The Thesis
RSI Snap-Back is a mean-reversion play on the seven largest US tech names — AAPL, MSFT, NVDA, GOOGL, AMZN, META, and TSLA. The premise is straightforward: large-cap tech tends to overshoot on short-term momentum and then snap back. The rules encode that view crisply — buy the most oversold names when RSI drops below 35, exit when RSI pushes above 70, and hold no more than four positions at once. That hard 4-slot book is the strategy's main discipline mechanism: it caps how much concurrent drawdown exposure the book can carry and forces rotation into the genuinely oversold rather than sprawling across the whole universe.
Backtest Performance
Over 451 days the strategy compounded a starting balance into $12,095, a total return of 20.95% and a CAGR of 11.21%. The win rate is the headline number: 66.67% of its 37 trades closed profitable, which fits the reversion story — snap-backs hit often, even if individually modest.
The risk profile is less flattering. A Sharpe of 0.61 is unremarkable; it says the returns came with meaningful volatility rather than a smooth ride. The 23.73% maximum drawdown is the figure to sit with — nearly a quarter of the book at the trough, which is steep for a strategy that markets itself on discipline. Turnover of 773% annualized also signals a lot of churn; fortunately, modeled fees were trivial ($37 total) and there was no FX cost, so trading friction did not erode the edge here.
Recent Activity
This is where the picture gets uncomfortable. The last six scheduled runs — from July 24 through July 31 — all report the same thing: 0 executed, 0 rejected, sitting in $10,000 cash, total $10,000. The strategy has not held a position or fired a trade in over a week. That is not necessarily a fault: a mean-reversion system that only acts on RSI < 35 will correctly do nothing when nothing is oversold, and the Mag-7 have evidently offered no qualifying entries lately. But it does mean the live book is currently earning zero, contributing no new evidence, and the flat $10,000 line tells us the live track record is effectively unstarted.
Strengths and Risks
The strengths are a clear, testable thesis, a high hit rate, and cheap execution. The risks are three-fold. First, no validation — the validation field is null, so we have a backtest but no out-of-sample or walk-forward confirmation, and a 37-trade sample is thin enough that the 66.67% win rate could be partly luck. Second, the drawdown-to-return ratio is unattractive: 23.73% of pain for 11.21% annualized is a hard sell. Third, the idle live book means the strategy is unproven where it matters most.
Verdict
RSI Snap-Back has a coherent design and a decent backtest, but it is not yet a validated, live-proven strategy. Watch for two things: whether it actually deploys capital when an oversold signal appears, and whether live results track the backtest's win rate without deepening that drawdown. Until then, treat the numbers as promising rather than proven.