What Actually Works
The TradingView indicators real traders swear by — and the ones they threw away
Every trader eventually asks which indicators actually make money. This book went looking for the answer in the places traders speak candidly to each other — veteran forums, the large subreddits, TradingView's own script ecosystem — and in the backtests and research that put the popular ones under a microscope.
Buy on AmazonWho it is for
- Your chart has accumulated indicators you cannot justify.
- You suspect most of what you read online is marketing.
- You want to know which of the classics survive testing.
What it covers
- The one indicator professionals defend when it is attacked, and the intraday role it plays.
- The stack profitable day traders keep arriving at, with settings.
- Why a coin-flip entry made money at a 38% win rate, and what that says about your obsession with entries.
What our own research measured
The book collects what traders say. This site measures what happened. The two belong side by side, so here is our own reading of the classics across 12,050,609 occurrences on 7,993 stocks, 1994-2026, against the market over the next 21 trading days.
| Formation | Occurrences | Before 2018 | Since 2018 | All years | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Golden cross | 47,325 | -0.08% | -1.19% | -0.60% | Noise — no reliable edge |
| Death cross | 49,334 | -0.27% | -0.66% | -0.45% | Noise — no reliable edge |
| Oversold: RSI below 30 | 1,744,974 | +0.52% | -1.32% | +0.05% | Flipped sign after 2018 |
| Overbought: RSI above 70 | 2,595,192 | -0.09% | -1.26% | -0.39% | Lagged the market, both eras |
| Crash: down 15%+ in a week | 383,970 | +0.19% | -4.11% | -1.09% | Noise — no reliable edge |
| Pullback in an uptrend | 1,087,083 | +0.39% | -0.43% | +0.18% | Led the market, both eras |
Read from our Formations study, which is rebuilt every morning. "Before 2018" and "Since 2018" are two independent halves of the sample: a formation only counts as reliable if it did the same thing in both. Averages are tilts across hundreds of thousands of events and say nothing about any single trade.
See the whole study, and get the free ThinkScript that plots it →
Get the book
What Actually Works is on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.
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