-coded trend signals that dominate promotional video thumbnails. Equally telling: the indicators with the highest individual trade win rates are often the ones that beat buy-and-hold the least. Money Flow Index posted a median trade win rate of 72.2% across tests — and beat buy-and-hold in just 9% of them. RSI Mean-Reversion showed a 71.7% win rate against a 10% beat rate. A high win rate and a real edge are not the same thing. Most promotional backtests conflate the two.
The Honest Verdict
Script popularity on TradingView is not evidence of trading edge. An indicator with tens of thousands of saves has almost certainly never been subjected to a cost-adjusted, out-of-sample test across a broad universe. If you are evaluating any trend-following indicator, the question to ask is not whether the equity curve looks tidy on a cherry-picked chart. The question is whether it beats a passive position in your specific asset, at your specific timeframe, after accounting for commissions and slippage. Across our study, most do not.
Everything described here reflects hypothetical backtests run with realistic transaction cost assumptions and tested out-of-sample. These are simulated historical results, not real trading returns, and nothing on this site is financial advice. Past backtested performance does not guarantee future results. Use the data to sharpen your own research, not as a trading signal.
Questions, answered
What timeframes did you test?
The study covers four timeframes: 1-Hour, 4-Hour, Daily, and Weekly. We did not run tests on shorter intraday timeframes such as 1-minute, 5-minute, or 15-minute charts.
Are these results the same as real trading returns?
No. All figures here are hypothetical backtests. Realistic transaction costs are applied and tests are run out-of-sample, but simulated performance is not the same as live trading returns. Markets change, and no backtest guarantees future results. Nothing on this site constitutes financial advice.
Why do high win-rate indicators often underperform?
Win rate measures how often individual trades close in profit. It says nothing about the size of winners versus losers, or whether the strategy beats passively holding the asset. An indicator can win 72% of its trades and still trail buy-and-hold if its losers are large or if it keeps you out of sustained uptrends. Our data shows this pattern repeatedly — some of the highest win-rate indicators in the study have among the lowest rates of actually beating buy-and-hold.
Where can I find the best indicator for a specific asset?
Each asset page lists the top-performing indicators for that ticker across the four timeframes we tested. Use the <a href="/assets">asset search</a> to find your market, or browse the <a href="/indicators">indicator leaderboard</a> for a cross-asset view.
Every figure here comes from our own out-of-sample backtests, costs included — not a course or a guess. Educational information only — not investment advice. Hypothetical backtested results; past performance does not guarantee future results. Trading involves risk of loss.
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