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Trading guides & research

Each guide answers one question and hands you the calculator that does the arithmetic. Each study states what was asked, how it was measured and what came back. Every one takes a position in its first line.

Everything, newest thinking first

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Guide How to Calculate Position Size Fix the loss first, then divide by the stop distance. Everything else is arithmetic. Read Guide How Much Should You Risk Per Trade? Between 0.25% and 2% for most systematic traders, and the number follows from drawdown tolerance rather than confidence. Read Guide What Is a Good Risk/Reward Ratio? There is no good ratio in isolation. A ratio is only good relative to the win rate it needs to break even. Read Guide How Trading Expectancy Works Expectancy is the average outcome per trade. It is the only number that says whether a strategy earns anything. Read Guide How Drawdown Affects Recovery A 20% loss needs 25% to recover, a 50% loss needs 100%. The asymmetry is the whole argument for small size. Read Guide How to Calculate Risk of Ruin Ruin is a function of risk per trade, win rate and payoff. At 2% per trade a normal losing run is survivable; at 10% it is not. Read Guide ATR vs Fixed Stop Losses A fixed stop changes your risk every time volatility changes. An ATR stop keeps the risk fixed and moves the size instead. Read Guide How to Backtest a Trading Strategy Write the rule so a computer cannot misread it, hold back data you never look at, and expect most versions to fail. Read Guide Does Win Rate Actually Matter? Less than traders think. A 35% win rate at 1:3 beats a 65% win rate at 1:1, and both beat a high win rate with no stop. Read Research Do Candlestick Patterns Work? 89 Patterns, Measured Across 89 formations and 1,172,151 bars, the mean edge over an arbitrary entry was +0.02pp. No formation stood clear of noise. Read Research Candlestick Pattern Statistics: Occurrence Rates Across 1.8M Bars Spinning Top appears on one bar in eight. Concealing Baby Swallow appeared once. Frequency and usefulness are not the same thing. Read Research Most Reliable Candlestick Patterns: What the Data Shows The ranking exists, but the gaps between the top entries are smaller than their confidence intervals. Read Method Candlestick Patterns Backtested: Full Method and Limits Detection rules, six exit rules, the conditioning grid, the sample floor, and what the test cannot tell you. Read Research Candlestick Patterns for Day Trading: What the Intraday Data Shows Shorter bars produce more signals and the same absence of edge, with costs taking a larger share of each one. Read Research Does Technical Analysis Work? What Our Testing Found Some of it is measurable and some of it is not defined precisely enough to test. We publish which is which. Read